Thursday, November 7, 2024

Part I

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Kamala Harris Concedes the Election: The Vice President’s White House Hopes Come to an End as She alls President-Elect Trump and Delivers Her Concession Speech

There’s something that’s a bit odd about the American presidential culture, but odd sometimes is nonetheless important. One of the important factors in an American presidential election is not what is just said by the winner, but what is said by the loser in the election. So, formally, this is known as the concession of the election or a concession speech in terms of the words that are offered. In America’s political culture, generally speaking, in the age of the telephone or similar kinds of communications technology, the losing candidate places a call to the winning candidate.

Some effective words are expressed about the acknowledgement that the election was lost, and there is a pledge to continue to work in support of the common goal of defending the union and of supporting a strong future for the United States of America. Now, sometimes those concession speeches have been made by individuals who went on later to win the White House. One of the most interesting of those examples would be Richard Nixon losing the 1960 election under suspicious circumstances, by the way, to the Democratic nominee who was then Senator John F. Kennedy. Just eight years later, and with many setbacks along the way, Richard Nixon would come back to win the presidential election. He won the White House, and then he won it convincingly again in 1972 only to resign from office, the only president to do so in 1974.

The point is this, sometimes you have someone who concedes an election and then comes back a winner. More than not in this kind of situation, when you have a concession speech, it is one of the last major political acts of an individual, and in all likelihood, that’s what this means for Vice President Kamala Harris. The reason for that is interesting, but it’s also fairly easy to understand. These are dots that are fairly easy to connect. When you look at a candidate such as Kamala Harris… Remember, she gained the nomination because of the withdrawal of President Joe Biden, and the Democratic Party was then in a truly perplexing situation.

There was no claim that Kamala Harris is the candidate most likely to win the election after the exit of President Joe Biden. No, the argument came down to that party’s embrace of identity politics, and identity politics helps to explain how Kamala Harris became Vice President of the United States, even though she didn’t win a single delegate, even though she had entered the race for the Democratic nomination in 2019. Joe Biden won that race in 2020. Kamala Harris withdrew before she had a single delegate vote, but nonetheless, she was asked to be vice president, and the reason she was asked has something to do with the outplaying of identity politics in the United States. But the fact is that Kamala Harris effectively was handed the Democratic nomination without winning in the Democratic primaries in either cycle.

So, the reality is that when you have an incumbent vice president who loses this kind of election, generally, there is no political comeback. That’s just the bottom line, and it’s basically true for both parties. So, you think for example of Walter Mondale. He had been out of office as vice president, but he gained the nomination, but he didn’t gain the White House against Ronald Reagan in 1984. You think about Al Gore who was vice president to Bill Clinton. He did win the Democratic nomination at the end of Clinton’s second term, but in the 2000 election, he did not win in the Electoral College, and thus, his political career was basically over. So, the Democrats were not saying going to 1984, “What we need to do is to bring Al Gore back.”

Similarly, it’s very unlikely that four years from now the Democrats are going to be saying, “Let’s bring Kamala Harris back.” No, that’s just not the way the system works. The way the system works is that right now on the Democratic side, there are a good many figures who see themselves as the likely 2028 Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. That nominee is likely to come in with some very considerable momentum, because that’s another fact of electoral politics. When you factor in the truth that Donald Trump can only be in office for four years in this second term, that means that after about the end of his second year, there’s a big focus on who will be the next Republican nominee? Who will be the next Democratic nominee? That’s just the way the system works.

Now, a part of what I think American history will mark against former President Donald Trump, now the president-elect of the United States, is that he did not follow the Democratic decorum, little d, the decorum of a democratic system of government, the decorum of our own American tradition when he lost the election in 2020. But, it was a return to the norm when Vice President Kamala Harris placed a personal phone call to Donald Trump yesterday, and acknowledged that she had lost the race. Then she spoke to her own supporters in a speech that was scheduled for 4:00 yesterday, but actually came about 30 minutes later. Her speech came on the campus of her own alma mater, Howard University there in Washington D.C.

