Kamala Harris ran a largely flawless campaign, but she was up against several insurmountable barriers. I’ll get to some of the others in another diary, but the one I’m focusing on here is that the American people were sold a bunch of lies and disinformation, and they believed it because of the way many of us now get our information, from warped social media and traditional media (looking at you, Fox and Newsmax, and especially X — Elon Musk’s personal disinformation generator).
[After I originally posted this diary, I discovered that my earlier diary on this same general topic, The Triumph of Illusion, was on the rec list. So I unpublished it and held it until the earlier diary had been read and discussed.]
Heather Cox Richardson made that clear Wednesday morning:
There is no doubt that a key factor in voters’ swing to Trump is that they associated the inflation of the post-pandemic months with Biden and turned the incumbents out, a phenomenon seen all over the world.
There is also no doubt that both racism and sexism played an important role in Harris’s defeat.
But my own conclusion is that both of those things were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now. Russian political theorists called the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media “political technology.” They developed several techniques in this approach to politics, but the key was creating a false narrative in order to control public debate. These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing. [emphasis added]
Russian disinformation. (Also, Russian-generated false bombs threats that slowed down voters in Georgia on election day.) Add Chinese disinformation to the mix, though the Chinese have had several thousand years of practice in being more subtle about it.
Trump has been increasingly incoherent and incompetent on the campaign trail, but media outlets like Fox News ignored it all or excused it all. Around here, we like to blame the NYT and WaPo for a double standard in covering Trump and Harris, but the fact is, they did report on how badly Trump was faring, even if late in the game. The real problem, which we did not spend enough time on, is that Trump’s voters don’t read the Post and the Times or watch NBC. They are locked into their own news silo.
The other real problem, that some of us have long noted but have not been able to correct, is the 50-year-assault on public education by the GOP and by the religious right, each of whom have their own reasons to block the general public from learning about our history, about science, about how to think critically. The GOP wants a pool of uneducated voters and also wants to limit good education to the wealthiest and best off, while the religious fanatics want to keep its congregations from leaning how inconsistent, incoherent, illogical, and destructive their religion has been.
The disinformation campaign seized on the economy as well. Yes, Biden did a tremendous job in hauling us out of the Covid recession, and the truth is that we have had a better recovery than any other country in the industrialized world. But Biden never tried to sell that to the country. Too many people felt they weren’t doing as well as we used to, not that we were doing better than anyone else.
Here is Dana Milbank’s observation from Friday:
Harris didn’t lose the race as much as Trump won it. He persuaded two-thirds of Americans that the economy stinks and the country under a deeply unpopular Biden is heading in the wrong direction; that’s not necessarily reality (plentiful jobs, growing wages, moderate inflation, stock-market records), but it’s where we are.
(Biden also let the immigration problem slide for too long, something I do not understand.)
The Trump campaign succeeded in tying Harris to their version of immigration and economy, and Harris — who had to run in part as the incumbent — was never able to break through that perception.
Crime is down, way down. But Trump and his media outlets convinced enough people that crime is way up, even that Haitians — who came here legally during Trump’s first term — were terrorizing their neighbors and eating their pets.
There was that moment where JD Vance was talking about how if immigrants made countries rich, then Springfield, Ohio, would be the richest city in the world, and the United States would be the richest country in the world. Well, news flash, the United States is the richest country in the world. Democrats Had a Theory of the Election. They Were Wrong.
How is it that Arab-Americans in Michigan voted for the man who, last time around, began his term with a Muslim ban, made crude racist remarks about them, and who boasted that he would give Netanyahu a free hand in Gaza, over a person who was working to defuse that situation? Part of the answer lies in a necessary component of diplomacy: it works best when it works quietly. Another part of the answer is that there probably is no solution. Both of those play right into the hands of a blowhard who promises that he alone “can fix it.” Disinformation again.
How is it that so many women in an era when we are going backwards on reproductive rights and women’s freedoms in general voted for the man who boasts of ending the protections of Roe? In too many cases, their siloed media didn’t tell them about all the pregnancies gone wrong, let them think that Trump wouldn’t sign a national ban, that he had nothing to do with Project 2025 and its intent to restore a misogynistic patriarchy (not there is any other kind). He doesn’t mean it, they were told.
We live in a complex world that is getting increasingly so. The planet is overpopulated, technology long since escaped our attempts at comprehension, much less control. We face existential challenges in global climate change. Diverse genders, races, religions that have always existed are now demanding to be heard and recognized. Harris offered new solutions that are complex, hard to understand, take a long time — but ultimately work. Trump offered simplistic bromides that give the appearance — the illusion — of solving our problems, but which ultimately make things worse. (“Ultimately” is the key here; by the time we realize they have failed, Trump figures he will either have left the scene or, as is his constant habit, he will find someone else to blame.)
Jared Diamond argued in Collapse that civilizations fail when they continue to rely on actions that used to be successful but no longer work. The situation we find ourselves in now is nothing new. That’s cold comfort, to say to least, but it tells us what Harris was up against. And as my quote from Richardson pointed out, this is happening all over the world, not just in the US.
