US Election 2020: America in the age of woke

The not-so-Quiet Americans and their concerns need to be understood.

US President Donald Trump dances as he leaves a rally at Tucson, Arizona. Picture: AFP

This article is an attempt to provide a post-election analysis before the election has concluded.

It’s a quixotic enterprise because whoever becomes president will have an impact on what happens in the next four years.

As votes now stack up, Joe Biden is the favourite to be that successful candidate because at this point on the rollercoaster he has the ability to reach the 270 electoral votes needed to win the electoral college while losing Pennsylvania.

Trump has to win Pennsylvania while also holding on to Georgia and North Carolina along with either Arizona or Nevada. That’s a tall order and it looks as if he won’t make it unless the courts intervene to accept his allegations of voter fraud. That’s an even taller order, but not because there wasn’t voter fraud.

Despite over-the-top skepticism of the media inside and outside of America, voter fraud is not that rare in US elections. Historians and political journalists can provide quite detailed accounts of how it’s done: a party boss holds off declaring the votes in his best districts until he knows how many would put his candidate over the top in the constituency as a whole. Then he pads his figures and announces them.

Most people know the story of how Chicago mayor Richard Daley put John F. Kennedy over the top and into the presidency in just that way. But less known is the story of how Joe Kennedy Snr, the Kennedy patriarch, gave careful instructions to Bobby Kennedy to calculate very carefully the votes he needed to win: “I’m not paying for a landslide.”

There’s rarely hard “evidence” of such shenanigans, of course, because they would end in prison terms if there were. And earlier court decisions — several in the past few weeks — have made fraud easier by weakening protections for ballot security.

But there are often obvious signs of fraud. Two such signs in this election were improbably high vote totals (in the swing state of Michigan, which recorded a turnout of almost 90 per cent with seven districts in Milwaukee producing more votes than they had voters) and the sudden appearance late at night of large batches of votes for one candidate with none for his opponent (138,000 Biden votes hit the swing state of Pennsylvania early on Wednesday morning).

By the time anyone has noticed these oddities, the fake votes have been folded in with genuine ones, and it’s too late.

You need the evidence to persuade courts to order a search for the evidence. The courts are reluctant to intervene in electoral politics, sensibly so, and they impose a high test for cancelling votes. Not only must there be evidence of fraud, but that fraud must be substantial enough to affect the election’s outcome.

In a 50-state election, that’s a huge obstacle to leap over and probably beyond the power even of Trump. He was being either mocked or denounced on Thursday for his lonely determination to take the fight for electoral fairness to the Supreme Court.But it’s increasingly regarded, even by Trump loyalists, as a lost cause even as many non-Trumpers see a need for reform of election laws and procedures since the present ones make America a laughing-stock in the rest of the world.

If it’s a lost cause electorally and legally, however, it may not be lost politically in the 50/50 America that the election has revealed.

Contrary to the confident predictions of the pollsters, the media and the Biden campaign, not only was there no “Blue Wave” Democratic sweep, but apart from the President’s apparent but narrow defeat, the elections were otherwise disappointing for the party.

Instead of gaining House seats overall, it lost them and looks likely to have a very small congressional majority — so small as to make a Republican takeover of the Lower House in the 2022 mid-term elections a strong likelihood.

Nor are the Democrats likely to win the US Senate, which will continue to be an important obstacle to achieving their legislative aims. Where liberal Democrats could once think of the Supreme Court as a citadel of their power even when they lost elections, it is now dominated by conservative justices of good reputation and high ability.

Outside of Washington the Republicans control most state governments. They won one more governorship in this election and now hold 27 governorships to the Democrats’ 23. Without the White House they would look as if they were caught between retreat and the doldrums.

These are poor results for a party that had the conviction that Trump represented a narrow, bigoted and shrinking social segment of Americans, the assurance of pollsters that they were heading for a landslide and the backing of almost every non-electoral institution in American society — the mainstream media, the courts, Hollywood, academia, Big Tech and even Big Football.

Indeed, it’s an understatement to call what the media, the pollsters and Big Tech did in the campaign as “support”. The most important journalistic institutions in American society abandoned any pretence of impartiality and campaigned against the President almost passionately.

