The Democrats have only themselves to blame

Smearing opponents as “fascists” is clearly a fruitless tactic. But will the Democratic Party learn from its mistakes?

There have been plenty of “hot takes” on why the United States election went the way it did. Inevitably, there are a whole range of factors at play, and I will not attempt to summarise them here. Instead, I’ll focus on a few key reasons why the Democrats failed so dismally and how they might avoid the same mistakes in the future.

The first point to note is the sheer magnitude of the mandate. This is the first time the Republican Party has secured the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004. Trump won the presidency comfortably having prevailed in all the major swing states, and his party has taken the Senate and may very well take the House. Kamala Harris has wisely articulated her recognition of the importance of the “loser’s consent” and has insisted that the result must be accepted, something that in previous decades would have been taken for granted.

With this kind of mandate, it is essential that the Democrats reflect upon why they failed even when enriched with a dramatically higher campaign budget than their opponents. The key blunder was to underestimate the voting public. For a long time now, the Democrats have displayed a high-handed disdain for the electorate. Most notably, they have continually sought to deny observable reality in the mistaken belief that voters are able to be gulled by sheer force of sloganeering and misdirection.

In the digital age, there is no way to prevent footage of the president from being widely circulated. It was obvious to everyone that Joe Biden was in a state of cognitive decline, and yet the mainstream media collaborated with the White House in a hopeless pantomime of denial. Has there been any soul-searching from the reporters who participated in this fraud, or the Democratic politicians who drove it? Had they admitted the truth of the situation early in the year, the typical process of electing a new leader would have been possible and the party’s position would have been significantly strengthened. As it transpired, with little time to prepare Harris was rushed into her jousting armour and spectacularly unhorsed.

This kind of “gaslighting” – the technique by which the truth before one’s eyes is outright denied – is a standard authoritarian technique. It is most famously encapsulated in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four though the maxims of the ruling party Ingsoc: “war is peace”, “freedom is slavery”, “ignorance is strength”. Orwell summarised the concept in his essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (1942):

“If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that ‘two and two are five’ – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.”

The reader will recall the denouement of Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which Winston Smith has fully succumbed to the torture in Room 101 and ends up unconsciously tracing the equation “2+2=5” in the dust on a table. This is what happens when tyranny prevails.

Yet the gaslighting did not stop with Joe Biden. Instead, it seems to have been the entire modus operandi of the Harris campaign. I have written previously about the extent of the historical illiteracy required to dismiss Trump and his supporters as “fascists” or “Nazis”, and it is now clear that the American electorate is similarly unimpressed with such histrionic mudslinging.