Surviving the Next Four Years Part 2: Another preliminary stab at post-election analysis drawing on my Lagniappe Links for 2024 Election Analysis
By Michael Alan Dover
(Written 11/26/24) Based on selected additions read today from my 2024 Election Analysis Bibliography found here.
As of today, I am still in analysis mode—as well as planning mode for how I think we the people should respond to the election of Trump. First, I should say, we should consider further just who we the people are and how it is that I or anyone else can speak for the people. One thing is sure, neither Trump nor Harris could claim to represent the people. And before any of us pundits, or journalists, or life-long lefties think we can do so, we had better think once, twice, three times before doing so. This is my second pre-full-analysis comment.
I presented my first thoughts already in my November 8 Surviving the Next Four Years, only to see that just within the last week Alex Beam, in the Boston globe, writes about My Plan for Surviving the Next Four Years. Replete with an AI generated photo of a den that looks very much like my own den of non-iniquity, sans the curved desk with two monitors, Beam proclaims he is not moving to either Canada or Mexico, or going on a long-cruise ship voyage.
He talks about cozying up with a stack of novels.
Me, I’m currently reading Tricia Hersey’s second book, We Will Rest: The Art of Escape, which I will no doubt recommend to my writing course students, with a little joke repudiating it saying, “No Edits Necessary,” but pointing out it do not object if taken in the context its next phrase “…not needing to be fixed.” Wha Hersey said it is certainly consistent with the empowerment theory the course teaches, along with my latest mantra, “Neglect No Need.”
Apparently, you see, her first book, Rest is Resistance: a Manifesto, recommended to me first by a student, second by an wonderful social work activist, and finally by a longstanding immigration rights and democratic socialist activist, had not really done the trick for me this election season, where I did as much as I could to elect Harris and re-elect Senator Sherrod Brown. True, the back cover gives me away: I am still on page 114.
Beam has also rejected becoming a monk. Yes, I’ve been upping my quotient of daily prayers, and prayed twice yesterday rather than once, in the hope there would really truly be a ceasefire in Lebanon (I haven’t yet checked, today, but every time I write or do something for a ceasefire—see the intro to my Peace with Justice in the Middle East bibliography—I pray it will not be necessary to say or do it. Once I even told the editor not to run my letter if there was a ceasefire in the meantime!
Beam’s next strategy is turning to the Bible. On our dining room table, where I stand facing East and say the Shema and all three paragraphs of the V’ahavta each morning, are my copies of Robert Alter’s masterful translation and commentary The Hebrew Bible. I am already behind in my resolution to read his translations, each week, of the weekly Parashah and Haftorah. I will catch up this weekend.
Beam reminds us that 2026 is the nation’s 250th birthday, the semiquincentennial. Who knew? True, even in the local Giant Eagle, among the workers and customers in the check-out line—and before that in a little conversation about what I call Real Medicare for All that I started around a table hawking Medicare Supplement Plans—three different people, both Dems and Reps, were already talking about the 2026 midterm elections. It seems democracy is alive and well in their minds. (Watch for a news analysis in Get the News Straight of Medicare for All and an accompanying editorial for what I call Real Medicare for All, a public option on steroids, consistent with John Tropman's article on the original intent of Pediacare and Medicare.)
Beam next ponders writing a book. I’m pondering two, long delayed. I think I will start over the holiday with the most delayed, the one on my 2003 dissertation, once under contract with Johns Hopkins. My editor, now with another press, is still exhorting me to finish it, along with my long-suffering co-chair and a mentor, the author of the above article on Pediacare, who kindly refers to me a slow poke. Howdy, pardner, I prefer turtle, and I’ll win in the end!
Meanwhile, I must feed the inner journalist in me, which has been dormant since my writing in Liberation News Service, the National Guardian, and the Detroit Fifth Estate in the late 60s and early 70s. I wasn't making and money and it got me subpoenaed by a Federal Grand Jury circa 1970.
