Three Ways I Have Updated My Priors Since the Election
A quick housekeeping note: After five years and 63 posts here at this standalone website, The Art of Association blog is moving to Substack. Starting in January 2025, new posts will arrive in subscribers inboxes as a fortnightly Substack newsletter. All posts will remain 100% free to all readers.
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This move will reduce the time and costs of distributing each post. It will also help a broader audience find and share them. As for the content I have posted over the years here, I will relocate two dozen or so of the evergreen and most-read installments over to Substack. You will still be able to access them in the archives there after this website is decommissioned. Now, onto our main topic…
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Elections are empirical events. In their wake, we need to update our prior understanding of the world. It behooves us to do this as citizens, voters, partisans, independents, social scientists, advocates, bloggers, etc. Since the election, I have been working to update my own priors, jotting down reflections as points of clarity or new questions have emerged. I was not planning to share them in one go, but recent conversations with colleagues who wanted to know how I was making sense of the results led me to reconsider. Here then are the three biggest shifts I have made in my mental map of democracy in America in light of the election last month.
When Fellow Citizens Disagree
First and foremost, I have to acknowledge that my perspective on who is fit to serve as president is not shared by most Americans. Ever since I saw Donald Trump speak in person, at a campaign event in New Hampshire in the fall of 2015, I have regarded him as a demagogue. To me, he exemplifies the “dangerous ambition” that Alexander Hamilton warned about in Federalist Paper #1 — and that the framers of the Constitution sought to exclude from the presidency. Trump subsequently demonstrated major shortcomings as a chief executive during his first term; in my view, he never really grasped nor demonstrated much interest in the core responsibilities of his office. Then came his shameless and sustained if ultimately unsuccessful bid to overturn the 2020 election. From my vantage point, then, Trump has repeatedly shown himself to be unfit for the office to which he was just re-elected.
I knew going into the 2024 election that it would be way too close for comfort. Still, I hoped that, as in 2020, at least a narrow majority of voters would see Trump in the same light. Alas, 77 million Americans cast their ballots for Trump — two million more than Kamala Harris managed to garner. In addition, 88 million eligible voters did not even bother or feel obligated to cast a ballot. Taking these non-voters into account, fewer than one in three of my fellow citizens viewed the choice before us in the presidential election as I did.
I am not suggesting that Trump pulled something over on his 77 million voters (a total, it is worth noting, that is up from 74 million in 2020, and 63 million in 2016). The Trump supporters I know harbor few illusions about his character or how he would operate in a second term. They simply do not weigh the importance of these factors in the same way as I do. Whatever Trump’s flaws, they view him as speaking on their behalf and for their interests in a way other politicians do not. Trump may be a bull in a china shop, but he is their bull, and the china shop should be tossed upside down.
As someone who believes that democracy is the best way to decide who should govern in a society of free and equal citizens, I am also committed to an important corollary. E.B. White put it best when he observed that “democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.” I share this suspicion. Thus I am obliged to ask a question, for the sake of democracy and curiosity alike: What might the growing ranks of Trump’s voters over the last three elections be sensing about him and / or this moment in our nation’s history that I am not?
To be clear, I have not changed (nor do I plan to) my convictions on the importance of presidents taking care that the laws are faithfully executed. The same holds for my views on the character virtues (or lack of them) that make someone more or less fit for the presidency. But after the election, I can see more clearly how these considerations form just one part — and not necessarily the most important part — of what democracy entails for most of my fellow citizens.
A Broader Definition of Democracy
Here we come to the second update to my priors. I realize I have come to hold a cramped conception of democracy and need to expand it. As Bill Galston has pointed out, in contrast to wonks like me, most people are apt to judge “liberal democracy much more by its fruits than by its roots. They may believe in the principles, but those principles are going to be measured against what a form of government at a particular time actually does for them.”
Survey results validate Galston’s point. Right after the election, More in Common (a nonprofit whose board I chair), asked voters to name up to three issues that they saw as most important for their voting decisions. The top five issues they mentioned in aggregate included inflation (49% of respondents), the economy (32%), immigration (27%), health care (24%), and crime (20%). Elections and democracy ranked 20th as an important issue; only 4% of respondents included it among their top three. Many of us who see ourselves as defending democracy have come to overlook — if not dismiss outright — the prosaic, everyday priorities and cultural dispositions that matter most for most Americans. We have done so to the detriment of our cause.
