The Counterpublic Papers vol. 9 no. 9

I’ve finally begun to bring myself out of the dumps enough to begin to wade through postmortems. I’m going to pick three. Here’s Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor:

Tayloy’s essay places a significant degree of the burden on outgoing Vice-President Harris’ inability to effectively distance herself from Biden through economic policies that would ease the pain many workers have felt both absolutely and in comparison to the Trump years. One wintry January night had more people experience homelessness than any other night the country has data for (see the report Taylor based this point on here). Total debt is the highest it’s been on record (almost $18 trillion). No wonder we see increased disaffection (which has, in Taylor’s eyes, spread from whites to Latinos and to a lesser extent black men).     

Adam Jentleson:

Jentleson, former Congress chief of staffer (most recently to Pa. Senator John Fetterman), tells a different story. For him the Democratic Party has largely eschewed the type of outside-of-the box thinking that we see in the Trump campaign, a type of thinking that needs to begin with the idea of generating the type of supermajority Obama was able to carve (for those who forgot—and I’m one of them—Obama garnered 365 electoral college votes in 2008). Doing so for Jentleson means discarding much of the interest group based work that ended up hamstringing the Democratic Party this time around—while the party didn’t run on anything like a “woke” agenda, there were just enough signals that it did for the Make America Great Again Republican Party to make use of. It also means turning to “get it done” type policies that combine broad skepticism with big government regulations with progressive ends.  

And finally Tim Barker. Barker’s But I’m using Barker largely because of his turn to the end of the 19^th century. 

Barker’s broader argument is that what we’re seeing does not represent the type of major order-redefining moment many suggest and that we simply don’t know what we’re going to get from Trump right now, particularly because in many ways capital functions the way capital tends to function, to preserve the conditions under which it can extract value from labor. We’re not experiencing realignment but simply dealignment. 

It’s worth noting something that I wrote last week again. The election margins were slim. When Barker notes at the beginning of his piece that Trump’s election “wasn’t close” he’s making an argument driven by his broad political interests rather than one supported by empirical data. When Taylor suggests that the prime reason Trump grew his voter base while Harris lost Biden’s is because of economic malaise and because of defections among Latino and to an extent black men, defections that Taylor didn’t speak to…she too is relying on her broad political interests (in de-emphasizing the function of racism in the election in favor of class antagonism). Trump’s white vote share, as measured by exit polls, decreased only 1% point compared to 2020…a margin so small I wouldn’t be surprised if it weren’t statistically significant.

(One of the problems with thin-margin victories like this is that the data shifts in real time in ways that really matter for analysis. My friend Sam Chambers noted two crucial ways that my last analysis was a bit off—Trump didn’t win a majority, and only won the popular vote by 1.4%. Taylor wrote that Trump won only 55% of the white vote compared to 58% in 2020…at least as of right now, I’m looking at the same dataset Taylor used and Trump won 57% of the white vote in 2024 not 55%.)

Because these election margins are so slim each tendency can plausibly claim that their preferred route to political power is the one that should be taken. 

Given this, I’ll make two claims. 

First it makes sense for political consumers to read everything about 2024 with the political interests of the writers in mind. Don’t read solely with an eye to “what happened” in some absolute sense, because in an instance like this the only absolute is that there isn’t one. If we have an election next time, and right now this is still more of an open question than I’d like, but less of an open question given the margins than I thought, we will quite possibly see significant swings in state and national elections. And that swing can be accomplished by pretty much doing everything except going after the never-trump vote (because it doesn’t really exist). People will turn to what they want first and use ideas to get what they want. 

Second, given this, it makes more sense to focus on the take that offers both the best empirical take and best political take going forward. It seems to me that such a take would emphasize the need for political and economic transformation, both to protect democracy and grow it and to reduce both upward distribution in general and the growing power billionaires exert over American life. (Another way to think about the election—if Musk was taken out of the equation, with everything else being the same, Harris wins.) The tactics involved in making this happen would be straightforward enough—aggressive organizing, starting with populations and geographic regions where the left-liberal end is already strong, combined with a straightforward articulation of the political transformations needed. 

Now I want to go back to 1896, that moment Barker brought up.

I’ve written about the role of race in the populist movement, in order to emphasize an under examined component of that movement—black populism. To make a long story short, the populist movement represented one of the first modern attempts to constrain capital by calling for a set of radical economic and political reforms that would significantly increase the power of debtors over lenders, that would establish a new set of public goods, and that would give individuals increased voting power (the movement wanted citizens to be able to vote for Senate directly). By 1896 the populist movement dies largely because blacks found whites unable to support their specific interests (protecting their right to vote, eradicating the crop-lien system) and refused to follow whites into the (white supremacist) Democratic Party. 

There’s intra-racial consequences worth mentioning—when disfranchisement begins in earnest blacks are able to express their political interests through organizations like the NAACP but these organizations have a significant class-tilt that sees black working class interests comparatively ignored. But where I want to draw your attention in closing is to the fact that for working class whites, white supremacy was most decidedly not a deal breaker. With all of the talk of multi-racial voting shifts, the fact remains that the Trump tendency is somewhere between 85-90% white and this is a feature not a bug, as Trump himself is the most virulently racist candidate the Republican Party has run on a national level ever. As hard hit blacks were by the economy, blacks didn’t vote for racist, misogynist, felon. Whites did. And they did so knowingly. Now we can take that as something that can be changed through politics rather than something somehow genetically baked in. But we have to look at that seriously. I chose 1896 because it represented an inflection point. However I could’ve chosen any number of similar points both moving forward and backwards in time. The white voter in general is, comparatively speaking, much much more inclined to support American fascism. So the best empirical take that generates a political read is one that emphasizes the short term political organization of metropolitan areas, which is different from mobilization, combing with the long and slow work of re-arranging white identity in a way that shifts their interests away from white supremacy. 

We’re in it now. A long road ahead. Just remember that even in moments like this, the dawn still comes.