The Counterpublic Papers vol. 6 no. 3

I’ve spent the last several days in Minneapolis. I drove to Detroit to attend my first cousin’s funeral last week and then kept driving. The space between Ann Arbor and Chicago, then between Chicago and Madison, then between Madison Minneapois/St. Paul gave me a lot of room to breathe. Driving through it before Tuesdays election and now driving back through it this upcoming Tuesday and then Thursday when I expect to be back home will give me a bit more room.

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Like many of you I’m still processing. I figured that the elements that led to Trump’s victory over Clinton (vote suppression, Russia, weak democratic campaign, white voting patterns) wouldn’t obtain and that it’d be hard for Trump to win legitimately. I figured the thing we’d have to really deal with would be the possibility that he wouldn’t leave peacefully. I also figured that given how important mail-in ballots would be to Biden’s chances (when Trump basically delegitimated the mail-in vote he screwed any chance he had to win legitimately) that it’d be some days before we knew.

(I talked to my undergraduate and graduate students about this a bit in my classes on Monday. They were understandably anxious—what we all saw coming was going to be likely nothing we’d ever experienced. I told them that whatever happened Tuesday, next Monday we would still be in class. I did this not to make them understand that their assignments would still be due, but rather to get them to understand that this too would pass. I then suggested that they make sure to create the space to generate at least a little bit of peace in the interim.)

I got a lot of this right. Because Biden didn’t have the same type of negatives Clinton did but perhaps most importantly because the type of disinformation campaign Russia waged couldn’t win twice whatever role disinformation played may have actually hurt rather than helped Trump. Relatedly arguably because Trump may have actually suppressed his OWN vote through disinformation, voter suppression didn’t work the same way. And because not only Biden but a range of activists and organizers throughout the country spent time reaching out to voters (one of my friends spent a few weekends at least in Harrisburg, another friend spent her own money on an airbnb in Philly for a week, a third friend mailed off around 50 or so postcards to Pennsylvania voters) I figured that the swing states would actually swing the democrat’s way unlike 2016.

Now I got a few important things wrong. I think Trump still won a majority of white voters, men and women. I thought that the Democratic Party would take control of the Senate (I thought Susan Collins would lose, severely underestimating the role local politics play in states like Maine, I thought Lindsey Graham would lose in South Carolina, severely underestimating the role the Bradley effect may still play in South Carolina). I thought they would extend their control of the House.

Here are a few quick takes on what should come next.

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Someone’s going to have to tackle the question I dealt with in my dissertation. How does gender structure political participation in black communities?

I say this because if I hear someone else who should know better that the black male Trump vote is politically important (and also a sign of black male dysfunction) I think I’m going to throw myself in the Detroit River. Black men are not simply men with an asterisk—that is, we’re not simply “men” only black. We’re a different genre of man. We can’t simply take ideas about how “men” function politically and then use them on black men with a modifier. Over the past few decades there’s been only one group that supports the Democratic Party politically more than black men—black women. And the gap between black men and women, while statistically speaking is significant (that is, it’s not likely due to chance) substantially speaking it’s small particularly when compared to every other population. Now it’s possible black male support for the GOP is increasing, but if Trump gets say 12 out of every 100 black voters, to the extent there may be an increase, that increase is only large statistically speaking because there are so few black men supporting him in the first place.

(Here’s what I mean. Let’s say that Mitt Romney got 8% of black male voters last time out. If Trump gets 12% then that represents an increase of 50%—that is, Trump gets what Romney got PLUS a half of that. It sounds like a lot when it really isn’t.)

It looks like the final tally ended up being something like 12% (black men) and 6% (black women). Definitely not worth ringing the alarm bells about, but given the discourse about gender in black communities, it’s definitely something worth pursuing.

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My ideas about the house and senate basically reflect a belief that the interregnum we were in would be somehow decisively determined. This was all sorts of wrong. I knew we were looking at a significant political project going forward—over 70 million voters voted not just for a racist who was indirectly responsible for 239,000 deaths (as of this writing) but for a racist who was utterly incompetent and unable to conceive of an interest outside of his own—but I thought that project would be waged from a position of relative strength. It will not be. Not now. Not the next election cycle. Because I’m still processing what this means what I’m going to do is point to a few pieces that might be worth reading to help us all process. Some of them are a bit old but are particularly valuable now.

Obama’s Lost Army—a decade later this one still hurts. I think we’ll look back at this and, depending on how everything turns out, think this represented the turning point.

A Blueprint for a New Party—there is no third party option coming. But we know that the Democratic Party is bankrupt. This piece suggests a new structure.

The 2020 Election has brought the progressives to the brink—I don’t like the headline but I do think that this is a sober assessment of where the progressives are after the election.

The following two articles are of a piece and should be read together:

Finally:

The Future is Faction—I do have moderate readers, but for those like me who aren’t, it’s still a pretty smart read.

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Until next time. Before coming to grips with the fact that we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, take a victory lap. The tendency remains. But in a short while, even if he doesn’t go quietly, he’ll go. If you've my cell, I'll be on the road for several hours on Tuesday, and then again several hours on Thursday.