That’s where her supporters had gathered on Tuesday night in what turned out not to be a victory celebration. But in her speech, we need to give a little attention to what she said. It was about a 12-minute speech. As she began, she said all the things rightly with which you begin this kind of speech. She acknowledged the current president, President Biden, spoke of Dr. Jill Biden, and said, “Thank you for your faith and support.” She also extended appreciation to Governor Tim Walz and the Walz family, “I know your service to the nation will continue.” She thanked her volunteers. She thanked her team.

She most personally thanked her husband, Doug Emhoff, and her family. She said, “I love you so very much.” Now, that is the kind of language that in this kind of statement you would absolutely expect. As Christians, we just need to step back a moment, and say, “These democratic traditions, little d, these traditions of democracy, they are really important. When they are not fulfilled, when they are absent, something seems off kilter,” and that was true in 2020. When they are back in place, you say, “Well, at least this is the way it ought to be.” The loser of this election should call the winner, and concede the election for the good of the nation, and then make a statement to the nation of some common purpose and common resolve and thankfulness for the opportunity even to have run the race.

But there are very few political figures who reach this kind of very high opportunity, very rare opportunity to bear the nomination of one of the two major parties for the office of President of the United States. There are very few figures who at this point can’t go on and say something with a little turn of the knife. Okay, so it’s at this point that Vice President Harris said, “At the same time” Now, when someone begins at the same time, you are getting ready. Just brace yourself. Put on the seatbelt. When she says at the same time, she’s about to say something is very different from the nice things she said before. She says, “in our nation, we owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the Constitution of the United States, and loyalty to our conscience and to our God.”

She said, “My allegiance to all three is why I am here to say while I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign.” Okay, now, what she is saying is that she stands for everything she stood for in the campaign. She continues to stand by them, and she is not conceding those issues even as she is conceding that she lost the election. She went on to say, “The fight, the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness, and the dignity of all people, a fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation. The ideals, she said, that reflect America at our best, this is a fight I will never give up. I never give up the fight for a future where Americans can pursue their dreams, ambitions, and aspirations.”

Okay, but then she went on to describe what she’s not giving up. That’s an America “where the women of America have the freedom to make decisions about their own body, and not have the government telling them what to do.” She went on to say, “We will never give up the fight to protect our schools and our streets from gun violence. In America, we will never give up the fight for our democracy, for the rule of law, for equal justice, and for the sacred idea that every one of us, no matter who we are or where we start out, has certain fundamental rights and freedoms that must be respected and upheld.” She goes on to say, “I’m going to continue to fight this fight,” and I think that’s probably true.

In her own way in various forms of service and employment in the future, she’s likely to contend for these very same things, but notice how she expressed it. Notice that the issue of abortion comes up right here, front and center, and this is where she describes what she calls the right of American women “to make decisions about their own body, and not have the government telling them what to do.” So, embedded in this concession speech in which she started out saying the right things in terms of the framework of this kind of speech and historic perspective, she then went on to turn the knife a little bit, and she went on to make a statement to underline which side she is on in the great worldview and moral cultural conflict of our day.

She’s on the abortion side, no surprise, but she has to mention that even in a 12-minute speech in which she’s conceding the election. That’s how important this issue is to the left and to the Democratic Party. But you also need to note something that’s embedded in this, because she is a former prosecuting attorney. She knows how to make her case in court. She knows how to speak words that are going to become part of the record, and that’s why she went on to say that she contends for an America where everyone “has certain fundamental rights and freedoms that must be respected and upheld.”

Now, insofar as she means this on the basis of, say, race and skin color and all the rest, all Americans should agree, but here’s where you need to understand that when she describes what she would claim to be abortion rights, she’s made the argument that abortion is a fundamental right and freedom. Fundamental means it pre-exists the Constitution, and America’s constitutional order simply is to accept and affirm and protect that pre-existing right, which we believe as Christians it is no right at all, and is not based in our constitutional tradition, and certainly is not explicit in the constitutional text, and would’ve been repugnant to the framers of the Constitution.

