The Normal American
Could it be that those voters who returned Donald Trump to the White House are actually, in spite of Trump’s Dark disparaging of America, more optimistic than Kamala Harris’ supporters about America’s resiliency as a country of laws? Fintan O’Toole, who gave a great keynote speech at the Hannah Arendt Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism gathering last month, writes that the Trumpian Tribe is possessed of a deep confidence in American institutions, one that is lacking in the opposing tribe. Trump voters, O’Toole writes, think we can gamble on a “carnival barker, a wild improviser, a reckless disrupter.” They reveal “a deep confidence in the America that Trump disparages with such dark relish, believing that a good shaking-up will not break the country but bring it back to its true self. Trump is a confidence man in both senses—he may be conning much of his own electorate, but they give him the benefit of their nonchalant belief that he is not destroying American norms, merely restoring an imagined American normalcy.” The return to normalcy from a 70 year fit of rule by intellectuals, policy analysts, and social justice warriors is very much one narrative of the election. Indeed, the election can be seen as a referendum on normalcy itself. O’Toole writes:
But not, it seems, uncomfortable enough. Trump’s bet was that this parade of misogyny would attract disgruntled young men to vote for him more than it would animate otherwise undecided women to vote against him. His instincts turned out to be right. A majority of white suburban women seem to have voted for Trump. According to exit polls, the gender gap was perfectly balanced, with Harris ten points ahead among women and Trump ten points ahead among men.
The gender divide partly accounts too for Trump’s increased popularity with men of color. This trend was already evident in 2020, but this time he seems to have made even deeper inroads. CNN’s exit poll suggests that 21 percent of Black men and a clear majority (55 percent) of Latino men voted for Trump. In such a profoundly gendered election, being male mattered more for many voters than any assumptions about racial or ethnic solidarity.
On the other side of that divide, even while pro-choice referendums passed in seven states (though they were defeated in Florida, South Dakota, and Nebraska), it may well be that the prospect of passing these measures gave many women a degree of comfort that they could protect their reproductive rights at the state level. Or it may simply be that garish misogyny is now so normalized that many women had already priced it in.
In a disinhibited America, a lot of women may now be expecting nothing better from men. Perhaps, like Haley, they rolled their eyes at the spectacle of Trump’s big Madison Square Garden rally being “overly masculine,” and then voted for him anyway because men being boorish is just the way of the world. Whatever this means for the future of gender relations in America, it is not likely to be pleasant.
It’s tempting, in some ways, to do the same for the election result as a whole—to normalize it by putting it down to prosaic explanations like the impact of inflation and the anti-incumbency mood that has swept through most of the democratic world. Those factors are of course very real. Inflation, in particular, acts as a cipher for a much wider range of perceptions, not only of immediate hardship but of unfairness and powerlessness. But we must not lose sight of the much larger consequence of Trump’s victory: it decisively shifts the idea of who is a normal American.