I’ve begun my musings on what went improper on this yr’s presidential election. In brief, the age-old liberal predicament of “look at my issue!” allowed Republicans to model Democrats, with the assistance of their large message machine, as a celebration that wasn’t within the considerations of “regular people.”
And whereas Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t explicitly embrace most of these slender points, and positively didn’t marketing campaign on any of them, a video of her endorsing taxpayer-supported transition surgical procedure for jail inmates led too many individuals to imagine the worst of her.
The Harris marketing campaign’s precise message was a message of freedom.
“Freedom. When Republicans use the word freedom, they mean that the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office. Corporations—free to pollute your air and water. And banks—free to take advantage of customers,” mentioned Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in his Democratic Nationwide Conference speech. “But when we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people that you love. Freedom to make your own health care decisions. And yeah, your kids’ freedom to go to school without worrying about being shot dead in the hall.”
Harris’ downside was the cacophony of upset and dissenting voices on the left: from Gaza, to complaints that President Joe Biden tried to chop a cope with Republicans on border safety, to calls for for extra consideration on local weather change (which by no means received a vote, anyplace, regardless that Democrats made nice strides on it with their Inflation Discount Act).
Sure, conservatives are additionally a target-rich setting, and relating to precise coverage points, they’re nearly universally on the unpopular dropping aspect. However the left doesn’t have a message machine to push out our narratives into the mainstream, and the legacy media was too busy this election sanewashing Trump to be of a lot use.
And all these individuals claiming they needed somebody youthful operating for president? They lied and elected the oldest presidential candidate in historical past.
So what did Trump and his occasion do effectively? That they had a very easy core message: safety.
Let me inform you a narrative. In my native El Salvador, individuals overwhelmingly elected a president, Nayib Bukele, who explicitly promised to shred the nation’s legal guidelines and norms within the identify of security. He’s even Muslim in a Roman Catholic-dominated nation that’s identify is actually Jesus, “The Savior.” His father is an imam.
He took one of the vital violent, harmful peacetime international locations on this planet, and made it the most secure within the Western Hemisphere. And he did that by calling a state of emergency and basically eliminating all civil liberties, imprisoning just about all younger males. Sure, that cleaned up the streets of the violent cartels, but it surely additionally swept up harmless males with zero judicial overview and threw them in a mega jail with a capability of 40,000. The consequence?
“Strong men create good times.”
It allowed him to basically dissolve the nation’s judiciary, circumventing a ban on conservative presidential phrases, and making a pliant, rubber-stamping legislature.
Once I visited El Salvador final yr, I used to be in a position to go to components of the nation that had beforehand been off-limits due to hazard. Gangs would actually torch buses with ladies and youngsters inside merely to ship messages, and now they had been liberated from that worry. The place was buzzing with optimistic power.
I talked to everybody I might, and requested what they considered Bukele. And to an individual, they’d inform me they knew harmless individuals—even their very own family and friends!—who had been caught up within the dragnet, and it didn’t matter. They nonetheless supported him by large numbers.
It was value it for them due to the safety.
And that’s the message Trump has been promoting:
Bodily safety: Crime is at an all-time excessive (it’s not). Have a look at all of the crime in Kamala’s San Francisco, all these immigrants wish to homicide you!
Financial safety: Inflation, the worth of groceries is simply too excessive, nobody can afford to purchase a home.
Cultural safety: They’re making you employ pronouns, drag queens wish to learn to your youngsters, white individuals are being dispossessed, being a person is now “toxic masculinity.”
What occurred in El Salvador? Safety trumped freedom.
What simply occurred right here?
Safety trumped freedom.
I don’t have solutions proper now. I’m nonetheless processing all the pieces. However I wish to return to FDR’s Second Invoice of Rights:
Each a type of objects is a matter of safety: job, housing, well being care, and so forth.
There’s one thing there we will work with.
