Opinion

America has made a terrible mistake. Despite everything we’ve seen from the right, voters have nonetheless moved toward it.

Rather than the mandate Trump/Musk/Christo nationalists are claiming from the election, however, US voters merely reflected the same pattern emerging from around the globe, almost universally: Incumbent leaders and parties worldwide have been defeated, or their majorities reduced, in a global ‘radicalizing effect’ still lingering from the Covid economy. Across the political spectrum, voters have punished incumbent parties in Japan, South Africa, Italy, Austria, the UK, France, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, Belgium, Portugal and the Netherlands. As Matthew Yglesias wrote for the NYT, “everywhere you look in the world of affluent democracies, the exact same thing is happening: The incumbent party is losing and often losing quite badly.”

We just elected a guy who’s fine with the planet melting down, kids getting shot in school, insurance companies going back to denying coverage for preexisting conditions, and wanting to weaponize the federal government in a way dictators do.

What happened?

I have absolutely no regrets.

This time, I fully knew what my country was capable of, and I did everything I could to work toward a better outcome.

I was wrong about this election. I was wrong about a bunch of things. Maybe I erred largely on the side of hoping too much. I hoped that most people in America understood that Donald Trump was the worst candidate of our lifetimes. And as a consequence of understanding that, I hoped that most people would make the right decision for themselves, their children and their country. How wrong I was.

I don’t blame Kamala Harris. I don’t think anyone should. The vice president ran pretty much the perfect campaign, according to people who have worked with presidential nominees. In terms of policy, in terms of messaging, in terms of get-out-the-vote – it was as good as anyone could expect from a candidate who started in July. Her campaign was “all gas, no brakes.” I think she did everything she could. So did all the pro-democracy people out there. It just wasn’t enough.

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” — Frédéric Bastiat, Economic sophisms, 2nd series (1848)

We just watched the final fulfillment of a 50 year plan. Lewis Powell Jr. laid it out in 1971, and every step along the way Republicans have followed it.

America’s billionaires would love to have a recession, particularly a really severe one.

In a recent “town hall,” billionaire Elon Musk acknowledged what 23 Nobel Prize-winning economists across the country have predicted: If Trump is elected and he and Elon undertake their project to gut government spending, it will provoke a severe recession.

Today is the eve of Election Day. It’s tempting to presume there’s nothing left to say, but there always is. What do you want to know? That’s the question I put to followers. I couldn’t reply to all today, but I will try to get to the rest tomorrow before the polls close.

Do you see any warning signs for Kamala Harris? – @Maryqiae

It was just about two years ago to the day ...

I had finished up a last-second voter canvas before the polls closed and started revealing how the 2022 midterm elections would fall.

This is my last column before the election. I am as tired of writing about politics as most Americans are tired of reading, thinking, and hearing about it. The stress of this make-or-break Democracy test feels cruel and unusual. Cruel because of what’s at stake, unusual because it is unrelenting.

For people who inform themselves through fact-based media outlets, the most commonly heard question is: how is this race even close? Of all the craziness we’ve seen and heard, the Nazi-adjacent rhetoric, the venomous threats, the crazed narcissist making the nation’s struggles all about himself, how can half the country still support him? How can half our fellow citizens vote for him, knowing what they know about him? Are they crazy? Are they hateful?

Conspiracist ideology has consumed the Republican Party. At his rally at Madison Square Garden, Trump pledged to demolish the deep state, drive out the globalists, and rout the fake news media. Speaker after speaker referenced the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, a dogma that was once confined to the manifestos of mass shooters, but which is now the Trump campaign’s closing argument for the presidency.

Former Fox host Tucker Carlson, who promoted the Great Replacement over 400 times on his now-defunct show, told the crowd at Madison Square Garden that the political class “despises [the people] and their values and their history and their culture and their customs; really hates them to the point that it’s trying to replace them.”

With less than a week to go, let’s talk about expectations, specifically the widespread expectation that this shouldn’t be a dead-even race.

The idea usually comes from liberals and Democrats, who tend to believe that Donald Trump is such a uniquely dangerous threat to democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law that it boggles their minds to see him running neck-and-neck with Kamala Harris.