This election showed the power of passion over reason

I am still processing this election, but I have a few preliminary thoughts.

Passion not reason

Overall, I don't think this was a fight over policy or rational positions.  Trump won because he stirred up passion among a lot of unhappy people, a lot of angry people, and among another group who wanted to believe passionately in "someone," maybe "anyone." The key is "passion," not raciocination.

My friend Sagar, a doctor and former student of mine, said this was an amygdala election, not a cerebral one.  Another friend, Alan, who is a psychologist, likened this idea to “the reflexive response seen in youth challenged by complex trauma.”  Simply put, we are not talking about executive function-like decision-making.  It is emotions, like anger and rapture, not reason.  Something more akin to spirituality, with the many associations between Trump and God as evidence.

So, if that is true, then Harris lost the election the day she announced, because nothing she did or could have done would have evoked greater passion than did Trump. He got people from around the country moving in his direction.  Best results for a Republican in Chicago in decades! All the recriminations against the Democrats are misguided. To use the old cliche, we brought a knife to a gunfight.  And if you scan the likely Democratic candidates for President, it seems clear that none of them could have beaten Trump this year.

It couldn’t have been reasoned analysis that led to his 75 million votes; Trumps biggest positions were patently refutable.

Undocumented immigrants

There aren't 25 million undocumented, and removing the ones who exist will sink agriculture, construction and hospitality. Plus he killed the bipartisan immigration bill.  And study after study shows, contrary to Trump’s dark scenarios, that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than citizens.  But people who cared about immigration were passionate, and Trump incited that. Not reason. Passion.

Inflation

Inflation, caused almost entirely by the pandemic, peaked at 9.1% in July 2022. It started dropping soon thereafter and is down to 2.1% now (without a recession!). But prices didn't come down, on eggs or rents or a dozen other things people buy every month. So people blame the Dems for causing the high prices (they didn't) and not lowering them (no one knows how to do that). "Aaargh! Look at that grocery bill!"  First Biden, then Harris, talked sense on this, but were met with vivid anger and sadness, not thoughtfulness.

Tariffs

Raising tariffs has sounded simple for centuries, and people feel passionately about fighting economic wars with other countries, with "those goddamn foreigners."  

You can argue logically that high tariffs have never worked and have repeatedly caused severe problems, like more inflation. All you get is passionate shouting in return. Trump led those shouts.

Climate change

Climate change is good science, and that science has been presented by lots a calm discourse by our leaders and pundits. But "drill, baby, drill" is a battle cry. Trump led his followers in that passionate cry and they followed him, amygdalae aflamed.

The “good old days”

More than 1,000,000 Americans died because of Trump's failures in responding to COVID. And one of the very few things he positively championed was tax cuts for the rich, decidedly not in the interest of most of his voters. Yet many of his voters remember his first four years as a wonderful time in the country's history. What did we liberals do?  We offered rational arguments based on solid history, sound science and powerful economic analysis. And, of course, we utterly failed in the face of the passionate memories of that great first Trump term.

Nothing we could do

Nope, there was nothing we could do. Harris was a very strong candidate if this had been an ordinary election. But she was totally out of her league in a hard fought contest of passion over reason.  As would have been any other likely Democrat.

If all of this is accurate, and whoever comes after Trump is as good a rabble-rouser as he was, then we have to find our own purveyor of passion and then come together around a set of values we can champion to fight against the anger, selfishness, and resentment that Trump stoked. I am open to thoughts about who that might be. But I think it is a pretty short list.  

Maybe the next election (if we get to have one) will go back to the standard contest of a mix of emotions, values and reasoned policy discourse. But a roused rabble seldom settles quickly.