Maybe the voters are partly to blame

Six quick scattered thoughts from a European left-winger on the U.S. election

I have seen many people write blog posts in Substack, in this part of the blogosphere (Substackosphere?) writing their takes on Donald Trump's victory in the U.S. election. I would like to just express some scattered thoughts on the topic. Donald Trump's victory is interesting for Europeans like me, because it is not only Donald Trump's victory, it also signals more years of followers of Trump and of right-wing figures trying to become best buddies with Trump and a growing influence of these people all over the globe.

Nothing I will say here is particularly new or mind-blowing. In fact, many of these things were also said when Donald Trump was gaining popularity for the very first time. This is mostly just a restatement of some of those ideas, which we seem to have forgotten.

But this week I have seen a lot of blame being put on the Democratic party. In fact, I think perhaps too much. Maybe we should go back to blaming people for their reactionary beliefs and identities.

(1) Maybe voters are partly to blame.

We take political parties in elections as catering to voters' preferences and identities. That’s how they win elections, after all. There is a problem with a naive application of this theory, however, since people might take this merely descriptive theory to justify blindly accepting that those preferences or identities are immediately justified and shouldn't be under normative or ideological criticism. It just takes political parties as having to cater to them, whatever they are.

However, I believe that the rise of these right-wing populist movements, not just in the US, but across the world, with people like Boris Johnson, Giorgia Meloni, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen, shows that a great deal of the electorate has these tendencies towards moral tribalism, moral exclusion—for example, of immigrants, but also of feminism and anti-racist initiatives. And those preferences and identities should be criticized.

Ironically for critics of the "woke left", this shows the kernel of truth behind theories such as intersectionality. It shows that Kamala Harris, by being a woman, a person of color, and having stepchildren—so, having children from a man from another marriage—created mockery from corners of the right, such as the well-known quote about her being a "childless cat lady."

While this is not the only factor leading to Donald Trump getting reelected, the race was pretty close, so it is one factor that might have been a tipping point towards Trump. It shows that the American electorate is unprepared to have such a person governing the country, and this has been reflected in quotes by undecided voters who were, in fact, undecided because they were not confident in the ability of a woman to lead the country. It is Hillary Clinton all over again.

So yeah, maybe there are issues with millions of people with beliefs that run counter to gender and racial equality. Turns out we need the “woke left” because society has been, and still is, very unjust. Woke is not the problem, the American public is.

(2) Right-wing corruption, red pillers, incels, etc.

Speaking of sexism, the recent information coming out shortly before the election also shows how low the populist right-wing is willing to go in order to promote their ideologies—for example, by accepting money from Russian oligarchs to fund right-wing podcasts that promote sexist ideologies like those espoused by Andrew Tate and the broader wave of "red pill" figures. One worrying trend is the number of young men—between the ages of 16 and 30, roughly speaking—being attracted to red pill and incel ideologies, which are full of hatred towards women or immigrants.

Part of the issue is a lack of models of what a man should be in the 21st century. Men are told what NOT to be, without being shown any positive role models they should imitate. Without an alternative, men have been becoming more right-wing in backlash against feminism. The massive following of Andrew Tate and thousands of his imitators shows that there is a massive audience for this kind of content.

(3) Both traditional and social media promote political extremism.

I also place a great deal of blame on both mainstream (TV and online newspapers) and social media algorithms (on YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram) for promoting hateful right-wing, sexist, anti-feminist, and anti-immigrant messages. Mainstream media, always seeking bite-sized quotes to attract clicks for their own narrow financial incentives, places right-wing populists front and center, as ludicrous statements by Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Andrew Tate, Ben Shapiro, Charles Kirk, and other right-wing populist figures attract far more clicks than a composed, thoughtful speech from any sensible left-wing or centrist figure upholding progressive values. The same happens with social media algorithms, which promote bite-sized clips likely to garner many views. Incendiary claims and personalities are favored by these algorithms over any sensible "takes," speeches, or ideas from the left, center-left, liberal, or progressive spheres.

(4) The left is boring. Being a leftist is boring.

I still have my bone to pick with identity politics, as this has been the direction left-wing thinking has taken since the decisive turning point of the May ’68 movement, which started the push for feminism, anti-racism, LGBT+ rights, and more. These gains are important, and great leaps forward have been made since 1968 in areas such as gay marriage, abortion rights, the acceptance of atheism, and other advancements. However, this has come at the cost of a fractured left.

