Following the 2024 presidential election in the United States, observers are scrambling to assess troves of data. Pundits are laying blame. Yet, prevalent interpretations of the outcome miss the big picture.
Focusing on specific events and individual personalities fails to capture a living history culminating in regime change. Better to fight off this amnesia and dig for underlying forces.
The outcome of the election cannot be attributed to a single factor. However consequential, salient issues such as disinformation, racism, misogyny, inflation and growing inequality alone do not explain the results.
Stitching together three key factors enables understanding of the 2024 vote. Together, they form a combustible mix. To achieve a more humane future, the public must grasp this ensemble.
Major thinkers provided clues before the 2024 race. Important insights, some of them remarkably prescient, have not been given their due.
The first major factor is tyranny. As Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale, writes, the Founding Fathers established a democratic republic on the principle of warding off tyranny. Shunning monarchy, they opted for a constitution that was intended to preclude a power grab by an individual or faction.
The Founding Fathers considered the fate of democratic impulses in other contexts: ancient Athens and Rome as well as France in their day. So, too, we must think about not only how to sustain modern democracies but how they falter. In a globalized world with advanced communication technologies, the rise of autocracy in a host of countries gives sustenance to U.S. right-wing politicians.
The second factor is the need to manufacture a distinction between friends and enemies. Today, line-drawing between us and them, we and they, is rampant. Drummed into public pronouncements, it animates anti-immigrant sentiment, calls for mass deportations and antisemitism. But what are the root causes of this move?
In Nazi Germany, Carl Schmitt, a legal expert and an ardent antisemite, held that the in-group’s identity is forged by excluding out-groups. The assimilated Jew became an enemy to destroy.
Since excluding the enemy binds the dominant community, barring the enemy is a way to maintain unity.
In Schmitt’s telling, a strongman uses emergency powers, outlaws the enemy and suspends constitutional protections. This is said to be an exception, but the exception becomes the rule and considered normal.
Indeed, when the Nazi Party emerged victorious in Germany’s 1933 parliamentary elections, the country was already awash with antisemitic rhetoric about the country’s enemies.
The final factor, narrative power, is entangled with the second one. Storytelling about cultural differences helps galvanize forces of reaction.
In an uncanny portent of 2024, Philp Roth’s 2004 novel, “The Plot Against America,” recounts what happens when the United States no longer welcomes immigrants and minorities, such as Jews.
In Roth’s fictional account, Franklin Delano Roosevelt failed to secure an unprecedented third term as president in the 1940 election. Instead, the Republican nominee, Charles Lindbergh, an aviation hero and Nazi sympathizer, was victorious. His champions organized rallies, stoked the media and demonized “the Jewish race.”
Lindbergh joined the America First Committee of isolationists. Collaborators, including a prominent Jewish rabbi, supported his actions. And a cousin of the central character in the novel goes to work for a real estate developer whose profile closely resembles the 2024 president-elect’s.
Coming into office, Lindbergh elevated like-minded conservatives such as Henry Ford, known for his racist proclivities, to prominent positions in government.
In short, the power of this haunting narrative foretells our precarious times.
There is no reason to believe that a turn toward illiberal populism is eternal. A lesson to be learned from history is that however great the odds, resistance works. The Solidarity movement in Poland, the liberation struggle in South Africa’s white redoubt, and the fall of the Berlin Wall are emblematic of successful efforts to combat authoritarian regimes.
In the wake of the 2024 election, advocacy organizations, Democratic-controlled state legislatures, a group known as Governors Safeguarding Democracy led by governors Polis of Colorado and Pritzker of Illinois, and social movements are mounting resistance. High priorities are to grapple with glaring class differences and to take collective action. These steps must be predicated on understanding the ensemble of factors that carried the 2024 election.
Jim Mittelman, a Boulder resident and Camera columnist, is an educator, activist, and author, most recently, of “Implausible Dream: The World-Class University and Repurposing Higher Education.”
This post was originally published on here
