Opinion
There Was a Loser Last Night. It Was America.
Trump’s ugly speech told us exactly where we’re going
— and it’s nowhere good.
Thomas L.
Friedman
By Thomas
L. Friedman
Opinion
Columnist
Nov. 4,
2020, 12:16 p.m. ET
We still do
not know who is the winner of the presidential election. But we do know who is
the loser: the United States of America.
We have
just experienced four years of the most divisive and dishonest presidency in
American history, which attacked the twin pillars of our democracy — truth and
trust. Trump did not spend a single day of his term trying to be president of
all the people, and he broke rules and trashed norms in ways that no president
ever dared — right up to last night when he falsely claimed election fraud and
summoned the Supreme Court to step in and stop the voting, as if such a thing
were even remotely possible.
“Frankly,
we did win this election,” Trump declared, while millions of ballots remained
to be counted in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and
Nevada.
“We’ll be
going to the U.S. Supreme Court,” Trump added, without explaining how or on
what basis. “We want all voting to stop.’’
We want all
voting to stop? You can’t do that.
But if
Biden wins — and we may not know for days — it may be by just a sliver of votes
in several key battleground states. Although he’ll likely win the popular vote,
there will be no landslide — no overwhelming majority telling Trump and those
around him that enough was enough: Be gone with you and never bring that kind
of politics of division back to this country again.
“Whatever
the final vote, it is already clear that the number of Americans saying,
‘Enough is enough’ was not enough,’’ said Dov Seidman, an expert on leadership
and author of the book “How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything.’’
“There was
no blue political wave,’’ he added. “But, more importantly, there was no moral
wave. There was no widespread rejection of the kind of leadership that divides
us, especially in a pandemic.’’
We are a
country with multiple compound fractures, and so we simply cannot do anything
ambitious anymore — like put a man on the moon — because ambitious things have
to be done together. We couldn’t even come together to all wear masks in a
pandemic, when health experts tell us it would absolutely save lives. It would
be so simple, so easy and so patriotic to say, “I protect you and you protect
me.’’ And yet, we can’t do it.
This
election, if anything, highlighted the fault lines. The president, using many
different dog whistles during the campaign, presented himself as the leader of
America’s shrinking white majority. It is impossible to explain his continued
support, despite his unprecedented poisonous behavior in office, without
reference to two numbers:
The U.S.
Census Bureau projects that by the middle of this year, nonwhites will
constitute a majority of the nation’s 74 million children. At the same time, it
is estimated that by sometime in the 2040s, whites will make up 49 percent of
the U.S. population, and Latinos, Blacks, Asians and multiracial populations 51
percent.
There is
clearly a discomfort, and even resistance, among many whites, particularly
white working-class males without college degrees, to the fact that our nation
is in a steady process of becoming “minority white.” They see Trump as a
bulwark against the social, cultural and economic implications of that.
What many
Democrats see as a good trend — a country reckoning with structural racism and
learning to embrace and celebrate increasing diversity — many white people see
as a fundamental cultural threat.
And that is
fueling another lethal trend this election only reinforced.
“Many
Republican senators and congressional representatives — like Lindsey Graham in
South Carolina and John Cornyn in Texas — won by hugging Trump,’’ said Gautam
Mukunda, author of “Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter.’’ “That means that
Trumpism is the future of the G.O.P. The tactically unique thing about Trumpism
is that it never even tries to get the support of the majority of Americans. So
the G.O.P. will continue with the strategy of using every legal, but
democratically deeply harmful, way to control power even though most Americans
vote against them — like the way they just crammed through two Supreme Court
justices.”
That means
all the stresses on the American system of government will continue to grow,
Mukunda added, because in our antiquated electoral system, Republicans
theoretically can control both the White House and Senate — despite the desires
of a large majority of the American people. “No system can survive that kind of
stress,’’ he concluded. “It will break at some point.’’
Nothing has
happened, even if Biden wins, that suggests that Republicans will fundamentally
rethink this political strategy that they perfected under Mr. Trump.
But
Democrats have a lot to rethink as well, notes Michael Sandel, a professor at
Harvard and author of “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common
Good.’’
“Even
though Joe Biden emphasized his working-class roots and sympathies,’’ Sandel
told me, “the Democratic Party continues to be more identified with
professional elites and college-educated voters than with the blue-collar
voters who once constituted its base. Even so epochal an event as a pandemic,
bungled by Trump, did not change this. Democrats need to ask themselves: Why do
many working people embrace a plutocrat-populist whose policies do little to
help them? Democrats need to address the sense of humiliation felt by working
people who feel the economy has left them behind and that credentialed elites
look down on them.”
Again,
while Biden made small inroads with working-class voters, there seems to be no
huge shift. Maybe because many working-class Trump voters not only feel looked
down upon, but they also resent what they see as cultural censorship from
liberal elites, coming out of college campuses.
As Rich
Lowry, the editor of National Review, wrote in an Oct. 26 essay, “Trump is, for
better or worse, the foremost symbol of resistance to the overwhelming woke
cultural tide that has swept along the media, academia, corporate America,
Hollywood, professional sports, the big foundations, and almost everything in
between.”
“To put it
in blunt terms,” he continued, “for many people, he’s the only middle finger
available — to brandish against the people who’ve assumed they have the whip
hand in American culture. This may not be a very good reason to vote for a
president, and it doesn’t excuse Trump’s abysmal conduct and
maladministration.’’
This
election shows that view seems to be still very alive among Trump voters.
I confess
that the hardest conversations I had last night were with my daughters. I so
badly want to tell them that all is going to be OK, that we’ve been through bad
patches as a country before. And I hope that will turn out to be the case —
that whoever wins this election will draw the right conclusion that we simply
cannot go on tearing one another apart this way.
But I could
not, in all honesty, tell them that with any confidence. I am certain “the
better angels of our nature’’ are still out there, but our politics and our
political system right now are not inspiring them to emerge at the scale and
speed that we so desperately need.
The Times
is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to
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here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Thomas L.
Friedman is the foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist. He joined the paper in 1981,
and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including
“From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman
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