But, this is how political arguments are made and historical markers are laid down, and Kamala Harris knew that she, perhaps for the last time in a long time, if ever, had virtually all the television cameras pointed towards her, all the microphones pointed towards her. While she had the microphone, while she had the camera, this is what she wanted to be remembered for saying, and we should remember it.

Part II

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Mapping the Worldviews: Once Again, Liberal Political Intensity Was Hottest Nearest Cities, Coasts, and Campuses—and In a Big Way

But the next big thing I want to point out, even as the election results still come in, and the analysis is going to take, by the way, months in order to get to a lot of the questions we want to answer simply because the avalanche of data, it is so deep. It is so wide. It is so rich, but a couple of things are becoming clear. 

One of the things is a pattern that I talk about repeatedly on The Briefing, and that is that when you look at the liberal-conservative divide in the United States, when you look at the liberal-conservative divide in our culture, it maps out. It maps out on a map. The closer you get to a coast, the closer you get to a city, and the closer you get to a campus, the more liberal the society becomes, more socially and politically liberal. Okay, never have I seen that so graphically clearly demonstrated on a map as what took place on Tuesday. Now, CNN yesterday was showing a map of political intensity. Now, that’s different than a map just of the vote.

We’re accustomed to looking at states in red and the blue, but instead, this was a map that took every basic county across the country, every unit we would call county respective of what the state calls it all across the national map, and it mapped intensity of change. This is where Donald Trump improved his political standing in the election over 2016 and over 2020, and often by as much as 3 or 4%. Those sections, those counties were marked red, and it was a sea of red from sea to shining sea, except for a thin blue line on the west coast, and a thin blue line on the northeastern coast of the United States in Florida, one county blue. The rest of it, a sea of red.

In looking at that map, I just wanted to say I wish I could show this to Christians in order just to make the point that our culture is not evenly distributed. Certainly in terms of geography, you’re looking at a massive map of red, of conservative, of Republican vote, of the Trump vote in 2024. Of course, the liberals will come back. The left will come back and say, “Yes, but that area of the country is more thinly and sparsely populated.” If you’re looking at the great population centers, they’re basically on the coast, or they are in isolated islands of blue surrounded by an ocean of red.

Now, here’s where the democratic strategy failed catastrophically for that party on Tuesday. They actually were running a campaign running into the blue territories for intensity. But, the strategy of Donald Trump and the Republican Party, but basically it was the strategy of the Trump campaign. It was to turn out red votes all over the map, and that includes what many on the Left has simply dismissed as flyover country. Here’s the fact. You have a lot of rural areas in this country, and they have fewer voters than in more concentrated metropolitan areas. No doubt about that, but you know what? They still have the power to gather to change the entire map. That’s what happened on Tuesday.

Now, I often point out that when you ask the question why, why, in this, case are the coasts and cities and campuses more liberal? Well, in one sense, it’s because they are separate from some activities that would likely make you less liberal. What kind of activities would those be? Well, one of them is farming, or to put it in another way, ranching or those who are involved in livestock. If you are involved in livestock, regardless of what that stock might be, here’s the fact. If you want little pigs, you got to have a male and a female pig. If you want calves, you’re going to have to have a male and a female cow.

You know what? You could put lipstick on a male cow. You could put lipstick on a bull, but you cannot make it a cow. I know that proverbially, it’s more often described as lipstick on a pig. But you know what? Lipstick on a bull is an entirely different thing, and I would offer, it’s probably more dangerous, which why it isn’t done. But, it’s just to say that ontology matters. Biology matters. Male and female matters. If you’re going to deny the stable reality of male and female, I’ll say as a Christian to the glory of God, if you’re going to deny that, you’re going to go out of business because you’re not going to have any calves. You’re not going to have any piglets. You’re not going to have any whatever. All you’re going to have is a very awkward-looking animal with the wrong animal wearing lipstick. Wait just a minute. None of them should wear lipstick. 