Their failure to report otherwise major news stories because it might hurt the Biden candidacy was a scandal. Their habit of inserting into reports of Trump’s speeches health warnings like “without evidence” was not only biased but also amazingly condescending to their readers — as if they needed the guidance of journalists to protect them against his clever wiles. And their abject failure to subject a potential Democratic president to serious questioning on anything at all once he was his party’s standard-bearer was like watching East German television reporting on the heroic statesmanship of Erich Honecker.

But the behaviour of the media was objectivity itself compared to that of Big Tech, which refused to carry news stories and opinions from other media and respectable organisations more or less on the grounds that it felt like it. What its young engineers felt like included such things as censoring the President’s tweets or applying different standards of truth to tweets from conservatives and progressives.

The pollsters are a different matter. They lose business if they get it wrong, which they don’t want to do. My guess is therefore that they made one of two mistakes: either they allowed their (progressive) wishes to override their judgments or they underestimated the changes they needed to make to their polling methods if they were to adapt to the deep social changes in modern life; or both. Whatever the reason, their picture of Americans proved to be a caricature when the election results rolled in.

One finding about the electorate in the exit polls that contradicts so much of the conventional wisdom of progressives is that Trump improved his position with almost every ethnic and social group except for white men. Their support for him fell slightly. That’s not the result we should expect for a white supremacist. But when you take on a progressive’s racialised spectacles, it’s not so surprising. Race and racism are important but not the sole or dominating truth of American life that the Left likes to believe (and preach).

Other social and economic factors matter, too. Exit polls show that those voters who thought the economy was the most important issue went for Trump overwhelmingly, whereas those who gave higher importance to racial justice were equally likely to vote for Biden. Until the pandemic hit, Trump’s economic policies — especially, deregulation — had spread prosperity and raised wages and salaries for ordinary Americans, in particular those “left behind” by the economic growth of earlier years that had benefited those who gained from rising asset prices rather than incomes. They were grateful.

That perhaps accelerated a long-term development, emphasised by Clark Judge of the White House Writer’s Group, that when immigrant or minority groups reach a certain level of success (defined as both incomes and as upward social mobility), they gradually cease to act as single-issue interest groups, disaggregate and cluster into other groups based on economic interest or cultural affinities.

As some Hispanics started businesses and moved into the great American middle class, they looked on Trump not as a racist who opposed open borders but as a fellow-entrepreneur who had given them a break. As they moved rightwards, they passed some other Americans, including college-educated whites, who had been made “woke” by the summer’s racial disturbances and sympathised with the riots and attacks on property as peaceful protests against racism that the Hispanic small businessman saw as a direct attack on himself.

As for the white male worker — if we can believe what the exit polls tell us about white males who may not tell the truth to pollsters if he answers their questions at all — he might have been asking Trump the skeptical question: what have you done for me lately? Not every 2016 Trump voter improved his position in the past four years; he didn’t deliver on some headline policies such as the border wall and reducing immigration that may have won their support originally; and his election campaign didn’t especially address itself to them but either to minorities such as black Americans or to the entire citizenry. So a few of them stayed home on election day.

That said, the overall picture from the election and exit polls is of a nation that is sorting itself out into a new party system.

The Democrats are becoming a progressive party of the economic and cultural elites in alliance with those lower down the social scale who are dependent on government subsidies of one kind or another.

The GOP is morphing into a new multi-ethnic middle-and-working class that is patriotic, culturally conservative and economically striving. This social realignment on party lines has been occurring for at least two decades throughout the Anglosphere. It is far from complete, but it has proceeded far enough for both class parties to develop a cultural awareness of their own values and hostility or suspicion towards the other class and its values.

Because the progressive class is in control of all the communications industries, it can’t help insulting and annoying the conservative class, even sometimes unintentionally. It never hears what the other side says; it is tone-deaf in how it talks to them; and it is especially clueless when it tries to make common political cause.

The most obvious case of this misplaced comradeship is its call for police departments to be defunded, which naturally frightens those people with “something to lose”, especially if it’s a little, and which a Democratic congresswoman said this week was responsible for her almost losing her seat.

Still more revealing is that some younger social justice warriors and older Democrats anxious for a thrill have been hymning the praises of socialism — which is essentially a program of slavery, poverty and murder — to voters who have fled countries like Venezuela and Cuba ruined by it.

