Douthat: That many are undecided should surprise no one

By Ross Douthat / The New York Times

Since the populist surge that gave us Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, politics in the Western world has polarized into a distinctive stalemate; an inconclusive struggle between a credentialed elite that keeps failing at basic tasks of governing and a populist rebellion that’s too chaotic and paranoid to be trusted with authority instead.

The 2024 campaign in its waning days is a grim illustration of this deadlock. We just watched Kamala Harris, the avatar of the liberal establishment, smoothly out-debate Trump by goading him into expressing populism at its worst; grievance-obsessed, demagogic, nakedly unfit.

But her smoothness was itself an evasion of the actual record of the administration in which she serves. Harris offered herself as the turn-the-page candidate while sidestepping almost every question about what the supposed adults in the room have wrought across the last four years.

A historic surge in migration that happened without any kind of legislation or debate. A historic surge in inflation that was caused by the pandemic but almost certainly goosed by Biden administration deficits. A mismanaged withdrawal from Afghanistan. A stalemated proxy war in Eastern Europe with a looming threat of escalation. An elite lurch into woke radicalism that had real-world as well as ivory-tower consequences, in the form of bad progressive policymaking on crime and drugs and schools.

All of this and more the Harris campaign hopes that voters forgive or just forget while it claims the mantle of change and insists that “we’re not going back.”

Undecided voters in a polarized America generate a lot of exasperated criticism from both sides of the partisan divide. And no doubt it will exasperate many readers when I suggest that the choices presented in this election make indecision entirely understandable.

But they really do. The “ask” of the Democratic Party in 2024 is not, as some anti-Trump writers would have it, to merely compromise one’s convictions on this issue or that issue, to accept a few policies you dislike in order to keep an indecent and unstable populist out of office.

Rather, the “ask” is to ratify a record of substantial policy failure and conspicuous ideological fanaticism, dressed up for the moment in a thin promise that we won’t make those mistakes again.

This is the constant pattern of the Western elite over the last generation. A form of aggressive groupthink takes hold among the best and brightest, ideology gets laundered into supposed expertise or consensus, and the result is post-9/11 debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya … or Davos-man naiveté about the downsides of globalization and the rise of China … or Eurocrat myopia about the wisdom of a common currency, the manageability of mass migration and the true cost of Russian energy … or the recent phase of progressive mania that closed schools, legalized hard drugs, wrecked educational standards and warped curricula, licensed dubious medical experiments in the name of transgender rights and turned the U.S. immigration system into a disaster area.

Then the bill comes due; the elites backpedal and obfuscate and conveniently forget (What do you mean, Kamala Harris endorsed publicly funded gender reassignment surgery for illegal aliens? Sounds like Fox News nonsense!); and the unhappy swing voter is informed that no real price can be exacted for any of this folly, because the populist alternative isn’t fit for power.

And, sure enough, the great leader of American populism is currently hanging out with far-right-influencer Laura Loomer, who’s so manifestly bigoted and conspiratorial that she gives other far-right influencers hives. He’s currently litigating the Biden-Harris immigration record via Facebook rumors and anti-Haitian animus. His smartest supporters premise their loyalty on the idea that he’s a huge BS artist who probably won’t actually follow through on all his promises, even as his most devout supporters stand ready to excuse excess, corruption and constitutional brinkmanship.

But this unfit man was already president for four years, and for three of them, his personal chaos coexisted with decent outcomes in arenas — foreign policy, inflation and immigration — where things have been much worse under the rule of the serious people, the good meritocrats, the smooth and respectable elites. And even when covid overmastered his administration, his flailing was matched by progressivism’s period of mania, and his White House still managed to keep the middle class solvent and the stock market high, and delivered a covid vaccine faster than almost anyone expected.

All of this is more than enough to explain why this election is close and why voters might not rubber-stamp the sudden transformation of Harris, apparatchik of progressivism, into Harris, steady hand and reasonable moderate.

To the undecided voter, this isn’t a simple choice between stability and peril. It’s a choice between two candidates and coalitions that for different reasons don’t merit public confidence. And in a democracy, if you keep offering voters two bad options, you shouldn’t be surprised that they will often choose the one you are sure is worse.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.