When I arrived to testify, the federal ADA said he knew my family and I could go home, only to discover that while I was away, someone had broken into my apartment on Forest Avenue. It had been ransacked. My guitar, the speakers I made from plywood with a Jensen coaxial speaker with woofer and tweeter inside, and my kit-made pre-amp and amp were all there. Good thing they got be admitted to the Blue House on Division in 1972, where my relationship with my life partner and wife began in earnest.
In any case, the address books I yearly re-copied were gone from my desk. Luckily, the latest one was still in my back pocket, and I still have it. It appears that the folks at the Cointelpro operation had the wrong idea about me. I was just a wannabe reporter, and apparently still am! There is more to this story, and I may tell it sometime. I was innocent, and the jury agreed!
But for now, I must say, I admire Beam’s writing!
To move on to others who stole my phrase “surviving the next four years,” given one of my favorite theatrical characters is Mother Courage from Brecht’s Mother Courage, I must say I like Mother’s for Democracy’s Guide for Surviving the Next Four Years. There is also lots of stuff about surviving the next four years on Reddit.
Actually, it turns out that in 2018, there was a book by Gillian J. Mckenzie, Understanding Trump: How to Survive the Next 4 Years, and it is free on Kindle, to me at least! I’ll have to cover it in my Book Corner section, coming up! But must say, I’ve been resolving to survive the next four years every mid-November since 1968, with the possible exception of 2008. And I’m kidding about my phrase being stolen.
As for further analysis, I’m holding off, as many have said we should do, before drawing too many actual conclusions, or going into Paul Revere mode about how the fascists are coming.
Adam Tooze in his substack today referred to Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian, who said, “A democracy requires an informed citizenry, and the US media over the past eight years in particular created an increasingly misinformed citizenry,” Solnit says.
Yes, certainly a public divided between MSNBC devotees, Fox fanatics, CNN’s failed attempts to be balanced, and those democratic socialists and those on the far left who put too much stock in the proliferating warnings coming from various YouTube channels and far-left publications. All their analysis fell short of the mark, it seems to me.
So, I thought I would take a stab. Just as, in Reagan’s second run, when Walter Cronkite normalized Reagan as something other than the extremist who, as Tim Barker in Sidecar points out, said that the Waffen SS were “victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.” This was his equivalent of “there are good people on both sides.” So in 2016 the mass media alternatively saw Trump as a buffoon, a grudging contender for the run at the presidency, or a candidate they felt at first they had an obligation to cover, without fact checking his lies.
The result should have been predictable the moment Clinton had a flu and stepped out of a limo to refer to his supporters as a “basket of deplorables,” an attitude Biden mimicked this fall just before the election, in saying in saying, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” by which he meant the speakers at Trump's fall 2024 MSG rally, and perhaps the crowd there, not all his supporters.
But each time, in 2016 and 2024, in my opinion, the election outcome was in part sealed. The gender gap in the working class and among suburbanites—Harris’s only hope—went up in smoke, in a significant way. The men who were—in 2016, 2020, and 2024 trying to persuade “their” women to vote for Trump, were pleading at first, “But honey, they think we are deplorables.” This fall, they added, “Biden thinks we are garbage!”
That was likely pretty conclusive evidence that the Professional Managerial Class of which the DSA leader Barbara Ehrenreich spoke first in 1976 Paul Buhle’s Radical America were exactly the YUPPIES (young urban professionals who one white and one Native American pair who took me fishing offshore in 2016 told me they hated sooo much. I said, “What if I was a Yuppie once,” and they went on to tell me about their $11 an hour jobs at a plastic plant owned by a flag waving right-winger who hated unions even more than Yippies. Voters concluded that today’s Dems are just grown-up Yuppies, and that they can’t be trusted.
