History and the 2024 Election

The triumph of democracy?

With a new Constitution, a highly fragile union of States, and a fundamental break from traditional political authority, the new nation began an experiment with democracy that is still to this day unfinished.

It was a radical move to settle conflicts that might otherwise lead to anarchy or civil war by making them more public, by increasing the number of people involved in the decisions. Instead of suppressing, privatizing, conflict, the new Constitution and its sister State Constitutions, expanded the scope of a conflict by involving hundred of thousands of voting citizens.

John Murrin, Princeton historian, is very helpful in delineating the many competing views of government and human nature that battled each other in the last half of the 18^th century. They all competed for hegemony in the new institutions of government.

As income barriers to voting fell and workmen, commoners, seized their right to organize politically and vote for candidates, the rise of one of these basic divisions of mind and spirit, foreshadowed a three-century undercurrent of basic political conflict that still organizes political partisanship and opposition. It provides a necessarily way of understanding a 21^st century elections.

The conflict was understood in the late 1700s by many as a battle between “liberal/individualist” and “republican/public good” philosophies of government. This division fueled the Federalist vs Jeffersonian conflict of the period. I believe that we can better understand the 2024 Presidential Election by realizing that it remains an underlying framework for organizing political conflict in America.

In essence the difference is that people either assert the priority of personal interests over moral conceptions of the public good, or visa versa. It has boiled down to whether or not one should view government policy through the lens of one’s personal interests and threats to their attainment, or favor a government of men and women whose vision for the future is a society that better represents the interests of all its citizens, and whose decision making reflects an ability to suppress on

our personal interests in order to govern in the interest of a general “public good.”

What I have to say is an overview that leaves for further discussion many of the finer points of current political partisanship. I want to focus on how a crisis of partisan identity, a realigning moment in partisan time, has interacted with these enduring political divisions.

Consider what I have written before, that an immediate crisis (the Covid Epidemic coupled perhaps with the 2008-9 recession) galvanized the latent discontent that a generation of technological and accompanying economic change (globalization) had intensified, where an increasing number of workers were left behind, or left out of, the economic future to which they felt entitled. Such a potentially critical group of voters blamed their government (whether in the hands of either of the traditional parties) as either unable or unwilling to act on their behalf. They sought leadership that would recognize their needs and support their interests.

I am arguing that we can see political leadership of both Parties falling back on one of the two fundamental cultural lens that I have described, to justify their claims to office, justifying their agendas for reform and relief.

The Trump appeal to the Maga World was essentially an individualist approach. The government would increase overall wealth by favoring the production of more traditional fossil fuel energy, create more jobs through tariff reform and halt the flow of competing workers from other countries. In addition, lower taxes on the wealthy would make more money available for them to peruse their interests, i.e. investment in manufacturing jobs.

The Democratic Party did not adopt a different lens (except at the fringe). The Harris program was also in my mind essentially individualist reforms. It was built upon an “aspirational” narrative. This has been a common political message over the years and one that fits the individualistic narrative.

It promises to provide future workers, the sons and daughter of current voters (as well as the current unemployed) with the additional skills that they will need to succeed, as they strive for upward mobility in an expanding economy. The promise is the creation of new higher tech industries which will employ the more highly qualified workers of the future at high wages.

As well the Democrats signaled their continuing opposition to cultural privileges and prejudice that have impeded the upward mobility of stigmatized populations.

Both then “played” the individualist aspirational “card.” The Republican, however, had the upper hand. The narrative of economic opportunity has always has always been more persuasive when it is tied to “presumed” enemies that have taken for themselves, with the help of the government, the jobs and income that “belonged” to them. Republicans, the party out of office, could argue that it was the current government that was at fault. A government that allowed, even facilitated illegal immigration, raising prices, spreading conflict, and taking jobs away from deserving Americas.

The Democrats countered with aspirational promises. We will give you down payments, i.e. increasing your individual economic power. We will continue to manage an economy that will produce more and more jobs at better and better wages. Their narrative was a future oriented message. We have cleared a path forward for you. You have, and will continue to have, more opportunities than ever before.

Except many of the voters don’t or didn’t think they have such a yellow brick road ahead. All they “saw” were the prices at the store and the continuing erosion of former job security and wages.

The Republicans said it’s the Democratic controlled government that is limiting your opportunities, often because they care more for minorities, for global concerns, and cultural issues than for opening up the economy for hard working Americans.

As long as the battle was being fought on individualist turf, the Republicans were bound to win. Whether or not the Democrats could have shifted the narrative to a ground on which they stood to win, i.e. the republican public good narrative, is a mute question. Perhaps not. I might argued that they could have opened up a “second front” by stressing more than they did the “rich profiting from the crisis” argument and the “we are building a future economy” for all of us. I think we were too close to a genuine economic crisis and still absorbing the dislocations and economic transformations necessary to a successful transition to a global economy, for a social good narrative.

It is also possible that the traditional ‘look what we are doing to lead the world to a better future’ appeal is becoming threadbare. Either in a time of crisis, most don’t care, or the overall “project,” the American Empire crusade, has run its course or has become more and more exposed as the self-important fantasies of would be “world leaders.”

Regardless, we didn’t see the demise of Democracy. Instead, we saw its rebirth as people used their vote to elect a new government.

Postscript: You don’t have to like the result of an election to realize it is the result of a democratic process.