What American voters are trying to tell us

Yup, I wanted a grandrebuke too. Iwanted Donald Trump demolished by 10 points. But elections are educational events. Voters are not always wise, but they are usually comprehensible. They know more about their own lives than we in our information bubbles do, and they almost always tell us something important.

The first thing we heard from most Americans— since Joe Biden’s popular vote victory seems all but certain— is that Trump is unacceptable. We live in a divided, dug-in nation, but millions more white evangelicals voted Democratic in 2020 than in 2016. Many people voted against partisan predilections to remove a man who is a unique menace to the foundations of this country. That is no meager accomplishment.

The second thing voters told us is this: Separate church and state. We’ve long had political polarization in this country and we still will. But over the last few years polarization has transmogrified into something worse: a religious war.

Trumpism and Wokeism are not equivalent phenomena, but they both serve as secular religions for their disciples. They offer a binary logic of good and evil, a cult like membership experience, apocalyptic or utopian visions, witch trials for the excommunication of the impure and the sense of personal meaning that comes while fighting a holywar.

In different ways, voters told the two parties that they’d like our politics to be about practical issues. If youwant a religious war, go have it somewhere else.

They told Republicans, for example, that you will be much stronger without the MAGA craziness. The Republican Party had a much better election than Trump. Republicans have picked up six House seats so far. The Democrats have yet to flip a single state legislature, meaning Republicans will draw the district lines for the next 10 years of electioneering.

The image of a possible future GOP emerged—a multi racial working-class party. Republicans made surprising gains among Latinos, African Americans and Muslims. Trump won the largest share of the nonwhite vote of any Republican candidate in 60 years. That wasn’t done by Trumpian race-baiting but because of the party’s reputation for championing personal agency and personal responsibility, and for boosting small businesses and economic growth. That can be built on.

Meanwhile, voters told Democrats that they, too, would benefit if they played up policy and played down cultural concerns of their Portland ia/ graduate-schooled/ defund-the-police wing.

If therewas ever going to be aDemocratic blowout election, thiswas it— against an immoral candidate with a criminally incompetent record. ButDemocrats failed to pull it off.

It’s not policies that cost Democrats. The core Biden policies are astoundingly popular. It’s that they’ve built a cultural blue wall that keeps the other half of the country out, no matter the circumstance.

They’ve done it by telling a certain sort of story. American politics, progressives commonly say, is all about the historical shift fromhomogeneity to diversity. They see America as divided between those enlightened cosmopolitans (Democrats) who welcome the coming diverse post industrial world and those knuckle-dragging, racist troglodytes (Republicans) whodon’t.

The first problem with this narrative is that it is perpetually surprised by events. Election after election, the emerging Democratic majority fails to emerge. The second problem is that it oversimplifies the different processes going on in America. Somehow, we have to have the racial reckoning, which is essential, whilewe understand the other mega-narratives people feel are driving their lives. Third, it’s just astonishingly smug, self-congratulatory and off-putting.

The voters have handed us a political system that will be led, probably, by Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and MitchMcConnell. These are not culturewarriors. They are politicians and legislators.

We nowhave two parties whose best version of themselves is asworking-class parties. Maybe the next few years can be a partisan competition overwhois best for Americans without college degrees.

We have to live with one another. Let’s fight our moral difference with books, sermons, movies and marches, not with political coercion.