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I remember the Obama era narratives of the “Coalition of the Ascendent.” If demographics were truly destiny, Republicans wouldn’t touch the Presidency again. Obama’s “resounding” 2012 victory prompted the infamous Republican “Autopsy.”
This narrative ignores the numbers, though. 2012 wasn’t a triumph for Democrats, but a warning – while the Republican candidate had gained just under 1 million more votes than the 2008 Republican candidate, the Democrat had lost a little over 3.5 million voters. While Hillary Clinton eked out a plurality of the popular vote,* this trend continued in 2016: the Republican candidate gained about 2 million more votes than in 2012, while the Democratic candidate lost ~60k votes. A minor number, to be sure, but a trend nonetheless. 2012 wasn’t a victory lap, but instead a demonstration that the “Obama coalition” was a mirage, a flash in the pan – a demonstration that we all missed at the time.
As the 2024 election is mulled over by pundits to see what, exactly, went wrong, I wonder if we are missing similar “warning signs” in trends. The Bernie-Bro-turned-Trump-supporter pipeline a la Joe Rogan could be symptomatic of voters aligning more along an axis of “insiders vs. outsiders” instead of policy preferences, education, age, or race; while there are correlations with each of those things to an “insiders vs. outsiders” axis, none of them are definitive. Are we similarly looking at the 2024 election the wrong way, especially as we make judgment calls while several million votes have yet to be counted?
Some of the most prominent Republicans right now identified as Democrat-aligned during the Obama era (Trump, Vance, Elon, Tulsi; I’d throw RFK in there too but I’m not sure that he views himself as a Republican). Republicans are winning over tech bros and unions, and bleeding college-educated voters. There’s talk about this just being a Trump thing, it’ll go away. It was a big anti-incumbency year, worldwide. The elite will reclaim their rightful place as the only right, correct, egalitarian way forward. Etc.
*Talking heads bicker about how Trump “only” receiving a plurality of the popular vote decreases his significance, even while clinging to Clinton “winning” the popular vote in 2016 despite also receiving a plurality, and not a majority. The semantics are amusing from a culture war perspective – the war on language continues – but ultimately meaningless.
People have at least discussed this, although I don't know how much it's been internalized yet. Matt Yglesias had an article about the crank realignment, Hanania had an article about voters who see conspiracies everywhere, and Meskhout had this article.
In short, both sides have become dominated by delusional partisans screaming in echo chambers. The left have become experts in infiltrating institutions and corrupting them to woke ends, while the right have become eternal dissidents who are great at critiquing the left but terrible at actually building better replacement institutions. The left was a bit ahead of the right when it came to radicalizing, but it's also deradicalizing now in a way that will likely happen to the right in a few years. Around 2020 was "peak woke" after which things slowly calmed down. Now we're approaching the summit of "peak crank" on the right, which will also hopefully calm down.
All three of these articles about "cranks" on the right parse as: People who disagree with right-wingers think right-wingers are wrong. I am not a crank -- I'm right about everything!
I think this is an unfairly low effort dismissal. I don't like all the people above, but they are thoughtful and making more of an effort at fairness than you suggest. Read Ymeskhout's if you haven't and look at things like Trump's post about AI crowds that were included in it. I understand the traditional Motte argument that Trump lies like a used car salesman and Democrats lie like lawyers and there is certainly some truth to that. And I agree that at the moment Democrat lies are more dangerous precisely because they have a veneer of respectability and acceptability by institutions. However, I don't think that changes the fact that Republicans really have become the party of choice for conspiracy theorists that have very little grounding in reality. It is a very particular kind of mindset that is a not insignificant portion of the electorate and it has become increasingly partisan in recent years particularly since Trump and doubly so since COVID.
Ymeskhout called it a crazy conspiracy theory to think progressive prosecutors were using procedural manipulation to favor BLM rioters. It is absolutely a weaponised term.
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