I’ve begun my musings on what went wrong in this year’s presidential election. In short, the age-old liberal predicament of “look at my issue!” allowed Republicans to brand Democrats, with the help of their massive message machine, as a party that wasn’t interested in the concerns of “regular people.”
And while Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t explicitly embrace most of those narrow issues, and certainly didn’t campaign on any of them, a video of her endorsing taxpayer-supported transition surgery for prison inmates led too many people to assume the worst of her.
The Harris campaign’s actual 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,” said Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in his Democratic National Convention 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.”
Related story: What went wrong—Part 1
Harris’ problem was the cacophony of upset and dissenting voices on the left: from Gaza, to complaints that President Joe Biden tried to cut a deal with Republicans on border security, to demands for more attention on climate change (which never won a vote, anywhere, even though Democrats made great strides on it with their Inflation Reduction Act).
Yes, conservatives are also a target-rich environment, and when it comes to actual policy issues, they are almost universally on the unpopular losing side. But 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 much use.
And all those people claiming they wanted someone younger running for president? They lied and elected the oldest presidential candidate in history.
So what did Trump and his party do well? They had a very simple core message: security.
Let me tell you a story. In my native El Salvador, people overwhelmingly elected a president, Nayib Bukele, who explicitly promised to shred the nation’s laws and norms in the name of safety. He is even Muslim in a Roman Catholic-dominated country that’s name is literally Jesus, “The Savior.” His father is an imam.
He took one of the most violent, dangerous peacetime countries in the world, and made it the safest in the Western Hemisphere. And he did that by calling a state of emergency and essentially eliminating all civil liberties, imprisoning virtually all young men. Yes, that cleaned up the streets of the violent cartels, but it also swept up innocent men with zero judicial review and threw them in a mega prison with a capacity of 40,000. The result?
“Strong men create good times.”
It allowed him to essentially dissolve the country’s judiciary, circumventing a ban on conservative presidential terms, and creating a pliant, rubber-stamping legislature.
When I visited El Salvador last year, I was able to visit parts of the country that had previously been off-limits because of danger. Gangs would literally torch buses with women and children inside merely to send messages, and now they were liberated from that fear. The place was buzzing with positive energy.
I talked to everyone I could, and asked what they thought about Bukele. And to a person, they would tell me they knew innocent people—even their own friends and family!—who had been caught up in the dragnet, and it didn’t matter. They still supported him by massive numbers.
It was worth it for them because of the security.
And that’s the message Trump has been selling:
Physical security: Crime is at an all-time high (it’s not). Look at all the crime in Kamala’s San Francisco, all those immigrants want to murder you!
Economic security: Inflation, the price of groceries is too high, no one can afford to buy a house.
Cultural security: They’re making you use pronouns, drag queens want to read to your children, white people are being dispossessed, being a man is now “toxic masculinity.”
What happened in El Salvador? Security trumped freedom.
What just happened here?
Security trumped freedom.
I don’t have answers right now. I’m still processing everything. But I want to go back to FDR’s Second Bill of Rights:
Every one of those items is a matter of security: job, housing, health care, etc.
There’s something there we can work with.
