Grappling With the Catastrophe
Grappling With the Catastrophe
Plus: My thoughts on last night.
Recently in The Bulwark:
BILL KRISTOL & ANDREW EGGER: What Will Trump’s Win Mean
JOE PERTICONE: Congress Is Going to Be Able to Do Whatever Trump Wants
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MONA CHAREN: Grappling With the Catastrophe
IT ISN’T A HARD CHOICE, we said. On one side was a candidate who, whatever her particular policy predilections, would abide by the Constitution and laws of the United States and accept the outcome of elections. On the other was a candidate refusing to accept a 2024 defeat even as memories of his attempted coup in 2020 remain fresh; someone vowing to punish the “enemy within”; someone promising that mass deportations will be “bloody.”
That was what we meant by democracy being on the line.
But it seems that the anti-democrat was preferred, not just by a plurality, but by an actual majority of our fellow citizens. How to process this?
KENNETH BAER: Kamala Harris Was Dukakis-ed
JOE BIDEN IS LIKELY SITTING IN in the Oval Office today wondering how his vice president lost to a twice-impeached convicted felon.
Part of the answer lies in the key lesson learned from the first presidential cycle Biden ran in back in 1988: An attack unanswered is an attack believed.
It may surprise anyone under 50 to know that there was a time when opposition research and rapid response were not central parts of a political campaign. They are today because of what happened to Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee in 1988. Up 17 points over Vice President George H.W. Bush after the Democratic convention, he went on to lose by over 7 million votes and an Electoral College landslide of 426 to 111, making Bush the only vice president in the postwar era to win a promotion to the presidency from the electorate.
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Bulwark Podcast with Tim Miller: Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: Election Debrief [YouTube]
Bulwark+ Live: The Bulwark Election Night Livestream
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Thoughts on Last Night…
For a lot of readers of The Bulwark, this has been one of the worst of days—as it has been for us on the Bulwark staff, too: a painful day of reckoning and rethinking and imagining the next few years. How do I know? I read your messages.
But even considering this, I didn’t have a sense of dread opening up my inbox (and our catchall inbox) today. I never do. Going through them, I actually found myself motivated by the messages I read: people wanting to help, new subscribers who joined at the bleakest point in the night, folks wanting lists of organizations to volunteer for. It was enheartening.
Reading these messages really gives one a good sense of our community. That includes all the notes where people just wrote to say thanks, and to tell us that they were commiserating and finding strength in what we were producing. I know I speak for every one of my colleagues when I say that we’re all deeply grateful to you, too.
Did last night remind you of any past election? For me, it felt like 2016 all over again. I was less certain that Kamala was going to win than I was that Hillary would. I didn’t think it was possible in 2016, and wouldn’t make that mistake again. This (gestures broadly) is apparently what the other half+ of our country wants.
We at The Bulwark are not going anywhere. The fight continues. I did some “me things” today, and I hope you did, too. I checked out a new grocery store, some new phones, and went to my happy place: the library with my girls. On the way out, I picked up some free postcards from the Cincinnati Art Museum of this lithograph of Billy Sunday by George Bellows. (I am a postcard sender.)
The Smithsonian has this description of the work:
Billy Sunday was the most successful preacher of his time. Once a professional baseball player, he turned to religion in the late 1880s and became a Presbyterian evangelist by 1896. In a few years, his ministries evolved from modest gatherings in rural midwestern towns to “revival campaigns” attended by multitudes. Drawing crowds in major cities such as Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles, these events offered a message of repentance and Christian salvation. Sunday's past in sports bolstered his popularity. Joining the Prohibition movement, he made preaching against the sale and consumption of alcohol key to his moral cause.
At our events this year, people would ask me what The Bulwark would do in different scenarios—what would happen to us if Harris won, what would happen if Trump won. I had some quips, but my honest answer was that of course I wanted Harris to win because she was the right candidate, and it’d be a nice change of pace to not have to be so Trump-focused. After all, before this, many of us worked at a magazine that lasted 23 years, finding new ways to thrive as political winds shifted. There are always things to write about. After a Harris win, things would have been different for us—much more pleasant, if it meant less Trump in our lives. Alas, we didn’t get what we wanted.
