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Barker, Tim ‘Dealignment: On the U.S. Elections’ NLR/Sidecar, 11 Nov 2024"In terms of the American experience, the Harris campaign seemed to aspire to something like Nixon’s 1972 project for a ‘new majority’. To be sure, today’s Democrats lack Tricky Dick’s swagger and agility. But, like him, they imagined building a coalition that spanned the AFL-CIO, the Business Roundtable and the neoconservative movement (nascent in 1972, senescent in 2024). Like Nixon, Biden sought to bolster domestic support for the costs of U.S. international hegemony by administering homeopathic doses of economic nationalism. Both administrations balanced reductions in U.S. military commitments (Vietnam then, Afghanistan now) with redoubled support for brutal regional gendarmes (the Shah then, MBS now)."

"The quest for a broad centrist majority requires an antagonist who can be framed as utterly outside of the national mainstream. George McGovern – despite being a pastor’s son from South Dakota, and a war hero to boot – provided the necessary basis for such an appeal. One reason was that his platform did in fact call for a radical reordering of American society: cutting military spending by one-third, redistribution via steep taxation of inheritances and capital gains. During the summer of 1972, Business Week reported, ‘even those who claimed to be lifelong Democrats talked of 'opening Swiss bank accounts' and supporting President Nixon in November’."

"Donald Trump is not George McGovern. The attempt to portray him as foreign to the body politic failed, because there is nothing remotely un-American about him. His political DNA links him directly to Nixon, via echt-Americans like Roy Cohn and Pat Buchanan. The things about him which are supposed to be deal breakers – racism, xenophobia, misogyny – can only be seen as outside the American mainstream by someone with the mental equipment of an earnest child. The slogan Make America Great Again is borrowed from Ronald Reagan, an American hero who mocked the poor for being hungry, compared African diplomats to monkeys and (on the advice of Pat Buchanan) proclaimed the Waffen SS to be ‘victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps’. The idea that Trump could be banished to the margins by getting Reagan appointees to endorse Harris never made sense to anyone not already opposed to Trump."

"The Democrats were prepared for a close election, or even for a loss in the electoral college which could be contrasted with an anti-Trump popular vote. But the ‘coalition of all democratic forces’ approach left them singularly unprepared for a popular defeat. Among the hardest core of party ideologues, the response was an abrupt pivot from jingoism to anti-Americanism. As Rebecca Solnit put it: ‘Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do’. The New York Times described ‘a conquering of the nation not by force but with a permission slip’. ...
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