IN AMERICA'S COLD CIVIL WAR THE VOTE IS THE PRIMARY WEAPON
Do you vote FOR a candidate or party or do you vote to PREVENT a candidate or party from taking power?
You can dice and splice the results of the 2024 presidential election anyway you choose:
Did Kamala/Donald gain or lose: Male, Female, college-educated, White, Black, Latino (what happened to Latinx, did they all die?), rural, urban, regular, irregular, high, low information but in the end, in a society as hopelessly split as the United States the essential question is the one I pose above.
Let me rephrase it for the people I think are my core readers:
Did you vote to stop Donald Trump? Or because you were enthusiastic about Kamala Harris?
In a week that started with a lot of noise about books detailing Joe Biden’s decision to stay in the race let me pose the question another way: if Biden hadn’t dropped out, would you still have voted for him, even though it was clear he was physically (not numerically) to old for the job? I would have — just to stop Trump.
Political scientist Norman Ornstein calls this, “negative partisanship”. When thinking about the democratic backsliding that characterizes the Trump era in American history, it is important to understand the role decades of negative partisanship have played in bringing American society to this point.
As a focus group of one, looking back across half a century of voting, I can’t remember too many occasions when I was able to vote for positive partisan reasons, my party’s policy “offer” as my British colleagues say.
Does the following self-analysis of my voting history have anything in common with yours?
I was born in the numerical middle of the American century and brought up in the New Deal Democratic faith. The modern Democratic party is not the FDR/LBJ Democratic party I watched my parents vote for and then embraced when I came of voting age. That faith is based on two fundamental principles turned into legislation and law: Social democracy embodied in Social Security programs and Civil Rights.
Neither is fully realized yet in American life. The health portion of the social safety net is a very slow weave, and the willingness of the Supreme Court to slowly eviscerate the Voting Rights Act after 50 years, as it did in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, shows that racism cloaked in judicial robes is an always present danger to racial equality in American life.
I cast my first vote in 1972 (I missed 1968 as the voting age was still 21) I voted for George McGovern. It was an act of civic hopelessness. I was living in Topeka Kansas at the time and there was no possibility of that state’s electoral votes ever going to a Democrat.
It was primarily a vote of positive partisanship. McGovern was not going to overturn the New Deal (neither was Nixon, truth be told) or Civil Right acts (neither did Nixon, truth be told, he actually deepened the legislation via Title IX) But McGovern was committed to ending the Vietnam War quickly. That was decisive.
There was perhaps a tinge of negative partisanship. Voting for the South Dakota Senator was a sanctioned way of showing my hatred of Nixon although it was no more effective than getting tear-gassed in Lafayette Square across from the White House in May 1970 following the Kent State Massacre.
I have always voted Democrat even when the party’s nominating processes served up poor, uninspiring candidates like Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. It required negative partisanship to get me to the ballot box. I voted against Reagan and Bush more than for Mondale or Dukakis.
Bill Clinton in 1992 was a vote of enthusiasm. A guy of my post-war generation, charismatic, articulate, and economically knowledgable. There would be money in the bank to sustain social security and other programs and he was an apostate white Southerner committed to civil rights as Lyndon Johnson had been before him.
It was only after Clinton was in office that his flaws became more manifest: too politically calculating in managing America’s international affairs, and too ill-disciplined in his personal life.
What wasn’t his fault was the almost immediate confrontation with the horrifying new reality of American politics: the elevation of “negative partisanship” into an ideology spread through right-wing media and turned by Clinton’s dark shadow, Newt Gingrich, into political practice. Clinton was inaugurated in January 1993. Gingrich’s new Republican party took over the House of Representatives 18 months later.
The challenge revealed the President to be mostly about his own political survival. He was not a particularly good steward of the New Deal either. There are many examples but the key was signing away the guardrail on rampant financial speculation put in place by FDR’s administration: the Glass-Steagall Act.
Gore and Kerry? Neither inspired. Gore won but wouldn’t fight for the Presidency in Florida. Kerry watched incomprehensive as a ratcheting up of negative partisanship swift-boated him.
In 2008 I could vote for Obama for all the positive reasons and the idea that there was still a place for my America to be America again
The land that never has been yet, And yet must be
Obama’s election led to another Republican ratcheting up of negative partisanship. I spent the summer of 2009 in Washington DC making a two-part program for the BBC World Service on the passage of the Affordable Care Act and interviewed South Carolina Senator Jim De Mint who was ratcheter in chief. He failed to stop the bill’s passage but spread enough partisan poison that he was rewarded with the leadership of the Heritage Foundation. It was a helluva reward: more money than he earned as a Senator and no voters to face.
That 2008 vote was the last time I voted with enthusiasm FOR a candidate.
By 2012 I had retreated back to the tribal. I was voting against the Republicans not for Obama. Unlike Joe Biden I didn’t think passing the Affordable Care Act aka ObamaCare was “a big fucking deal.”
Yes, a person can’t be turned down for insurance because of a pre-existing condition and medicaid eligibility was expanded slightly but the ACA fell well short of establishing health care as a right enshrined in legislation and left private insurers and big drug companies pretty much unhindered in driving up health care costs.
The Obama years gave way to the new historical epoch. After 20 years of negative partisanship ideology America was primed for MAGA and so I voted against Trump. Three times. Not for Hillary (a Clinton restoration didn’t appeal. I wanted Elizabeth Warren to win the nomination) Not for Joe (I knew he would be true to FDR’s principles but was too in love with bi-partisan dealmaking twenty years after bi-partisanship was murdered by Gingrich to protect them) Not for Kamala (It’s shallow of me but I really do need my candidate to have the charismatic fluency of a Clinton or an Obama)
It really is a useful exercise to look back and honestly assess the primary reason for your presidential vote over time. Have you ever switched parties? Failed to vote because your team fielded an uninspiring candidate? Voted mostly against the other side rather than for your side?
That last question is the key. It would be really great if a polling company asked MAGA voters:
“Was your primary reason for voting for Trump to fuck the Dems?”
The answer, I think would be overwhelmingly, YES. And it might help explain why North Carolina MAGAts, concentrated in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the western part of the state, voted overwhelmingly for a man who was always going to do to them what he did last week:
It would explain why so many MAGA policies which hurt their voters, like stripping medicaid protection in the “Big, beautiful, bill” from millions of people can pass without a peep from the Trump supporters who will suffer most.
Finally, the clear answer would explain a simple fact to the millions of liberals at Facebook, Bluesky, and X posting bewildered or smug questions asking how Trump voters can be so stupid as to vote for a guy who will screw them at every turn:
Those Trump voters don’t care.
MAGA has turned the democratic process in America into a paraphrase of Clausewitz:
Voting is civil war by other means.
In war, people are called on to make extraordinary sacrifices. So if MAGAts lose a little benefit, they don’t mind. They just want you to lose more because they see you as the enemy.
If January 6th 2021 didn’t convince you, perhaps now it is time to look at them the same way.
This study is what inspired this week’s column. A very interesting and thorough data analysis of what happened last November. The company that compiled it, CATALIST, is highly regarded. But what’s missing from it is a detailed and accurate assessment of partisan hatred — real hatred — on both sides.