This shift partly reflects the fall of Soviet Marxism as a systematic and comprehensive alternative, and the victory of the capitalist right. It is not the literal End of History as Fukuyama claimed, but the history of big ideologies has pretty much halted since 1992.

To put it simply, we have a left that is out of fuel, out of energy, and out of ideas, and that will probably have to rethink itself—perhaps not so much in its core ideas, but in the packaging with which they are presented.

To illustrate with an example of my own country, when the Spanish left-wing political party Podemos first presented itself for elections, it followed the agonistic democratic ideas of Chantal Mouffe, and aimed to package left-wing ideas in a wrapper full of incendiary comments that clearly pandered to left-wing populist sentiments. While it was somewhat irritating to follow such a spectacle (since it reminds many people of Latin American left-populism), Podemos was more successful back when it was following this incendiary strategy than later as it moderated itself into a more classic progressive leftist form of political communication. That second form is boring, and doesn’t get clicks, so it fades into obscurity.

What I aim to say with this example is that maybe we need to rethink the packaging of left-wing ideas for the broader electorate. We may need to package leftist, progressive, social democratic ideals in somewhat incendiary messaging to reach the masses. Of course, this is simpler to achieve with right-wing ideology, which is always looking for a scapegoat—such as immigrants, women, identity politics, or "woke" politics.

A smart left-wing movement should be grounded in empirical information about reality, such as statistics, rather than simply making things up without any fact-checking or grounding in reality, as Trump has done.

This is clearly harder to do for the left than for the right, which has definitively detached itself from reality. These are the now the much-repeated ideas of "post-truth". Yet people don't care, because people live in narratives that they find viscerally compelling, both empirically and normatively, rather than good but boring values. This trend shows how many people in politics think with their guts rather than with their brains. Politics is the mind-killer, as they say.

(5) The tech right is disappointing.

I spend a lot of time on Twitter, and I am also disappointed with my extended circle of social media, such as people I might come across in my Twitter algorithm who have been in the tech sphere—typically fans of tech progress, but also fans of figures like Elon Musk—for falling for the traps of Donald Trump and the populist right. At least previous tech enthusiasts from the Bay Area had the decency to be Democrats.

But following Elon Musk (and even before him), more and more tech enthusiasts are moving to the right wing, which is especially disappointing, given that these are supposed to be decently smart people. Being “smart” doesn’t make you immune from bad politics. B2B SaaS engineers from the Bay Area don’t have great politics.

(6) There's no such thing as historical memory, and the visceral appeal of right-wing populism.

Of course, some might complain that my views here are too biased, that I'm not keeping a neutral stance.

But I think I have now gone through studying the right-wing academically, and I have come out the other side. I have studied social scientific ideas that help me understand the right wing a bit better than the naive view I might perhaps have presented here, which puts the progressive left above the right wing, which is looked at with condescension.

Let’s put an example of one social scientific theory that aims to be helpful for politics. Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory argues that while liberals emphasize values like freedom, equality, and empathy, right-wing conservatives also prioritize values such as proportionality, hierarchy, and sanctity. However, we shouldn’t follow Haidt in his normative recommendation or in his appeal for leftists to understand these moral foundations as if they were morally justified. I don't believe we should keep political neutrality in our analysis of right-wing political regression to authoritarian tribalist politics.

I think we have powerful reasons to attempt to abandon these Moral Foundations of proportionality, hierarchy, and sanctity, in favor of more enlightened, liberal, and progressive values. The consequences of hierarchy and sanctity throughout history have been devastating for many centuries, through monarchy and the church, and we should learn from these historical mistakes. We now have democracy and secularism. We shouldn't just keep a neutral scientific stance towards right-wing authoritarianism like it is an object of study or an artifact in a museum. That would be overcorrecting. Right-wing authoritarianism is an active, politically regressive movement that we have to actively oppose.

As this election also shows, historical memory is limited. Simply put, people don't remember fascism. They take democracy and liberalism for granted (some might not even want them, which is even worse). People often only remember what they experience within their lifetimes, showing little interest in or awareness of the pitfalls of right-wing authoritarianism that previous generations fell prey to. One might hope that, as the Santayana quote goes, we remember the past so that we aren’t condemned to repeat it. But, as the meme in response suggests, those of us who do remember the past are doomed to watch as history repeats itself once more.