Nevertheless, I think you get the point. But something else you have if you are involved in farming, and this is very central to what was the agrarian movement in American political history, what you have is the reality of hard work and trust being absolutely necessary. That hard work is invested in the entire process of agriculture, but it’s also based in trust. Trust in the fact that if you plant the seed, there will be a harvest. Trust in the fact that if you don’t plant the seed, there is not going to be a harvest. When you look at the modern reality of industrial farming, you can say, “Well, that’s become more abstract.” But yet on the ground, I can guarantee you it has not, which is exactly why you look at that political map, and you understand that where you are growing wheat and corn, soybeans and just about anything else, it’s red. It’s red for a reason. 

But you also understand on the other hand how this happens when it comes to campuses, because campuses, they’re a part of the ideas industry, the knowledge industry. If that is abstracted from something as simple as having a normal job, it tends to become unhinged from reality, and that’s exactly what happens. Because if you are going to say, “Let’s just instead delve into the world of theory,” well, in the world of theory, you’re going to end up with a lot of crazy theories, and eventually, they’re going to become the norm on major elite campuses. That’s exactly what’s happened. You look at all the critical theory variants. You look at all this, and say, “Where in the world would that make sense?” Well, it makes sense in New Haven, Connecticut. It makes sense in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It makes sense in Berkeley, California, and it makes sense to all the other would-be elite institutions who want to look as much like Harvard and Berkeley and as Yale as possible.

But it’s not just the city and the campus, it’s also the coast. As I mentioned, this has to do with how cosmopolitan coastal cities are. This goes all the way back to, say, the age of exploration. It goes all the way back to Homer. It goes all the way back to Greek epics. Where you have coastal cities, you have more interchange with other cultures. You have more, well, you have certain industries you might say that don’t exist in other parts of the country because of the anonymity that often comes. Someone comes on a ship, they are on the shore. They just might give themselves to activities that they wouldn’t want known back home.

All of that is a part of the old seaport culture. All of that is a part of the cosmopolitanism that marks coastal areas. You also have a fact that when you look at that cosmopolitanism, let’s just say you’re taking a city like San Francisco, because it’s liberal in every way we can imagine. You look at a city like San Francisco, a lot of the people who are involved in business and academia, and let’s just say the knowledge industry and global commerce and all the things, they may have more conversations with people on the other side of the Pacific than they would with people on the other side, which is to say the eastern side from San Francisco or the rest of America.

That just shows you how that cosmopolitanism works. Of course, I know where you’re headed. Well, what if you could put a city and a campus and a coast together? Well, bingo, that’s exactly where things get really far on the Left, because you’ve got the cosmopolitanism of the coast. You’ve got the campus and its culture, and you have the city and its allurements. Guess what? You’ve got a very blue dot in what turned out Tuesday to be a very red map. You want to know something else that plays into this? The people in those blue dots have more conversation dot by dot than they do with the people in the red in between.

It’s also honest to say, let’s just say it, that at least there are many people in red America, those red states, those red areas that have very little discussion if ever with, say, the cosmopolitan academics in a city. But you know what, here’s where Christians need to understand how the system works, because you don’t have a lot of people leaving, say, San Francisco to go spend four years on a farm. They might get acquainted with a lot of reality if they did, but you do have a lot of young people on a farm whose parents pay a lot to send them for four years to a campus. It’s not an even equation.

There are an awful lot of conservative Christian parents who wonder what in the world happened to their young people when they get them back after four years, very different than when they sent them in. A part of that is just the naivete, which can be very costly of not understanding the intellectual, cultural and moral context. It’s a very, very powerful thing.

Part III

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Guardians vs. Counter-Revolutionaries? Another Way of Seeing the Clash of Worldviews That Appeared at the Vote on Tuesday

Well, all right. We also need to look at something else Ezra Klein of the New York Times in an article that was written before the election, so it was written and published before the election. His headline was “This Election Pits Guardians against Counterrevolutionaries.”

In looking at the distinction between the left and the right, conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats in this country, he says, “One of the ways that that distinction is made clear is in the distinction between those who are the guardians of institutions and the counterrevolutionaries who are basically out to subvert those institutions or correct those institutions that if necessary eliminate those institutions.” I’m going to say he’s not entirely wrong in that. I think if you look at the energy behind the Trump campaign, a lot of it was counterrevolutionary. A lot of it was saying, “We don’t like the direction this country is going. We don’t like the edicts coming down from its institutions. We don’t like what is happening in its government.”

