Who is to Blame?
Making Sense from the Election
This is my first substack post since April.
I have purposefully stayed away from this platform and started/stopped numerous newsletter posts because I didn’t know what to put or say.
I had a lot of ideas and concepts for discussing various topics, but I couldn’t pull the trigger. Something didn’t feel right.
I kept trying to talk about health and nutrition while seeing beyond these topics. My mind loves to connect different subject matters and see the bigger picture.
Nutrition and health were always political topics. I’ve said this for a long time exhaustively but it felt like many were not listening to me.
It took the rise of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement through notorious anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his crones for many to make the connection I saw coming for so long.
The rise of Trumpism and the re-election of Donald Trump will surely impact various aspects of economics, healthcare, the environment, immigration, etc. with many of his proposals having a high probability of negative impact if they’re enacted.
Many of us who think deeply about evidence, the rights of others, and take social justice advocacy seriously know that the re-election of Donald Trump is anything but a positive development.
That being said I have seen a lot of narratives circling from the failure of Kamala Harris’s campaign. The narratives I am most concerned about come from her supporters and liberals in general.
The Blame game
I have seen some takes where blame is the center of everything.
Self-identified liberals and democrats have gone on record to blame the Muslim community, Latino men, the Black community, third-party voters, and everyone in between.
I identify this as a projection of grief.
Grief is defined by the psychological pain that accompanies a loss. In this case, it is a loss of a potential future, a loss of security, and a loss of support from government leaders.
The pain that follows this loss shows up in numerous ways but we often describe the ‘process’ or ‘stages’ of grief. There are different stages but we will focus on the 5 stage model.
The 5-stage model:
Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
I am not going to cover each stage, you can read more about it in plenty of places, but the main argument is this…
Many are shocked, in denial, angry, and want someone to blame.
The stages of grief are not necessarily sequential and don’t always follow a specific timeline. So, it seems like many are in the denial and anger phase of their grief from the election. I think this pain from the loss is causing a lot of people to point a lot of fingers, but is this blame healthy?
I don’t think blame is healthy or gets people to reconsider their positions and change, some research supports my thinking.
If blame isn’t healthy, what can we do instead?
Self-reflection and awareness.
Time to Look in the Mirror
Instead of Democrats on Threads or TikTok blaming minority groups, voter turnout, or any of the various other factors that may or may not be true to some extent or another…
Democrats need to reflect on these various factors and why their strategies didn’t work. Blaming others is unhelpful, we should reflect on our systems and ideas.
Why did Harris fail?
Who did the campaign fail to reach?
Why would people vote for Trump to begin with?
Everyone has their own answers for these questions if they reflected on them to begin with, but the point of reflection is not self blame.
We established blame isn’t helpful, the point of awareness is to build insight and to take action. When Democrats realize there was numerous problems with the Harris campaign and there was a disconnect between people voting for Republicans while voting for progressive policies… that is when they can honestly make a change, hopefully for the better.
Who Are We Doing this For?
There is a lot we can say about Democrats but I think the lite version of my criticism is reflected by Bernie Sanders. The Democratic Party has lost touch with working class issues and struggle, this is not to say Republicans actually give a shit about the working class, but in order for the Democratic Party to actually represent the working class they need to champion progressive policies at a minimum.
I think there are a lot of layers we can pull back here. Many people voted for Trump because of economic reasons.
Ironically, more billionaires supported Harris and more low income voters supported Trump than Harris.
Democrats (and liberals more generally) are perceived as failing to address the material needs of the electorate.
How can they recifiy this?
That is something that needs to be reflected on.
stop coddling trump voters