The Art of Losing: Joe Biden

Or, The Art of Losing: Kamala Harris, if you have to.

ettingermentum

Nov 02, 2024

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(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

Following up from this article:

The Art of Losing: Donald Trump

ettingermentum

Nov 2

Approximately a week from now, our long national nightmare will be over. The results from the U.S. Presidential election will be almost entirely reported, and we will (probably) know the identity of America’s 47th president. Over a year of horse race coverage will suddenly give way to a frenzy of post-election analyses, all of which will come to miraculous conclusions: that the results vindicate whatever the author of the piece believed in the first place. If Trump wins, right-wing writers will cast it as a stunning vindication of their exact brand of conservatism; if he loses, it will represent a sober judgment that he did not embrace their beliefs hard enough. Many of those of us on the left will undoubtedly do the same, with just a few thousand votes in a couple states determining whether we say Americans demonstrated support for price caps or rejected a center-right Cheneyite warmonger. Similar self-serving analyses will be made by America’s liberals, centrists, libertarians, monarchists, and everyone in between. In the end, they will all say, the one thing to learn from the results is that there is nothing to learn from them.

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I know I said that this article would be titled The Art of Losing: Kamala Harris, but after considering it for a while, I changed my mind. Although she is the candidate on the ballot, it feels wrong to single her out as the principal (potential) loser of the election on the Democratic side. The dynamics of the election that she was forced into were not of her choosing or her making. To the extent she has failed or made mistakes, they can all be traced back to her boss—not her ideology, her perceived ideology or really all that much about her individually.

Of course, I’m aware that this could very well look self-serving if I published it in the aftermath of a loss, which is why I’m publishing it while there’s a very good chance that she could win. Either I’ll have proof that my post-election takes aren’t being put out for convenience’s sake, or I’ll be one of the rare pundits on record critiquing a winning campaign. Hopefully, both will be a contribution to the discourse. So, without further ado, here are the main issues facing Democrats heading into Election Day.

Reason #1: It’s not progressivism, or centrism, or anything ideologically. A despised old man was the presumptive Democratic nominee for more than a year.

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