Some Idle Thoughts On The 2024 Election

This girl killed herself – and died a horrible death. But each of you helped to kill her. Remember that. Never forget it. But then I don’t think you ever will. Remember what you did, Mrs Birling.

You turned her away when she most needed help. You refused her even the pitiable little bit of organized charity you had in your power to grant her. Remember what you did.

(snip)

Well, Eva Smith’s gone. You can’t do her any more harm. And you can’t do her any good now, either. You can’t even say “I’m sorry, Eva Smith.” But just remember this. One Eva Smith has gone – but there are millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their lives, their hopes and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives, and what we think and say and do. We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. Good night.

-Inspector Goole, An Inspector Calls

A few months ago, there was a brief flurry of excitement online about an American teacher who was discovered being an OnlyFans model and was fired, probably under a boilerplate morality clause. The news gave me some very mixed feelings. On one hand, I think that teachers (particularly teachers of teenage boys) should not be posting pictures on OnlyFans. It is very hard to think of someone in quite the same way if you have seen them naked, and this is particularly true for teenage boys. On the other, teachers are grossly underpaid for a number of reasons and a disturbingly high number of school staff have to supplement their earnings with gig labour and other non-academic sources. It is easy to condemn a teacher using OnlyFans when you are not worried about making ends meet, but a great deal harder to make ends meet on a poor salary earned by doing a very difficult job.

This leads to a point that often goes unremarked, although it is always true. A person in a bad situation will make bad choices. (For example, Severus Snape joining the Death Eaters.) It is easy to condemn such a foolish decision, but harder to provide an alternative that would keep people from doing something foolish because they see no other choice. I would have more sympathy for a school board that fired a teacher for using OnlyFans if that school board paid the teachers enough to ensure they didn’t have to use OnlyFans.

Most people, in my opinion, do not make bad choices because they get up one morning and say to themselves “today I shall make a bad choice.” They make bad choices because they have no other options. And then someone looks down from high overhead and condemns them, as Dumbledore condemns Snape, often choosing to overlook their own role in limiting someone’s choices so they can moralise without having to deal with the consequences of not making the best of a bad set of choices. People who wish to play ‘Sybil Birling’ often discover they are loathed and hated, not because they are inherently bad people but because they have no empathy for people caught in a trap they cannot escape.

So what does this have to do with the 2024 election?

Since it became mathematically certain that Donald Trump would pull off a near-unprecedented return to the White House, my friends list has been exploding with people who are gleefully exulting about Trump’s success and others reacting with absolute horror. The latter have no love whatsoever for Trump and his supporters, and they don’t have any empathic understanding of precisely why anyone choose to vote for him. This leads far too many to try to exclude Trump’s supporters, or to pour scorn on them in a manner that probably helped Trump win the election (every time you called a Trump supporter an idiot, Trump got an extra ten votes), and generally refuse to comprehend that for most of his supporters Donald Trump was the best of a bad pair of choices.

This is driven, I think, by elitist politicians who do not wish to face up to the uncomfortable truth that they, more than anyone else, laid the groundwork for Donald Trump. His election in 2016 should have been a wake-up call. Hillary Clinton was not a poor choice because she was a woman, but because she was an elitist who had very little empathy with the average American and effectively rigged the nomination in her favour. Kamala Harris had a very similar problem. Indeed, in many ways, Harris was in an even worse place. Hillary Clinton had far more experience and she had been challenged and questioned in ways Harris never faced.

I could say a great many things about this, but they all boil down to one point:

If you wish to defeat someone like Donald Trump, you have to provide an alternative. And that alternative has to actually be something the voters want!

The average person doesn’t care about elitist concerns. They care about the economy, they care about their ability to put food on the table, they care about crime and security and safety: they object, strongly, to being told they have to sacrifice, to put aside logic and reason and surrender their right to come to terms with the changing world in their own way. They want to feel that they have agency, that they have control over their own lives, and that is something that is increasingly stripped from them. In many ways, Kamala Harris was the ultimate representation of a lack of agency. There was no primary, not even a very hasty process, for her to replace Joe Biden on the 2024 Democratic ticket. She was just forced down the throats of countless Americans and they rejected her.

I believed that the 2016 election result would lead to a period of soul-searching on the part of both Republicans and Democrats. The Republicans would have to acknowledge their mistakes, the ones that allow Donald Trump to steal the party from its former leadership; the Democrats would have to admit that they lost touch with the average American and rebalance themselves to compete in the new political era. In that, I was completely wrong. The Republicans were frozen by the horror and indignity of having to cope with a Trump presidency, while the Democrats threw a four-year temper tantrum rather than admit their mistakes and come up with a proper alternative.

There is a lot I could say about this, but here is food for thought. Throughout the history of the Western World, there have been numerous violent upheavals, from the Young King’s War to the Peasants’ Revolt, the Pilgrimage of Grace, the English Civil Wars, the American and French Revolutions and even the American Civil War. Although these events took place over nearly a thousand years of history, they all have one thing in common. The elitists, from monarchies to slaveowners, refused to give up even a little power, to share what they had and accept a new reality in which their whims were no longer absolute and the people they had once ruled were no longer disposed to accept a social order tilted against them. Their attempts to keep the lid on only ensured that when the explosion came it was disastrous, shattering the social order and sparking off wars and upheavals that still resonate today. Worse, after the upheavals came to an end, the elitists often showed that they had learnt no lessons from the affair.

Donald Trump’s election is not a victory for racism or sexism or –phobia or the all-purpose bigotry. It is a rebellion against the political elite, an elite that is steadfastly refusing to give up power and propagating policies that might be beneficial to the elitists themselves but extremely harmful to their subjects. Trump was elected because he saw there was an ever-increasing mass of angry and discontented people who wanted to push back, and made himself their representative. And it was easy, because there was no alternative.

It isn’t easy to let your own mistakes. It isn’t easy to empathise with people on the other side. But it has to be done.

Or else there will be many more upheavals to come.