Here we go

Turns out you should believe the polls

Dear Reader - 

A week ago I wrote to you about the election, and wow was I wrong. (I know there are those, perhaps including my brother, who will be thrilled to hear me admit “I am wrong”.) Last week when I wrote to you, I got many replies, including from my friend Mike, a Trump supporter, who wrote:

“Great read, but don’t believe people are happy with the last four years. She was never vetted and she is Biden all the way. Lots of young voters voting for Trump, I don’t see that he can lose.”

Mike was right. 

But that is the story of the Trump era -- a failure of imagination on the part of the elites. After recovering from Tuesday’s late night, this week I read The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis, a book about the 2016 Trump transition team and the bureaucracy of the Federal Government. Then I read portions of the actual Project 2025 plan and America First Agenda (many journalists report that the America First Agenda is the real Trump agenda, as opposed to Project 2025).

I resisted my elite instincts and tried to imagine the Trump policy agenda working. It could work; parts of it will work. With a friendly Supreme Court, a solid majority in the Senate, and what looks likely to be a slim majority in the House, Trump will be comparable to FDR, reshaping the federal government in dramatic ways for decades. Trump has already rivaled FDR in one way: he’s dominated our presidential politics for three elections.

I should have known Trump would win. In 2008, I sat in my first faculty meetings at Harvard. I was young and felt like I didn’t belong, so I mostly kept my mouth shut. But as I listened to the conversation, I thought “these people don’t live in the real world”. I had a profound sense of dislocation from how the elites perceived the world versus how I experienced the world. This led me to write a book in 2012 – The End of Big – where I made this argument: 

“The big, traditional institutions that built modern life in America have lost their way. They are deeply flawed and even corrupt. They deserve to die. Our institutions have failed us. But institutions aren’t dispensable. They were created for good reasons. These institutions – from the federal government to higher education to medical expertise – were created to help humanity, to build a better, safer world. Even if they’ve failed us, their purpose is important. And network technology – radical connectivity – is deeply threatening to these fragile institutions. Technology is not values-neutral.”

A central question of the book – a question I still have – is when reforming our broken institutions, how do we not “throw the baby out with the bathwater”? I am haunted by the human cost of the world wars that accompanied the birth of the modern era. The last chapter of my book opens by quoting the first paragraph from Barbara Tuchman’s history of World War I, The Guns of August:

“So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens–four dowager and three regnant–and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.” 

Just imagine: seventy nations’ royalty. If you had attended the funeral of King Edward VII in 1910, you would think the monarchy would last forever. It was so powerful, so strong, so wealthy! In fact, the new King of England wrote letters to his first cousins the Tzar of Russia and the Kaiser of Germany and rejoiced in how their grandchildren would be monarchs of Europe and the colonies. But by 1940, that world disappeared, its institutions collapsed. 

I saw this all very clearly twelve years ago, and it led me to believe that Trump would win in 2016. But by now I am fat and happy and ensconced in my elite bubble, and I couldn’t imagine his victory in 2024. When it was clear Trump won, the first thing I thought about was the Vice-Presidential debate where J.D. Vance had this to say:

Governor, you say trust the experts, but those same experts for 40 years said that if we shipped our manufacturing base off to China, we'd get cheaper goods. They lied about that. They said if we shipped our industrial base off to other countries, to Mexico and elsewhere, it would make the middle class stronger. They were wrong about that. They were wrong about the idea that if we made America less self-reliant, less productive in our own Nation, that it would somehow make us better off. And they were wrong about it. And for the first time in a generation, Donald Trump had the wisdom and the courage to say to that bipartisan consensus, we're not doing it anymore.

He’s right about the bipartisan consensus screwing over a lot of Americans. During Bernie Sanders’ run against Hillary Clinton in 2016, Sanders argued that whichever political party could build “a working peoples’ coalition focused on addressing economic pain” would win for a generation. That party is not the Democratic Party. 

Of course, by some measure that party is the Democratic Party. The Biden administration has been the toughest administration on corporate greed in my lifetime. Lina Kahn, the FTC chair Biden appointed, is the least popular person on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley – so much so that some of Biden’s largest donors were openly calling on him to fire her. (I have closely followed Matt Stoller as he has chronicled the anger of corporate American at Biden’s FTC.) But many of the policy remedies of the Biden administration to help everyday Americans will take years to have a full effect, and Democrats were reluctant to make the case that Biden’s policies are better for you. Not to mention that actually making that case is extremely hard given the media’s full-on right-wing bias (see Elon Musk’s Twitter, Ben Shapiro’s Facebook, or Rupert Murdoch’s Fox). 

So where does that leave us? Tuesday’s election was very, very bad for Democrats in our national politics. But sometimes we forget our national politics are not the only politics, and sometimes not even the most important. In North Carolina, Trump won, as did Republican judges. But at the same time Democrats won every major executive branch race in the state (governor, attorney general, superintendent of schools), the only competitive US House race, and even broke the GOP supermajority in the state legislature. In Wisconsin, Democrats grew their state legislature power by flipping ten seats in the Wisconsin Assembly while winning all of their re-elects. Democrats had significant down-ballot victories in Arizona and New Mexico. It turns out getting involved in your community is pretty important.

I am certain the Republican sweep at the federal level is going to make life hard for many Americans. I fear for one of my best friends who is undocumented and for the many friends who have undocumented immigrants in their families. Republican policies will continue to have a tremendous impact on women’s health care, including women in my family. And that’s just for starters. John McCain used to say, “It’s always darkest before it’s pitch black.”

We are a divided country, with broken institutions (first and foremost among them the media), with big challenges ahead from the deficit to climate change to the economy. But we’re also Americans and ultimately I believe that Americans are hard-working, innovative, and kind. We like challenges – which is good because we’ve got plenty to tackle.

Lots of love, nicco

PS. If you want a copy of my book, shoot me an email. I have several cases of the book in our basement that my wife would love to see gone. It is a bit dated at this point but holds up reasonably well. There are also a lot of used copies on Amazon and eBay for $1. My wife once referred to the book as “an excellent sleep aid”. And if you end up buying one of the sofa-beds my friends named after me, I’ll send you one as a bonus: you can read the book and fall asleep on the most comfortable sofa-bed on the market.