One of the things that makes democracy different to other forms of government is that every so often, the people get to speak. And when they speak, they create a new reality. Elections are like the event horizons of black holes - there’s something new and alien on the other side of them, but until you get there you can’t conceive of what it’s going to be.
Like a lot of people, I am already feeling drained and jaded about the 2024 presidential election, and it has barely begun. There are nearly eight months to go until the people will actually speak, and in the meantime we have to deal with… you know. Part of the problem is that it seems inconceivable that we’re going to hear anything new in the coming months - the two candidates are both well-known quantities rehearsing well-known scripts. Biden is certainly going to tinker with his message, and he’s going to become more aggressive and partisan in an attempt to overcome questions about his age. For his part, Trump seems more determined than ever before to cross the line into outright racism and fascism, such as when he casually said that many immigrants are “not people” at a rally in Ohio in Saturday. The details are different, and horrifying; but the pattern is something we’ve seen before.
This monotony is combined with astronomical stakes - Donald Trump might become president of the United States again. But for me at least, the stakes just contribute to a feeling of stupefaction. As we approach the event horizon which could produce this inconceivable result, thought slows down and becomes difficult. Unless you have a direct line to the (at most) hundreds of thousands of swing voters who will actually affect the outcome of the election, speaking and writing are pointless. The same arguments and points have been rehearsed literally millions of times before, and yet here we still are.
If nothing else, the Trump era has revealed to us the extent to which democracy is fundamentally an irrational activity. The ideal that we have of a democracy is something like the old image of the Athenian polis in which rationality and the weighing of argument hold sway. American politics never met this ideal, but the Trump phenomenon is based on emotion and the denial of rationality to an extent unparalleled in American history. Who he is seems to lie at the root of his power rather than what he says or does. This is what people mean when they say Trump has a “cult of personality” - to continue to believe in him despite all evidence to the contrary requires turning your critical faculties off. This is also where the sometimes overblown invocation of “fascism” comes from in discussions of Trump - he reminds us so much of Hitler and Mussolini because he is so ridiculous and at the same time so deadly serious.
These factors - the monotony, the stupefaction, the fascism - create a challenge for anyone writing an American politics newsletter in 2024. There’s little juice left in rehearsing the same old arguments that we have all already heard (and in my case, written) a hundred times before. “Trump is bad!” is, like “the sky is blue”, a given, not something worth repeating on a regular basis. I will try to use this space to be a little more practical - to explain where things are going, to game out unfolding scenarios, and to draw attention to little-noticed events. This newsletter has an undeniable partisan lean, but I also take the Explained in America Explained very seriously, and that’s where I think I have the most value to add.
At the same time, I’ve already started a series on the concrete policy implications of a second Trump presidency, with pieces so far covering trade, immigration, and “Christian nationalism”. One of Trump’s most successful political tricks is to generate so much controversy that his actual agenda somehow never makes it into the media conversation. Showing people that Trump is not just bad but also incompetent at governing and bereft of any workable vision for the American future is a niche that I am happy to fill, and I hope that pieces like this might have an impact on someone, somewhere. There are many more of them still to come.
Finally, I’m going to use 2024 to keep helping readers look beyond the election to the broader events and trends which are affecting our world and will impact our lives, regardless of who wins in November. It might sometimes seem surprising when I don’t comment on the outrage-of-the-week and instead write a post about Africa, or artificial intelligence, or mifepristone. But in the face of someone who derives much of their political power from dominating the conversation with outrage after outrage, I view this as in itself a political and constructive act. If we want to shape the future, we have first to create a space in which to discuss it - and not let that space be dominated by our enemies.
If this agenda sounds good to you, then I hope you’ll consider upgrading to a paid subscription to America Explained. The more people who do so, the more time I can devote to this project as opposed to writing for outlets which are more likely to be swayed by the outrage-of-the-week. The great thing about Substack is that it makes it viable to create a small community of readers who can get the content they want without it being subject to the whims of editors and advertisers. Signing up really does help make that possible, and I want to thank everyone who has already done so from the bottom of my heart. I’ll try not to let you down.