True, the Democrat’s fear mongering about a national Congressionally approved abortion ban didn’t help. No one believed it, given Trump saying it should be handled at the state level. Nor did they necessarily want federal legislation mandating Roe vs. Wade. This is not to minimize the terrible threat of what I call totalitarian theocratic patriarch power brokers, which operate globally and in the US. We must be vigilant. But more informed voters and pro-life advocates don’t want to pay taxes for abortion and may have feared repeal of the Hyde Amendment.
In any case, our scare tactics did not work. Nor did anyone truly believe the re-election of Trump would be the end of our democracy. As Tim Barker noted recently as well, “The quest for a broad centrist majority requires an antagonist who can be framed as utterly outside of the national mainstream.” Trump was clearly within the trajectory from Nixon to Reagan to Trump. He was no Eisenhower and not even a Bush, and he was certainly behaving like a “wannabe fascist” as the disturbing book by Federico Finchelstein said in is recent book. (Watch for something on that in my forthcoming Book Corner as well.)
Voters also didn’t believe either Milley or Kelly that Trump is actually a fascist. A wannabe fascist maybe, a performative fascist, but not really a fascist, in my view. An authoritarian? Yes, but as Timothy Noah said today in The New Republic, “He was a weak president before, and he may be an even weaker one this time.”
In fact, the voters were more likely of the view that it was the Democrats who were a threat to democracy as we know it—given the widely expressed goals of many liberal Democrats, the supposed “institutionalists”— who wanted to pack the Supreme Court, a complaint repeated constantly on Fox.
Viewers were reminded that Roosevelt toyed with doing that. Also, many Democrats proposed abolishing the electoral college, rather than addressing some of its problems at the state level, by eliminating the winner take all provision (like in Maine and Nebraska). If this were done widely, and included including ranked choice voting as well for all federal elections—but it is just too darn complicated for most of us to understand—it would be a more democratic solution, one which any institutional analysis would conclude would be less likely to tear the nation apart. It would avoid coastal Democrats dominating the nation, only to see the heartland rebel.
In other words, voters concluded it was the Democrats who many thought were the real threat to our democracy, not the 1000s of demonstrators on 1/6/24 who, egged on by Trump, marched on the Capitol, where just over 1000 (fact check), incited by dozens of well-prepared far right fanatics, rioted in ways that reminded me of the 1971 Mayday riots, more than any 19th century insurrection.
But the Democrats ran with the insurrection discourse and lost. It turned out 25% of those who entered the capitol that day were Marines or former Marines. And the full crowd at the capitol was outraged because they falsely believed the election was stolen, not because they wanted to install a fascist and dissolve Congress. They really saw themselves as protecting the Constitution, by and large, not subverting it.
But few liberals or those on the left dared defy the “insurrection” consensus. Instead, we ran on our self-righteousness and the voters— the very “masses” we professed to represent—spotted that:
The substack of Adam Tooze today points out just how close the election was. And as analysis proceeds, we’ll learn more about the role of secretive Christian nationalist groups, Musk-funded groups and so forth, and other efforts to suppress the vote. We’ll learn more as well about the reality that it appears that “only Trump” voters, who voted only for Trump and nothing down ticket, far outnumbered the Never Trump Republican voters. Many of them were undercounts in 2016, meaning they voted down ballot but not for president. Many voted for Biden in 2020, and I know just which Republican houses has Biden signs in their yard this year. At least one didn’t, this year.
But the idea it was not useful to involve Lynne Chaney is ridiculous. Yes, Harris should have also campaigned with Sanders, and in my view involved Senator Warnock and Governor Moore more prominently. And Senator Bennet, but he was apparently in the doghouse for being the first Senator to warn Biden couldn’t win and later warning of a landslide by Trump over Harris. We didn’t see a lot of Senator Kelly and Governor Shapiro or even Governor Walz in the campaign either, did we?
Well, this is just post number two, based just on the pieces I read this morning. It will be quite some time before my next installment of Surviving the Next Four Years. Meanwhile, why not write your own? I have a solid bibliography just waiting for you here on my Lagniappe section.