As for the “racism” of Trump and the GOP, one progressive writer was honest and perceptive enough to say this week: if Trump can put together a coalition, half the country disagrees with our idea of what racism is.

So there was already a gulf of understanding and some emerging class hostility between the two social armies. Those antagonisms were aggravated by the “racist” caricature of Trump, Trumpism and Trump supporters that was painted by the media, the pollsters and Big Tech and by the foolish ruthlessness with which they forced their judgments on others and made it clear that they had little time for such aspects of the American polity as free speech and the First Amendment, which are often held more sacred by immigrants than by native-born Americans.

Imagine, therefore, how many people on the losing side of this week might feel if it begins to look as if Trump has been robbed of an electoral victory by a broad-based political campaign that broke all the rules of fairness and equality, and when that unexpectedly failed, by a series of voting irregularities and breaches of law that the authorities refused to correct.

That may well succeed legally, as it seems to be doing, but it won’t work in other ways as Michael Anton of the Claremont Institute has pointed out.

“Even if the steal can be made to stick, half the country won’t accept it. That is, they’ll accept the reality that power is now in the hands of a party that took it by fraud. But they won’t believe that the election was fair or the outcome real. They will believe, or be confirmed in a belief that’s been brewing for a long time, that the system is rigged, the process is fake, the ruling class are liars, the government is illegitimate and that they themselves are subjects and not citizens — anything but a free people with a say over their own destiny.

“If the ruling class can get away with this, they will be able to get away with anything. And they will know it.”

That will certainly be Trump’s own reaction. Those who were condescending to him as a broken and absurd figure on Friday must have forgotten his performance over the last three weeks.

Trump is a man of huge flaws— impulsiveness, touchiness, narcissism — but also of huge gifts — above all, resilience and energy. For practical purposes Trump was the Trump campaign, criss-crossing the nation, drawing huge crowds in small places, single-handedly restoring his party’s fortunes, eventually holding the Democrats to an effective draw.

He may look a beaten man now, missing the popular mood. But moods change, and a significant number of GOP and conservative activists have rallied to him. It’s hard to see him quietly leaving politics now even if the Democrats would allow him to do so.

More likely, they will harry him, even using the transition period to ram home the “illegitimate president” message and cripple his ability to issue pardons while in office. Once a Biden administration is installed, its younger “woke” supporters, now appointed to positions in the Justice Department, would press any “moderates” around the president to halt any Russiagate prosecutions, cancel investigations likely to embarrass Clinton or Obama personnel, block presidential pardons and move to charge, convict, and imprison Trump himself. They would be supported by the usual suspects.

Nor will the Left’s various street activists give up because Biden can’t get progressive legislation through the Senate. They’ll demand executive orders for their favoured causes. If they think a threat of violence might push the new administration in a more progressive direction more quickly, you might see armed “Bidenvilles” and “Portlands” spreading across America.

Much would then depend on whether Biden is a tough moderate Democrat or a Kerensky yielding by degrees to the unrelenting pressure from his Left. Whichever role he adopted, however, he might not be there to sustain it long. And would a President Harris fight against a rising Left supported by a woke corporate establishment on behalf of Middle America?

Establishment and moderate Republicans are already signalling that they would like to see their party play down controversial issues from the Russiagate plot to voter fraud.

But two forces will resist this: the President himself and those conservatives who feel that a serious act of injustice has been perpetrated on Trump, by extension on themselves, and on the body of democracy as well.

They contend that the allegations of treasonable Trump-Russia collusion were in effect an anti-democratic plot that succeeded; that the crimes involved in this plot have never been honestly admitted nor their authors punished in any way; and that voter fraud is the final act in this unconstitutional coup.

Between the Trump loyalists and the alliance of street radicals and woke intelligentsia on the Democratic side of the barricades, America is not going to get the return to normalcy that many Americans voted for.

But the deeper villain may be an antiquated, inefficient, patchwork system, devised by partisan officials and lawyers that makes cheating easy, more apparent than real, and therefore inviting — and voting a serious inconvenience.

John O’Sullivan is a British commentator and journalist. He was a senior policy adviser and speechwriter for prime minister Margaret Thatcher and editor of Quadrant magazine from 2015 to 2017.