This reality has come home to me since the election in a series of discussions with fellow democracy advocates to take collective stock of the results. In a familiar refrain, many participants have lamented the misogyny, racism, and xenophobia they perceive to be the primary drivers of Trump’s support. Others have essentially followed H.L Mencken in suggesting that the people have spoken, the SOBs, and now they deserve to get what they asked for — good and hard. As for the economic challenges and cultural dispositions of working class voters that led a growing and multi-ethnic portion of them to conclude their best option was to take another flier on Donald Trump? Well, nobody has seriously broached that topic.
It’s not a winning look to obsess about constitutional norms and the rule of law while ignoring the economic and cultural dimensions of democracy that predominate for most Americans. This is especially the case when many defenses of democracy are becoming harder to distinguish from opportunistic partisanship. The most recent exhibit here was the crickets heard from so many self-proclaimed anti-authoritarian groups and pundits after President Biden pardoned his son and accused the Justice Department of a politicized prosecution.
Oren Cass of American Compass, who has been calling out this hypocritical pattern for several years now, pulled no punches about it after the election:
“Defenders of Democracy have seemed not to care much about democracy, or its norms and institutions, at all—except when it is helping them to secure and wield power. Their commitment to its defense has been a talking point, perversely intended to avoid any commitment to its actual practice. Vote for us because democracy demands it, the argument went, as if that were a substitute for what democracy actually demands, which is that leaders take the values and interests and priorities of the citizenry as their own.”
This criticism is harsh, but not unfair. Agree with Cass or not, it is hard to see how democracy funders and advocates in civil society can make much headway if they do not correct their course along the lines he suggests.
The good news embedded in the election results
The third prior I am updating is the silver lining of what was an otherwise disappointing election for me. For more than a decade now, I have been focused on the problem of polarization and the ways in which fundamental questions of identity have served to accelerate it. How can we possibly begin to depolarize a polity in which a younger, more racially diverse, and urban party faced off against an aging, predominantly white and rural rival? Love him or hate him, Trump has cut through this Gordian knot. The winning coalition he assembled points in the direction of a pluralistic, less polarized electorate. I see that as an encouraging development.
This prior was already shifting via a hypothesis I subscribed to in the run up to the election. I have been more and more persuaded by the arguments of my Democratic friends at the Liberal Patriot and the Welcome Party. They have doggedly been pointing out how and why their party is losing working class voters, including from racial and ethnic groups long thought to be the Democrats’ base, to the GOP. They have also mapped out the steps their party would need to take to build a bigger tent, appeal to the median voter, and reverse this unsustainable trend.
The 2024 election has validated (and then some) these Democratic dissidents’ perspective on the shifting patterns of working class support toward the GOP. The trends among Latinos, Asian Americans, and African American men in particular have led to an electorate that is much less polarized along racial lines. And the surprising and dramatic shifts toward Trump in many urban areas and among younger voters also point to a more dynamic and pluralistic electorate.
Insofar as both parties are competing for voters across all major demographic groups and geographies, it will have depolarizing effects. Trump’s MAGA-fied GOP has demonstrated the capacity to pick up voters in demographics and places that many analysts, especially on the progressive left, presumed were beyond their reach. The question now is whether Democrats can shift to the center to make inroads with rural voters and those without a post-secondary degree. Given the latter group outnumber those with a college degree by roughly two to one, the Democrats would appear to have little choice but to broaden their appeal.
Looking ahead
How will this set of adjustments in my mental map of U.S. democracy hold up over the next four years? What additional refinements might be warranted in 2028? Check back in with me then – no doubt there will be some. In the meantime, I look forward to keeping in touch and continuing to trace the interplay between philanthropy, civil society, and democracy in America via The Art of Association Substack. Again, if you are new here and have not yet subscribed to this blog, please do so on Substack to receive all future newsletters free of charge in your inbox.
