How could Missouri, a blood-red state so clearly aligned with the Republican Party that the major news networks declared it won by Donald Trump the minute that polls closed in the state, also vote to enshrine abortion rights in its state constitution? How did the state overwhelmingly approve a minimum wage increase that the people elected to positions of power have resoundingly, repeatedly rejected?
Missouri has had a wide chasm between how it votes for ballot measures and how it votes for candidates for a while now. The year that Missouri replaced its flawed but ultimately pro-labor senator Claire McCaskill with Josh Hawley was the year that voters resoundingly rejected Right to Work legislation that aligned with Hawley’s politics.
It helps Republicans that they have largely avoided taking public stances on some of their less popular policies. When Donald Trump was asked how he would be voting on Florida’s abortion amendment this year, he evaded the question. Despite a pretty clearly anti-union voting record, Josh Hawley has adopted pro-labor posturing and claimed to be a representative of the working class.
Donald Trump, in nearly a decade as a public political candidate, has consistently run as an oppositional candidate, even when he was the incumbent president. By running as an agitator, it shielded Trump from the single most obvious criticism one could levy at him: a complete lack of actual ideas for how to improve the country. In 2024, his speeches were primarily an airing of personal grievances—anger at the media or at his political rivals, but to the extent that he discussed actual political issues, he criticized Democrats for being soft on border control (while simultaneously strong-arming the party into shutting down bipartisan legislation regarding the southern border), criticizing trans women in sports (while, mercifully, not offering any sort of plan to mitigate this—just kind of plastering photos of some of the most vulnerable people in the country on ads and pointing and laughing), and vaguely saying “The economy” and gesturing wildly with the seemingly correct understanding that this would be enough.
I was not alive the last time a president was replaced with a president of the same political party. The margins of victory in presidential elections have largely narrowed—that a presidential candidate in 1984 won just one state (plus the District of Columbia) seems impossible by modern standards—but the end result of the 1984 election was not a permanent Reagan Republican majority but rather enough of a wave for precisely one more electoral victory before a loss of power.
In 1984, in a story from the world of music but one which intersects more with politics than most, the Bruce Springsteen album Born in the USA was released. Although many of the edges from Springsteen’s previous album, Nebraska, had been sanded off and the production was considerably glossier, it was still a broadly cynical album, most famously through the album’s title track, a (fictional) first-person account of a disenchanted Vietnam War veteran. In the forty years since its release, the song “Born in the USA” has become infamous for its misappropriation in politics—despite Springsteen’s well-known liberal politics and perhaps now billions of “actually ‘Born in the USA’ is about how America is bad, not a lot of people realize that’” takes, it is still used by Republicans as a patriotic anthem. This is its ultimate legacy.
But just because “Born in the USA” is a critique of conservatives does not mean that it is a celebration of liberals—it was Democratic president Lyndon Johnson who escalated American participation in Vietnam, after all. The nameless protagonist of “Born in the USA”, if based loosely on Ron Kovic, almost certainly did not vote for Ronald Reagan, but he probably didn’t vote for Walter Mondale, either. The particulars of 1984 presidential politics were not the resonant theme of the song; cynicism was. A belief that the American Dream, the idyllic world where merely working hard would get one everything they could reasonably expect, was crumbling. Despite Ronald Reagan’s massive Electoral College margins, it wasn’t as though he was universally beloved—Mondale did receive over 40% of the vote—and his “it’s morning in America” optimism was never built to last.
Despite the persistent use of the word “Hope”, Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was, in the broad sense of American politics, cynical. Now, to be clear: I think that cynicism was completelyfounded—when the country has been ruled for eight years by a guy defined primarily by war crimes and a lack of responsiveness to the immediate needs of the American people, you should have a healthy dose of cynicism. Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016 was every bit as cynical, albeit in a way that I found off-putting. Joe Biden, even with all of his hopelessly naïve talk about healing the nation, was fundamentally running on an adversarial message—his primary selling point in the Democratic primaries was not his wealth of experience and certainly was not the specifics of his agenda: it was that he could beat Donald Trump.
Americans take an odd sense of pride of being unaware of anything outside of our own borders. Single-payer health care or restrictions on individual citizens buying murder machines would not work and we must debate whether this would be the case rather than looking at the many actual, empirical examples around the world demonstrating that they would. But the signs pointed to a strong anti-incumbency sentiment all around the world, because inflation was not a uniquely American problem. Left-wing and right-wing governments were criticized for inflation, which existed no matter what fiscal policies specific governments implemented because inflation was not inherently caused by spending nor austerity but by the fact that the world spent over a year with minimal economic activity around the world because millions of people were dying in a global pandemic. A pandemic that was exacerbated by wildly disproportionate cases in the United States, where the right-wing federal government refused to take proper precautions because they wanted to keep short-term economic indicators looking good. It worked.
Donald Trump will likely get favorable marks on the economy once he takes office because the economy is doing well, just as he did in 2017. And if the second Trump term goes anything like the first one, the Republicans will almost certainly lose in 2028 because Donald Trump doesn’t have any plans. His primary motivation is to stay out of jail. But the ripple effect is going to be massive. Even if Trump’s laziness means that some of his worst plans never come to fruition, he will almost certainly appoint a majority of the United States Supreme Court. That is going to impede progress in the United States for generations.
We are already inundated with a bevvy of incredibly obtuse takes about how Democrats lost the election by capitulating to Never Trump Republicans—the reason Joe Biden dropped out is because he was on track to lose in a landslide, and the fundamentals that led to that never changed. Kamala Harris ran a pretty good, if imperfect, campaign. Donald Trump ran an absolutely terrible campaign, and it did not matter. And as deflating as it is that all sorts of unpopular collateral damage will come as a result of Trump’s re-election, this is simply a visceral reaction to our dissatisfaction less with Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or progressivism, but with the knowledge that the America we were promised is never going to be available for most of us. The result of this anger will be unpopular and destructive, but it’s the result on which we landed.
Until next time.