In Part I of “Followers Refuse to Follow” – posted three days ago – I pointed out that though the results of the American presidential election were momentous, they were not atypical. Just the opposite: they were typical.
As I wrote in the post, “The incumbents in every single one of the ten major countries that held national elections in 2024 were ‘given a kicking’ by voters.” I added that never in 124 years of tracking had this happened, until now. To frame the point slightly differently, for the first time since World War II, every governing party in a developed country that this year faced an election lost vote share. Which is to say that this year in every developed country incumbent leaders were at the mercy of followers who were fed up.
To understand what happened in the American elections – especially Donald Trump’s thumping of Kamala Harris – it is essential therefore to consider not just one of the contexts within which they took place, but three. The first is the national context. The second is the international context. The third is the temporal context.
To illustrate my point, I will list the explanations for last week’s outcome and organize them accordingly.
National Explanations
- Harris was a weak candidate.
- Harris did not have enough time to mount a first-rate campaign.
- Harris made a mistake in her choice of a running mate.
- Harris never separated herself successfully from the unpopular administration of Joe Biden.
- Harris relied too heavily on celebrity surrogates.
- Harris was too cautious, for example turning down opportunities to reach unfamiliar audiences such as through monster podcaster, Joe Rogan.
- Harris failed to repudiate some of her earlier, ultra progressive, positions.
- Harris was a victim of racism.
- Harris was a victim of misogyny.
- Biden was weaker in every way – physically, mentally, politically – than the Democrats either understood or let on. Or both.
- Biden chose unwisely in the first place, when he selected Harris as his vice president. She was seen as so weak a successor to the incumbent that she effectively shielded him from calls to step aside earlier in the 2024 presidential campaign.
- Biden’s early assignments to Harris – especially his instruction that she address the “root causes” of immigration – were as absurd as unfair.
- Biden failed to do what he intimated he would do – to be a one term president.
- Biden took far too long to get out of the race.
- Biden made embarrassing gaffes even during the abortive campaign.
- America’s messy and humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan was a fiasco from which the Biden administration never fully recovered.
- Democrats fought constantly among themselves. They failed to unite around a coherent message.
- Democrats never understood the issues that mattered most to most voters. These were not freedom and abortion. They were inflation and immigration.
- Democrats never understood Americans’ objections to their tiresome focus on political correctness – on being adequately “woke.”
- Trump was a much more formidable candidate than the Democrats appreciated.
- Trump’s grievances echoed Americans’ grievances.
- Trump’s legal troubles seemed to confirm the picture he painted of himself: as a victim not a perpetrator.
- Americans were willing to overlook what they knew were his flaws because they saw him as better at serving their interests than his opponent.
- Americans were attracted to the idea of a leader who was a strongman. 48 percent of Republicans thought the country needed a leader who was “willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right.”
- Americans were especially attracted to the idea of a leader who was a strongman given his opponent was widely perceived a weak woman. Kamala Harris was never seen as anything resembling an “Iron Lady” as was, for example, Britain’s longtime prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. (See my October 15th post on this point titled, “The Alpha Female.”)
- Americans were turned on rather than off by another strongman leader who took center stage toward the end of the presidential campaign. And who was in the end one of Trump’s staunchest and most generous allies – Elon Musk.
International Explanations
- Leaders in the West are becoming generally weaker.
- Followers in the West are becoming generally stronger.
- Increasing distrust in the West both of leaders and institutions that have shaped their lives since the end of the Cold War.
- Civic values are only feebly taught and therefore only feebly learned. These include Western Enlightenment ideas and ideals such as democracy and equality, freedom and individualism.
- Civic information has been diminished and devalued. For example, less than half of all Americans can name the three branches of government. They have no conception therefore of checks and balances, or of how essential they are to precluding power corrupting.
- Global misinformation and disinformation.
- Offshoots of the information age – for example, the addiction to smartphones producing feelings of isolation and anxiety.
- Siloed information exacerbated by the growing ubiquity of podcasts – some of which now reach exponentially larger audiences than do traditional media.
- Siloed information keeping audiences in a state of heightened anger and permanent mobilization.
- Largely unexamined but nevertheless real symptoms of Covid grief.
- Inflation, inflation, and inflation. Immigration, immigration and immigration. These issues hit home with voters everywhere in the Western world. As we have seen, the preservation of democracy, liberalism, and centrism does not.
- Choice of candidates. Too many resemble Joe Biden – that is, they are old school. They echo the 20th century rather than epitomize the 21st. I include in this category familiar figures such as Rishi Sunak and, yes, Kier Starmer; Emmanual Macron; and Olaf Scholz.
- The apparently widespread longing for an alpha leader. A leader who can fix what’s broke, or what feels like it’s broke.
- The apparent disenchantment with liberalism and centrism – leading to a shift to the right.
- The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East – both of which are unsettling and even upsetting. They give the impression that leaders who are incumbents in both the United States and Europe cannot keep the peace.
- Even worse, leaders who are incumbents cannot, apparently, guarantee prosperity. Voters are not dumb. They know damn well that income inequality is greater than ever. That the disparity between what they earn and what their bosses earn has never been greater. This reflects a failure not just of democracy but of capitalism.
- One global order is giving way to another global order, or disorder. Western hegemony is declining. Russian aggression will be rewarded. And America’s archenemies – Russia, China, North Korea and Iran – have formed a loose alliance.
Temporal Explanations
- Like the rest of the world the United States of America is in the middle of the third decade of the 21st century. This means that it, also like the rest of the world, is grappling with changes that are coming fast and loose, especially in culture and technology. People who live in democracies are being affected by these changes, as are people who live in autocracies, albeit in radically different ways.
- Cultural changes were amply in evidence during this most recent presidential campaign for voters chose as their chief executive a man who almost gleefully defies conventional norms such as truth telling and law abiding. Even one generation ago Trump as successful presidential candidate would have been not only impossible but inconceivable.
- Technological changes – to which the now ubiquitous presence of Musk testifies – were also amply in evidence during this presidential campaign. Whether communication or the distribution of information, changes in technologies and in who was able to employ them for which purposes, played a large part in how the campaign unfolded. Moreover, with each passing year the technologies associated with artificial intelligence will play a larger part in determining who wins and who loses personally and politically; in civilian life as in the miliary; at the level of the individual, the organization, and the state.
I return then as I always do – to the explanatory power of the leadership system. To understand what happened in last week’s presidential election, it’s imperative that we look at the flawed leaders, Trump and Harris; at the reluctant or even recalcitrant followers, American voters; and at the changing contexts, national, international, and temporal. Only this way can we know the United States of America in November 2024.