Let's play the blame game
I'm sorry to burst everyone's bubble but Ballerina Farm and Joe Rogan are not the reason Trump won.
The narrative has been decided: We need a “liberal Joe Rogan.” Latinos love Trump and hate being called Latinx. Democrats are too focused on pronouns and wokeness. Every liberal with a podcast or a think tank fellowship is convinced Harris could have won, if only her campaign had adopted the exact policy prescriptions put forth by their podcast or think tank. A similar phenomenon is happening on the right: every marginal faction of Trump’s coalition has convinced itself that people want what they, specifically, are selling. Real Americans are fed up with vaccines, pasteurized milk, and seed oils. Real Americans want homeschooling for all. Real Americans want to buy crypto and say slurs. Everyone is taking a victory lap; everyone is making it about themselves.
Cultural critics, too, are giving the right more credit than they deserve. They’re pointing to a rightward cultural shift that, they say, is embodied by figures as disparate as Ballerina Farm, Nara Smith, Jet and Pookie, Lana Del Rey, and Taylor Swift.1 The girlies are wearing cowboy boots and making sourdough and posting about quiet luxury and shilling “dating courses” on how to land a high-value man, so of course Trump won. It was inevitable; everyone is conservative now.
I understand the impulse on all fronts: the critics want to keep themselves employed, the esoteric right-wingers want to feel important, the coastal liberals want to be absolved of guilt. But the truth is that these are not the forces that secured a Trump victory. For a not-insignificant portion of the electorate, this election was about mass deportations, “protecting women’s sports,” and owning the libs. For others, it was about opposing authoritarianism, “protecting democracy,” and putting country over party.2 Neither constituency was large enough to win an election on its own.
For everyone else—for the people whose votes ultimately mattered—the election was about the economy. More specifically, the election was, as is everything in the average person’s life, about survival. Most people are not ideological, and they are certainly not “political.” They are interested in themselves and their families and their communities; they are seeking to maximize their prosperity and minimize their suffering. One side offered them a way out of the endless struggle to just get by, an enemy to blame and vanquish, a better future on the horizon. The other side told them the economy is better than it’s ever been. One side took voters’ support for granted; the other side fought to win.
Republicans succeeded where Democrats failed: they won an election by building a coalition. Trump’s campaign was undeniably run by a cadre of white supremacists, Christian nationalists, tech rationalists, cryptofascists, and Great Replacement obsessives who want to ban birthright citizenship and repeal the Immigration Act of 1965, and otherwise middle-of-the-road Republicans who have accepted that these once-fringe types are now their ideological fellow travelers. But their victory was brought in part by people who are here because of the Immigration Act of 1965: Arab-Americans, Muslims, and Latinos, immigrants and the children of immigrants, who felt like some Democrats may look like them but don’t govern with them in mind.3
The question now is whether this coalition can hold, whether the Republican Party will be a longtime home for immigrants and nativists, for working-class people of color and those who believe in the inherent biological inferiority of people of color.4 I think the answer to that question will ultimately lie in the reason people voted for Trump in the first place: the economy. Trump’s stated policy platform will probably lead to significant economic upheaval—the people who are struggling now will likely suffer more, not less, as a result of tariffs and mass deportations. I don’t mean to say that they voted against their own interests, which is condescending and dismissive, but that the Democrats didn’t give people something to fight for. They didn’t really offer people anything at all.
Some right-wingers are doing this too. I will concede that there is a vibe shift, but I still don’t think that’s why Trump won.
Even as I write this, I struggle to articulate what Harris was actually for, which I think sums up the problem with her campaign pretty well.
Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist running for mayor in New York, interviewed working-class voters in Queens and the Bronx about the issues that matter to them. You probably won’t be surprised that the cost of living and the war on Gaza are at the forefront of the average person’s mind.
If you think I’m exaggerating at all, I encourage you to read my recent Baffler essay on the race-and-IQ obsessives on the tech right.