Another Way to Think About The Election
Hello from Pennsylvania and some last impressions of the 2024 cycle.
Dear Friends,
This note is going out to you as I make my way down to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for some canvassing. If you were under the impression that I have any chill these days, I also ran the New York City Marathon on Sunday. It was my first and almost certainly last marathon and I loved and hated nearly every hour of it!
While I’m hobbling, I want to thank everyone who supported me and my marathon charity partner Democracy Works, a nonpartisan nonprofit that works to expand and improve voter access in America. If you haven’t chipped in, it’s not too late, and their efforts are still vital down the last minutes of the election!
I bring up my heroic efforts getting crushed by 75 year olds in the marathon, not just because it’s been a new way to draw attention to myself, but also because it’s how I’ve been metabolizing stress about the election. And when we look back on Election Day 2024, I imagine it’s the preternatural stress of it that will stand out most. From the high stakes to the Harris-for-Biden swap to the unreliable polls to the political violence to the inevitable disputes over the results or the turnout, watchwords like tenuous and urgent have taken on completely new meanings.
But one feature of this chaotic campaign season that I can’t quite shake is how in some ways, this feels pretty simple. I’m reaching beyond the democracy-vs.-fascism binary here for something a little different that has helped me organize my thoughts about 2024.
The External vs. The Structural
Let me first admit that I’m simplifying/reducing this all a bit; I’m also not breaking new ground in political thought here. But when I zoom out on former President Trump’s campaign, I see it largely revolve on perceived external threats to American prosperity – in his view, job-stealing undocumented immigrants crossing the border (to be solved by mass deportation), foreign competition in the marketplace (to be solved by tariffs), and the implication that people who don’t support him are betrayers of American values (the enemy within) to be jailed or silenced or worse.
One of Trump’s very-hard-to-watch national spots throughout the World Series was based on the myth that undocumented people are committing crimes and getting sex changes in prison on the taxpayer dime. The ads used an out-of-context clip of Harris saying that prisoners should have access to gender-affirming care and ended with the line that “Harris is for they/them, Trump is for you.”
Ultimately, the subtext of the Trump campaign is that real Americans are doing everything right, but they are getting screwed out of their good lives by someone else, some form of other. It’s a philosophy that requires no introspection and no internal second-guessing of the status quo. (In a recent example of this, The Guardian interviewed a GOP canvasser who believes that many American men have flocked to Trump because they don’t feel like they have to atone for being American men…which isn’t really what’s being asked.)
This is why – in Trump’s world – Columbus is still a hero and American counter-narratives like The 1619 Project should be banned from schools. It’s why open borders are the sole cause of the fentanyl epidemic and not also – in the words of doctors who have studied its causes – drug abuse “as a refuge from physical and psychological trauma, concentrated disadvantage, isolation, and hopelessness.”
If you’re struggling to get by or feel alienated by movements for a more equitable version of America, this campaign’s scapegoating scratches an ideological itch without demanding more of us as citizens.1
Meanwhile, the way that I interpret the Harris side is that America’s perceived challenges are structural rather than external. She argues that low wages and high consumer costs are caused by structural imbalances like corporate concentration. Or that public services – from infrastructure to teacher salaries – are undercut by low taxes on wealthy Americans and businesses. Or that income inequality flows from a system where income is taxed at higher rates than assets.
Harris’ solutions (like restoring the expanded child tax credit and making permanent enhancements to the Affordable Care Act) are also structural. And through the Harris lens, more guardrails, regulations, and government investment is what will restore prosperity and opportunity to American life.
Of course, these debates that go back to the founding. They’re not new and they certainly don’t explain everything. But what seems unique about them in this particular election cycle is their salience; they’re not overshadowed by or in competition with al-Qaeda, terrorism, Iraq, the Great Recession, Afghanistan, ISIS, or the pandemic. It’s been over two decades since we’ve had a presidential election seemingly so rooted in the fundamentals of what America is meant to be. I’m hoping for the best.
Love,
Adam
I’d argue that’s not what being a good citizen is about, but I may be in the minority on that. We’ll know more soon enough.