The reckoning that wasn’t

Six months ago, Trump won. Much rethinking was promised. Did it happen?

Six months ago, Donald Trump won the presidency for the second time — and a legion of people and institutions that stand opposite him vowed a reckoning. The country was promised real soul-searching and sincere, if grueling, introspection — by the Democratic Party, by activist organizations, by the press that aspires to hold Trump to account. Lessons from the first term would be learned this time around. Blind spots would be filled. Sacred cows would be slain for the sake of reinvention.

Somehow or other, over this past half year, I ended up in many situations in which planned or spontaneous reckoning found its way onto the agenda. Sometimes it was former aides to Joe Biden or Kamala Harris debriefing the campaign. Sometimes it was summits of progressive organizers and movement leaders. Sometimes it was gatherings of labor leaders. Sometimes it was a meeting of funders. Sometimes it was desperate calls from a Democratic Party leader asking what the hell could be done. Sometimes it simply emerged at a dinner party. Sometimes it was more organized. But, again and again, people were asking a version of: How did this happen, again? What do we not see? What must change?

For a moment, it seemed there might be a window of openness to a real reckoning worthy of the word and age. With a loss so devastating to so many, there was space for rethinking.

But as I look back on this half year, I can’t escape the conclusion: there was no reckoning. In fact, as far as I could tell, quite the opposite.

What I observed in these settings was those who found themselves facing Trump for the second time — whether in active opposition to him or in the adversarial role of the press — wriggling out of the hard self-examination so many promised and craved in November.

After what was once heralded as a wake-up call, I saw instead in so many quarters human qualities that make reckoning all but impossible: defensiveness, incuriosity, touchiness, the inability to see oneself as others see you, certitude in the name of so-called “moral clarity,” smugness, condescension, blame casting, deflection, and a total rejection of introspection.

So many of the people and organizations that should be grappling hard in this moment instead seem consumed by the feeling that they have been getting it absolutely right in a world that fails to appreciate their good sense. We were promised a reckoning; instead, we got complexes of feeling misunderstood. Here we are — amazing political party or news organization or activist group — and people don’t get it. Everyone is crazy. But we’re sane!

This pandemic of incuriosity has spared few.

Former Bidenworld insiders refuse to crack the doors of their minds three percent ajar to the possibility that his decline was a bigger deal than they treated it as being, with consequences the entire country is living through. And the former president himself is now being sent out to do interviews denying it all, everything is fine, I would have won, nothing to see here. It is remarkable, in a sense, this ability to be impervious to and oblivious to what so many others see, to be so uninterested in the possibility of learning from the past.

People who served on the Harris campaign engage in their own doubling down, insisting that the problems with the campaign were all external to it — the short time horizon, the pressure to stay close to Biden on policy. That the campaign itself was more lackluster and less inspiring and transformational than it could have been — that there are, therefore, lessons that could be drawn for next time — nope. This is no time for genuine reflection.

The same incuriosity can be found in the progressive wing of the party, among activist and organizing groups. Many meetings have been held, and then at those meetings the same behaviors that made progressive ideas less popular than they would naturally be were repeated. The out-of-touch, jargony, apologetic throat-clearing, the social justice terminology that feels inaccessible to those outside activism or academia, the breathtaking insistence on talking about politics in ways most normal people would not understand, the focus on issues affecting very small numbers of people instead of issues affecting everyone — these habits and reflexes reared their head in progressive “reckonings,” signaling that almost nothing meaningful would be rethought. Progressives have a giant normie problem in America; they don’t seem interested in fixing it, unless repeating the word “intersectional” until everyone comes around counts. Land acknowledgements are fine, but progressives might consider adding “game acknowledgements” to their repertoire. That’s when, like 98 percent of people in this country, you start by joking about last night’s game.

At the other end of the spectrum of the broadly defined left, you have corporate-adjacent groups like Third Way, which advocate for business-friendly policies. There is a broad consensus today that the excesses and depredations of neoliberal economic policy and unfettered capitalism and globalization and financialization helped break the country and contributed mightily to the present moment. Do you see a reckoning at places like Third Way, therefore? Nope. You see it putting out statements about how important centrist and business-friendly policies are going forward.

Then you have the national Democratic Party. Here is another place we were told reckoning might occur. But, spoiler alert, reader, it did not occur. The fact that the national party is not even really a party so much as a fundraising vehicle, the fact that it has embarrassingly little physical presence in much of the country, the fact that it is so cozy with the very donors whose business practices have fueled so much of the populist rage of this moment — none of this was truly reckoned with. Senior party leaders reached out widely for advice but seemed reluctant or unable to act on it.

Or consider the Democratic Party’s top elected leaders. Can anyone report some dazzling reckoning there? Some really sharp reimagining? The double down is in full force. It is a panglossian politics: everything that should be done is everything we already happen to be doing. There is nothing the angry street is telling us that gives us the shadow of a new idea. We are perfectly perfect, standing where we should be standing, saying what we should be saying. When, on rare occasion, someone like Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut or Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois speaks of the failure to reckon, it catches fire. People feel heard. This appears to scare party leadership instead of galvanizing them. Don’t threaten them with the good time of their constituents feeling understood, at last.

