Michael Shellenberger
Real Clear Politics, Nov. 7, 2024
“… if anybody really wants to understand why so many of us—even if we have our criticisms of Trump—feel relief and vindication at his victory, they need to consider that it has more to do with the repudiation of totalitarianism than with Trump as a person or even his policies.”
People who voted for Kamala Harris are reacting with shock, anger, and sadness at the election results. They’re asking themselves why so many Latinos, Gen Xers, men and women, not only voted the way they did, but why so many of us feel enormous relief at Trump’s historic victory. But do they really not understand, or do they not want to understand?
After all, over the last decade, many of us who have moved away from the left have been explaining our concerns at length. We didn’t appreciate being told we were bigots for not wanting to defund the police, open the borders, or mandate racial quotas. We didn’t enjoy being called phobic for not wanting doctors to experiment on children with pseudo-scientific transgender medicine, and we didn’t like being labeled conspiracy theorists for asking hard questions about Covid policies, or why the FBI/CIA/DHS were involved in mass censorship.
We’re not suggesting that those were the only reasons most voters or swing voters voted for Trump, the polls indicate the top issues were the economy and migration, but elections are won on the margins and what made the difference between 2020 and 2024 is the defection of so many traditionally Democratic voters to Trump and the Republicans. And many of those who defected were, like us, alienated by the transformation of the Democratic Party into a mob of woke scolds and persecutors.
Trump gained unprecedented ground across the electorate, disrupting Democrats’ holds on black, Latino, and Muslim voters in key areas. Even young people, and especially young men, swung to the right. Trump won over large sections of the working class, while Harris improved over Joe Biden with high-income voters, college-educated white women, and white people in general. These results are nothing short of a massive political realignment that should put to bed once and for all the corrosive myth that Trump’s coalition is driven by white supremacy or fascism. Through the democratic process, voters have resoundingly rejected elites’ favored narratives about race, class, and immigration. … [To read the full article, click here]