So, there was this counterrevolutionary energy that was translated into electoral energy for Donald Trump. You bet it was. He was counting on it, and that’s exactly what happened. But I think Klein’s right when he also says, “On the other side, you’ve got the guardians.” In this, he cites Steven Teles at Johns Hopkins University as coming up with that dichotomy, and I think both of them are basically right. I think a lot on the Left see themselves as the guardians of institutions. I want to tell them, and I want to tell you that one of the reasons why they are such ardent defenders of these institutions, it’s not just because they love the institutions, but it is because they control them.

So, an awful lot of the energy of the Left is actually invested in trying to protect not only the institutions, but their control of the institutions. So, just headed into the election and now on the other side of the election, I just have to tell you there’s something really powerful about this dichotomy. You do have counterrevolutionaries, I think an awful lot wearing the MAGA hats and beyond. They would say, “That’s exactly what I am.” There are the institutionalists, and they’re the ones who speak like Kamala Harris in defense of the institutions. But you have to say not only would conservatives, true conservatives, understand the value of those institutions, where conservatives would differ is in the control of those institutions, and the Left has been in control of those institutions for a long, long time. It’s because of a strategy, the long march through the institutions as the left has said in the ’60s. 

A lot to think about there. You see the clash of worldviews, one described here as the guardians, another worldview described as the counterrevolutionaries. I think as you look at this, there’s also a pretty interesting overlay in the more religious and the more secular, the more religious or the less religious, the more explicitly Christian, the less explicitly Christian, and sometimes right down to claiming that the future of America is a secular future and should be a secular future. When you talk about the guardians and the counterrevolutionaries, you need to understand that is at stake as well.

Part IV

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The U.S. Census Bureau’s Big Mistake: Wrongful Population Counts Truly Threaten the Integrity of Our Elections

But finally, for today, as you think about the electoral map and the count and the electoral college and the popular vote, a part of the clarity that comes to us in the 2024 election is that Donald Trump won convincingly in the electoral college, and he also won the popular vote, something that a Republican hadn’t done since 2004 when George W. Bush did the same. So, you look at that, and you say, “Well, you have an electoral map, and of course, you have the assignment of congressional seats and then the two Senate seats, and that’s what adds up to the total in terms of the electoral vote.” So, no state can have less than three, because no state has less than two senators and one member of Congress. Five states, as we saw before the election, have three votes.

But then you have states like California, Florida, Texas, lots and lots of votes. But you know what, it is now well documented that Republicans were at a false disadvantage in the 2024 election, because the Census Bureau made mistakes in terms of the assignment of population numbers, and you had higher numbers of population assigned to more democratically leaning states. Had the right census numbers been plugged in to the political equation, Florida would have more congressional seats. Texas would have at least one more congressional seat, and a lot of those red states where, by the way, people have been moving from blue states, a lot of those red states were basically shorted electoral college votes.

Now, you can’t do anything about that right now, but you know what, the President of the United States has a responsibility, and the government of the United States has a responsibility to get these numbers right. From the very beginning of U.S. census taking and head counting, the reality is it has always been political, but that politics comes with a cost. Had the numbers gone otherwise, that mistake or series of mistakes, or maybe we should say error, because maybe they weren’t done entirely by accident, those erroneous numbers could have cost Donald Trump the election. In this case, he won so convincingly. That wasn’t so. That’s not to say this will not be a major factor for our consideration, or should be in the race in 2028.

But you know what? 2028 is going to come soon enough. We’ll certainly deal with this issue when it comes, but one of the challenges for us is that when you see something like this that’s basically wrong, it’s easy to say, “Well, we’ll deal with that in the future.” That’s what the people who like these numbers are counting on you thinking. There are a few weeks that have given us so much to think about as this week, and frankly, we’ve only scratched the surface, but I appreciate you doing it with me.