Among the resistance, too, there is incuriosity. It is admirable, taking up of the cause of defending democracy, the work it involves, even the bravery. But the resistance has been hurt by an attitude that can sometimes imply moral superiority or dismissiveness toward the very citizens it hopes to persuade. There is often an affect of being the only ones to get it. The movement has struggled to attract people of color, and Black people in particular; it has struggled to attract young people and working class people who don’t have the luxury of time and gas money. And these conspicuous (and democracy-threatening) absences often seem to inspire contempt for those who don’t see rather than curiosity about the resistance’s own limitations. In politics, if your ranks are fewer than you want them to be, the safe assumption is that it’s your own fault.

The press is, of course, not the opposition to Trump — even though some would like it play more of that role. But it was widely agreed in many quarters of my profession that some rethinking was in order after Trump’s second victory. How do you combat his lies rather than unwittingly amplify them? How do you cover a man who uses the vernacular of traditional media forms to spew propaganda? How do you hold to account a man who is waging frontal war on the press itself? Why is the mainstream press so distrusted, and why is so much of the bled-out trust finding its way to independent podcasts and newsletters? But I have been struck by how many of my peers in the media have chosen to double down rather than truly rethink and reimagine. Here, too, is a defensiveness almost heroic in its devotion to keeping the old thing going. We just have to keep doing what we were doing. Our critics don’t get it. People want us to be this and that; they want us to betray ourselves. We will stick to what we know. And the trust bleeds further out, and many of the traditional media forms reach fewer and fewer Americans.

Of course, there are exceptions to these phenomena. But, from where I sit, I have noticed infinitely more wagon circling and doubling down. Ask yourself: In what sectors of American life have you seen leaders (and regular people) engaging in the actual kind of reckoning I’m talking about, letting the criticisms fall on them, trying to figure out what they mean, secure in knowing they are still decent even if they have limitations they can’t see?

The defensiveness and incuriosity are understandable. People naturally feel defenseless in this moment; the cavalry is very clearly not coming. No one is in the mood to make themselves vulnerable right now, because vulnerability is danger. The stakes are high, and every hint of weakness will be exploited. If the Democratic Party takes a genuine public look at itself, or if a big media company does, won’t Trump exploit the crack in the armor? It takes a level of security to look at yourself and criticize part of what you’ve become without feeling that you are at risk of invalidating the whole. It may not feel like the time.

The problem is that, in refusing reckoning, refusing introspection, turning against curiosity itself, those facing Trump become more like him.

The mirror neurons of our collective brain are firing on full blast right now. Introspection is, of course, the central gaping absence in Trump himself. But now his deepest tendencies are becoming our tendencies standing across from him.

An unthinking man is making us unthinking. An unreflective man who always thinks his first thought is his best thought is inspiring that instinct in his foils. A president blindly sure of himself is making others blindly sure that everyone who supports him is deluded or ill. A man who sees all critics as haters is stirring a similar defensiveness in those who face him.

Trump is causing those playing opposite him in this drama to remake themselves in his image. His is a Trumpomorphic opposition.

What perhaps protects Trump’s power and position as much as any formal power is how he changes those opposite him. There is a small chance he will throw someone like me in jail one day. But he has already remade my heart, made me at times harsher, less prone to assume good faith, more dismissive, than I would have been. This is a way of defanging your opposition that is considerably easier to scale.

Trump makes those he faces less equipped to face him. Less and less prone to living the lives of curiosity, openness, self-doubt and self-questioning, visioning and revisioning, wondering, renewal, and constructive jettisoning that is so vital to actual strategy and action. He drains his foils of their lifeblood, and, remarkably, has them celebrating the wasting of their minds as imagined strength.

Trump will never be defeated, or held to account, or kept in proper check — pick your lane and vocation — by people as unthinking and defensive and incurious as he is. Making you as facile as he is serves only him. Nuance and complexity are part of the way out — and, above all, curiosity about what you don’t see.

A culture of incuriosity prevents any real understanding of Trump’s enduring appeal — even in the face of the present chaos and pain. Everyone with some one- or two-word catchall explanation for what is going on — Fox! racism! — is pretending they know things. This incuriosity prevents his opposition from seizing on the clearly potent issues he has latched on to — say, how trade works — and offering their own, non-rampaging version. The incuriosity prevents the construction of a broad pro-democracy coalition. It prevents the reform and transformation of political parties and movements. It prevents the kind of changes to the news business that could allow good information to reach way more people.

The cost of all this incuriosity can be measured in distrust. Majorities of Americans do not trust the major political parties, do not trust journalists, do not trust people in sclerotic institutions who are so wedded to their certainties that no new information can derail them. Trump has lost a considerable amount of support since taking office. Yet it is a remarkable fact about our present situation that this slide has not really seemed to benefit Democrats.

Incuriosity is perhaps the knowledge culture of a tribal age. In more tribal societies, people don’t ask what’s the best way to prepare bread or throw a wedding or allow women to spend their time. They do those things the way they do those things. Questions are trouble. When you’re scared and hunkering down with your people, you may not feel in the mood for a big rethinking. This fear has to be gotten over.

Where is the boldness? Where is the wildness? Where are the people willing to shred their own deepest assumptions and roll the dice? Where are the institutions renovating their entire strategy, in the cold light of new realities?

After all, the opposite of Trumpism is not just a different immigration or tax policy. It is, at bottom, fundamentally different habits of mind: curiosity, humility, openness to criticism, a hunger for growth, and the courage to change.

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Image: “American Progress,” by John Gast, 1872