Elections

For want of a nail.

I wrote this in the early morning hours of Nov. 9th. I’d been kept awake for, I think, about a day and a half at that point, first by nervousness and then by fear and panic. Until today, I’d forgotten I’d written anything at all after the election. I’m publishing it now because, with France’s election returns due within the hour, it’s good to be reminded that political outcomes are the byproducts of political systems, and political systems are complex. The fate of the world can turn on one percent of the electorate being here and not there. But that’s a consequence of coincidence, contingency, and bad timing; political machinery encountering a scenario it didn’t foresee. When a tiny handful of voters change everything, no one can say the people of France or the United States have collectively willed themselves around certain bends in the grand currents of history. Sometimes things just fall apart in exactly the wrong way.

The effect might be a wave but I remain unconvinced the cause was a populist outpouring of pro-Trump sentiment, rejecting the ideals of the republic in favor of fascism. Instead, the whole 2016 campaign was something of a Rube Goldberg machine of systemic and chaotic failure, where each breakdown fed into another, all compounding until eventually Trump (barely) eclipsed his opponent in the final tally.

Trump’s victory in that final vote seems bigger because it wasn’t forecast. But it was not, in actuality, all that big. At the time of this writing he seems likely to lose the popular vote. At the time of this writing he seems likely to win one, maybe two more states than he needed to hit 270 in the electoral vote. Turnout was low; Florida was painfully close and could have almost reversed the entire outcome; it was, by most definitions, a narrow thing.

Nor was, as is commonly remembered, Trump the runaway favorite even in his own party’s primaries. His ability to lock up a majority of delegates remained in doubt late in the day, he won many contests with a plurality, lost many others, and obviously benefited from a fragmented field. In the process of winning, he alienated a historically large number of prominent members of his party, and it remains to be seen whether all of them will return home.

The overall popular vote totals remains well in line with what fundamentals-based models predicted, which was generally something between a narrow Clinton loss and a narrow Trump victory.

This isn’t to downplay the costs or risks of a Trump presidency. But the underlying issue is not that voters collectively decided to cast away liberal democracy, but that liberal democracy, as practiced in the United States, contained important structural risks that allowed someone as dangerous and unqualified as Donald Trump to seize highest office.

High among those is the tendency of voters to buck against incumbents, passing, first, downballot offices and then, ultimately, the presidency to the opposition party. Surely also playing a role is the tendency of the political system, media establishment, and hence voters to treat both major party nominees as roughly symmetric, a simple paper-or-plastic choice. As has been observed many times before, this practice ensured that any nominee of a major party, no matter who or what they are, could not be fully ruled out.

In this system, the gatekeeping function lies with the parties themselves. But the Republican Party in 2015 was in a strange and dangerous place: powerful nationally, but veering towards authoritarianism and running a deeply fragmented primary. It was precisely the environment in which a celebrity interloper might find accidental success — though again, not nearly the universal acceptance now imagined.

So that’s the basic arc of it: an unqualified novice enters a chaotic contest, clambers his way to the top of the pack, and then is entered into a second contest where forces far beyond his control — probably even beyond his comprehension — have a substantial chance of elevating him into the presidency. And so they did.

It didn’t help, either, that his presidential opponent was herself deeply (and undeservedly) unpopular, short-circuiting her attempts to break the enforced symmetry of the presidential contest.

It also didn’t help that, as a celebrity, Trump was fun for media to cover or discuss, and that his celebrity gave him a leg up in exciting the precise group of people he needed to excite, and that one consequence of centralized, saturation election coverage is that everyone is reading the same headlines and seeing the same shows at once, meaning that if media hyperventilation had driven Wisconsin working-class white voters to the polls in higher numbers, the same had probably happened to the tens of millions of similarly situated voters around the nation.

And it certainly did not help that Trump found in racial appeals and attacks a political lever that reached a racist subset of voters who were otherwise uninspired by national politics. There can be no question that Trump’s racial language effectively radicalized a portion of the electorate behind him.

But mostly, it’s probably the other stuff. The racial appeals may have pushed Trump over the line, and they have rightfully come to define him and his campaign. They are a dangerous precedent in more ways than can be counted, a national shame, a frightening omen, and even standing alone, capable of causing tremendous harm. But Trump’s victory doesn’t mean the country has endorsed and adopted those racial appeals, so much as it means that voters are still largely subject to the clanking internal machinery of democracy, which obeys its own logic and hears no reason, and has continued to operate more-or-less as usual through the hellish 2016 campaign, until the whole contraption went soaring off a cliff.