Editor’s Note: We welcome back Radio Free New Hampshire. Michael Davidow took a few months off from his column to finish his latest novel “Interdiction” about a veteran cop in a small New Hampshire town who shoots and kills a college student in a traffic stop gone awry. The ensuing investigation presents a tale of drug dealing, gunplay, and justifiable homicide. The lawyers are in control. The police are waiting and watching. The sole civilian witness to this killing is under indictment herself and silent regarding what she saw. The state’s most powerful politicians line up behind their officer. Only one thing stands between him and exoneration: another cop from another small town who begins to question what happened that night. His past has called him to his own separate truth.” It is awesome and available on Amazon.
By MICHAEL DAVIDOW
The consequences of this last election have been so profound that it’s easy to lose sight of how close it was. Kamala Harris won a number of states and a decent share of the popular vote. Trump gained no mandate. Neither he nor his supporters should think he did.
Yet given his poverty as a candidate, the Democrats lost far more convincingly than Trump won. This happened first and foremost because Joe Biden had no business running for re-election at all; recent news about his infirmities can’t surprise anyone. Then they hand-picked a weak and unappealing candidate to replace him – so much for democracy. Say what you like about Trump, he won his nomination fair and square. Then they gave the future to Trump. Harris’s entire campaign was premised on more of the same.
The consequences of this hubris remain head-spinning. Our alliances are in tatters, science itself is under attack, and the dollar is losing its charm.
Whether this results in a re-centering of American politics around a new and reasonable middle path or an increasingly unhinged see-saw between two ways of encountering the modern world is a chapter yet to be written. If past is prologue, though, then it’s worth looking at other elections that provided similar shocks in the past.
Two come to mind: Richard Nixon’s defeat of George McGovern in 1972, and Ronald Reagan’s defeat of Walter Mondale in 1984. The electoral map flowed red those years. It was forty-nine states to one, both times.
Though Nixon is mostly remembered for Watergate now, his political gifts were undeniable. He bridged and even embodied his party’s separate wings, its eastern liberal and western conservative sides. That allowed him to serve as both a check on Goldwater’s reactionism and a brake on Eisenhower’s liberalism. McGovern, on the other hand, represented the purest strand of his party’s left wing. He only won his party’s support because it had just changed its nominating process to lessen the role of its elites and amplify the voices of its activist voters instead: urbans, blacks, feminists, college students.
As for Reagan, he presented with little if any of Nixon’s subtlety; his twin terms made for the highest point of our nation’s post-war swing to the right. But Mondale arose from McGovern’s same milieu, only one decade later, with a bit less fanfare.
Given those choices, America opted for both Reagan and Nixon by a mile (one giant piece of Nixon’s personal tragedy: he had not needed to cheat to win). In cultural terms, the combination of Watergate and Reagan’s personal charm buried the message of those victories. But in political terms, the Democratic party internalized it. From Clinton to Obama and beyond, the Democratic party came to embody the middle position of American politics: friendly to business but open to social change.
Fine as far as it went; that Hillary Clinton was a Rockefeller Republican is a nice historical irony. But as with many successful playbooks, what started as sensible strategy soon hardened into forbidding doctrine, and the ensuing encroachment of moralism over both practical need and political intelligence came to be unrelenting. Democrats came to specialize in public virtue, even as they demeaned the foundations of private virtue that had long undergirded America’s democracy (guns and religion, anyone? or maybe you prefer baskets of deplorables).
Meanwhile they also let the pursuit of riches run roughshod over any concern for our national well-being. Wall Street failed, got bailed out, and Manhattanites stayed fat while Midwesterners went hungry. Trade flowed freely, but its benefits were skewed. Health, education, and safety all suffered, and upward mobility became rationed according to race. That trend was not just celebrated but institutionalized with mandatory DEI programs and worse. The Democrats became wolves in sheep clothing, as conservative as their opponents when it came to business matters, but elitist and prescriptionist when it came to every social cause.
Hillary Clinton ran and lost to Trump under that banner. Kamala Harris then doubled down on that theme. They both deserved to lose. Bernie Sanders and AOC are barnstorming the country right now with a similar indictment of their party’s disfunction, but they not only intertwine it with the old Democratic affinity for identity politics, they also mix it up with a hatred of capitalism itself that will impoverish us as surely as what Donald Trump is doing.
Trump is a small man, of lamentable personal stature. But he is riding a giant wave, set into motion decades ago. It’s the wave of neglect and unfairness and self-righteousness. The Democrats have much to atone for. They can start by admitting as much, and telling us what will change.
Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.