And so it goes. For inspiration, I reached for my copy of The Restless Wave by John McCain and Mark Salter. In a “statement that needs finishing,” McCain writes:
Before I leave, I’d like to see our politics begin to return to the purposes and practices that distinguish our history from the history of other nations. I would like to see us recover our sense that we are more alike than different. We are citizens of a republic made of shared ideals forged in a new world to replace the tribal enmities that tormented the old one. Even in times of political turmoil such as these, we share that awesome heritage and the responsibility to embrace it. Whether we think each other right or wrong in our views on the issues of the day, we owe each other our respect, as long as our character merits respect, and as long as we share, for all our differences, for all the rancorous debates that enliven and sometimes demean our politics, a mutual devotion to the ideals our nation was conceived to uphold, that all are created equal, and liberty and equal justice are the natural rights of all. Those rights inhabit the human heart, and from there, though they may be assailed, they can never be wrenched. I want to urge Americans, for as long as I can, to remember that this shared devotion to human rights is our truest heritage and our most important loyalty.
When the book came out in 2018, I didn’t have time to read it. I was a new dad and while I read “in it” I sent a picture of my twins fake-reading the book to Mark Salter, the co-author and longtime staffer of, writer for, and confidant of John McCain. My girls were infants then. Six years later, it is top among the works I will be revisiting this fall, thinking about the world those girls will be growing up in.
“A fight not joined is a fight not enjoyed,” McCain wrote. Indeed, I blame no reader for wanting a break from the fight. But few do. Most of the messages have a McCainiac’s hope.
Sixteen years earlier, McCain wrote in Worth the Fighting For: “When I look back, I see people more than events, not all of them real, or at least, not as real to others as they are to me. They are among the heroes of my fortunate past, who are as alive in my imagination today as they were when I imagined them observing the antics of the boy who foolishly thought himself man enough to emulate them.”
McCain has always been a hero of my fortunate past. Joe Biden, and now Kamala Harris, are, too. Unlike McCain, they’re still here with us, and after hearing Harris’s very good concession speech, it doesn’t seem like she is going anywhere, and that is good. Democrats have a strong bench of candidates for a vigorous 2028 primary with lots of good options.
We need all the allies we can get in this fight against the dangers posed by MAGA. Billy Sunday had some weird views, but he was an accomplished preacher who believed in baseball, and so do I. And as long as you’ll have us, we’ll keep preaching, fighting, and working to make this country better.
We will continue to be—as we have sought to be all along—a bulwark, protecting what is best about our politics.
As McCain spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2004:
Keep that faith. Keep your courage. Stick together. Stay strong.
Do not yield. Do not flinch. Stand up.
I am proud to be standing with all of you as we work toward a fortunate future.
🚨OVERTIME🚨
It’s Wednesday… And I have some #OHSen thoughts, now that Senator Boss Baby will be elevated to the vice presidency next year, and we will have a vacancy. Prepare yourself, you are probably not going to love the idea.
Mike DeWine should appoint himself.
He’s done the job. He could be the guy Larry Hogan wanted to be. Lt. Gov. Jon Husted is not my cup of tea, but he is better to run as governor than Vivek Ramaswamy, who still might beat him in a primary.
Repeated Senate hopeful Matt Dolan is as close to my type of Republican as exists at the moment, but he would immediately lose a primary. I am not sure that DeWine would.
I am prepared for disappointment, but a boy can dream.
🎵On the Jukebox…🎵 Guns N' Roses - “November Rain”
Why Donald Trump won and Kamala Harris lost… An early analysis of the results by Beg to Differ panelist William Galston.
Former Supreme Court Justice Souter… on The Danger of America’s ‘Pervasive Civic Ignorance’
Democracy Is Not Over… Americans who care about democracy have every right to feel appalled and frightened. But then they have work to do. Tom Nichols in the Atlantic. 🎁
And Yet It Moves… “PopeHat” Ken White’s thoughts on The Day After.
Kamala Harris just did… what Donald Trump never could. Anthony Fisher writes at MSNBC: “The vice president revived the 220-year-old tradition of peaceful transfer of power that Donald Trump broke in 2020.” Watch the whole speech here.
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Editorial photos provided by Getty Images. For full credits, please consult the article.