In Front of Their Noses
Why did so many highly intelligent people refuse to believe that a self-destructive administration would actually self-destruct?
Truncheon-wielding, balaclava-wearing ICE agents did not swarm the polling stations. The Insurrection Act was not invoked, nor did the president order the 82nd Airborne to lock up Democratic officials. The men in leather trench coats did not slip out of black limousines at midnight to seize the editors of publications that are unfriendly to MAGA and all of its works. Annoying columnists were not forced by Proud Boys festooned with scary tattoos to drink castor oil in front of jeering mobs. Elon Musk’s hundreds of millions of dollars failed to buy the votes of masses of apathetic yokels.
Instead, on Tuesday, the Republicans got a drubbing for the ages. The elections were peaceful, and their outcome so unambiguous that even Donald Trump had to accept it.
For nearly a decade, a drumbeat of commentary has insisted that American democracy was teetering or indeed done: The system had been irredeemably corrupted. The gerrymanders had guaranteed a permanent Republican majority in the House. Learned scholars drew chilling parallels with Macbeth, former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and, of course, the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Professors at Yale, giving up on the failed experiment that was America, fled for their freedom—nay, their very lives—to Canada. It was the stuff of nightmares.
Just why did so many intelligent people believe that Trump had suspended the laws of political gravity, and perhaps more important, why did they think that the American people were sufficiently dumb to fall for him and MAGA indefinitely?
Such reflection is difficult. At the end of 1943, George Orwell took the step—uncommon among intellectuals, and rather courageous—of rereading his diary entries from 1940 and 1941. “I find that I was usually wrong when it was possible to be wrong,” he admitted ruefully. He concluded that “to be politically happy these days you need to have no more memory than an animal.”
In 1946, he gave the question more careful consideration in his essay “In Front of Your Nose.” In making up one’s weekly budget, he observed, “two plus two invariably make four.” Politics was totally different, a world in which the rules of arithmetic did not apply. In the end, absurd and contradictory beliefs are “traceable to a secret belief that one’s political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.”
Just so. But tested those beliefs now have been, and it is important to ask why so many highly intelligent people refused to think that self-destructive officials and policies would self-destruct, why an appalling record of corruption, economic mismanagement, and cruelty—on top of an ill-conceived, poorly executed, and unexplained war—would not eventually yield the defeat of a party that had reliably put forward an assortment of cranks, crackpots, crooks, and careerists for the approval of the American people.
RECOMMENDED READING
The largest explanation lay in a disdain for the average American, the kind who gave Trump two chances but did not want to see noncriminal immigrants hauled off the streets or shot by masked federal agents, or the kind who thought that tariffs were stupid. This was in large measure class-based mistrust, and one wonders, even now, how fully it has been dispelled. Allied to this was a failure to appreciate the genius of a decentralized political system, in which an independent judiciary could block or retard the worst features of Trumpism until the wheels of the electoral process turned.
The Republicans have made a bad start at self-examination. Vice President Vance, in a now-famous post, asserted that “our voters” showed up but voted for the other side for four reasons. He grudgingly acknowledged the economy as a general issue, but his other explanations—the Iran war, a failure to put America first, and the connection to Israel—were a set of dog whistles loud enough for humans to hear. If he could not blame the president for the Iran war, who is the natural villain? If America was not first, which country was? And Israel, well, you know.
More obtuse yet: The problems he identified were focused on “our voters,” not on the American people. Vance still obsesses about the Trumpian base and seems little concerned with those outside it. The likely cratering of his chances to succeed Trump in the White House is one of the welcome consequences of this election.
The challenges for the Democrats are now different. It is one thing to promise greater affordability and more social welfare, but what about an exploding and unsustainable national debt? It is fine to denounce the war with Iran, but what is the alternative? If, for example, Congress denied funding for the war, would the Democrats wish to see Iran succeed in charging tolls in the Strait of Hormuz, or, indeed, actually acquire a nuclear weapon?
The country is fortunate in having Representative Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Chuck Schumer to manage Congress: Neither overflows with charisma, perhaps, but both are highly competent parliamentary managers and reliably moderate. They will have to walk a fine line between restoring accountability in government and yielding to the thirst for revenge that besets many of their members. More broadly, the Democrats will have to figure out what things they can and should restore to a pre-Trumpian order, what things to leave alone, and in what areas they can turn the chaos of this administration into creative destruction.
Above all, they will need to beware of overreach. Having listened to Democrats complain about Republican gerrymandering, I then watched them on November 3 back a constitutional amendment to allow their own gerrymander in Maryland, where I live. This will, they hope, remove the last Republican in Maryland’s delegation. They may live to learn, as the Republicans did in Texas, that in the fullness of time, such attempts to have politicians pick voters rather than the other way around can backfire.
If the Democrats are to take the country in a different direction, they will have to do something else as well: explain the phenomenon of Trump. Why did he sweep into office after eight years of Barack Obama, a president who still receives unthinking and uncritical adoration on their side? How could Trump possibly have come back after four years of Joe Biden, whose mental decline they refused to see, and whose record was far more unpopular than they can yet admit? Why did the great American public—the same yokels and laborers who threw the bums out on November 3—repudiate them twice? Because if Democrats do not get the answers to those questions right, the same will, sooner or later, happen to them again.
