NYT's Bret Stephens Perfectly Explains Why Bret Stephens Is Wrong About How To Win An Election

There will never be an end.

There has been no small number of election post-mortems going around in the last two days, most of which I can honestly say I have not felt like reading. Mostly because so many have said, more or less, that if all these people voted for Trump, we must be wrong about them being assholes. Given that he actually got fewer votes than he did last time around, it’s not mathematically clear why that would be.

“It won’t do to dismiss a majority of the country as biased, ignorant or otherwise basely motivated,” said the editorial board of the Washington Post (archived link), whose owner barred them from endorsing Harris and eagerly congratulated Trump on his win this week, adding, “Yes, prejudices against foreigners, people of color and other targets of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric surely play a part in his extraordinarily durable appeal, but they can’t explain it all; indeed, the condescension of elites is itself a factor against which his voters were protesting by supporting him.”

So, just to be clear here — the issue is not that Trump and his supporters say horrific things about foreigners, people of color, etc., but that people criticize them for doing so or say that these things are the reason they voted for Trump, or that they were at least not enough of a problem for them to not vote for Trump and that this may be a reflection on their character.” Got it!

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The explanation favored by the Post, by centrists, and by Republicans who were never going to vote for anyone but Trump anyway has largely been of the “They need to punch left and bow right if they want to win elections” variety. Surely you will be shocked to hear that this was the take favored by the New York Times’ Bret Stephens.

Here he goes!

Why did Harris lose? There were many tactical missteps: her choice of a progressive running mate who would not help deliver a must-win state like Pennsylvania or Michigan; her inability to separate herself from President Biden; her foolish designation of Trump as a fascist, which, by implication, suggested his supporters were themselves quasi-fascist; her overreliance on celebrity surrogates as she struggled to articulate a compelling rationale for her candidacy[.]

Well, that first part is certainly an interesting take, given that a large part of the reason she lost Michigan was because she refused to say she would stop supplying Israel with bombs with which to kill Palestinians.

The second part is fucking absurd given the completely batshit things that Trump has said about Harris and anyone else who opposes him. He has also called Harris a fascist (as well as a Marxist and a Communist — I don’t happen to think those are bad things to be, but Harris certainly is neither), but you don’t see anyone grasping for their smelling salts over that, do you? Do you see anyone on the Left shedding a tear because Trump thinks we are quasi-fascists?

No, because we’re generally kind of just supposed to expect that Trump and the Right will say terrible things about us and about people we care about, while Trump and the Right demand respect and generosity from us. Indeed, much of Stephens’s op-ed is about the fact that the Left refuses to pretend that Trump is normal and his supporters are kind, wonderful people who just have some “concerns” and are “dismayed” about some things.

But these mistakes of calculation lived within three larger mistakes of worldview. First, the conviction among many liberals that things were pretty much fine, if not downright great, in Biden’s America — and that anyone who didn’t think that way was either a right-wing misinformer or a dupe. Second, the refusal to see how profoundly distasteful so much of modern liberalism has become to so much of America. Third, the insistence that the only appropriate form of politics when it comes to Trump is the politics of Resistance — capital R.

Things were pretty much fine! They would have been a lot better if we could have stopped corporations from price gouging, but that would have drawn the usual right-wing hysterics about “price controls.” Every country on earth had economic issues and inflation following the pandemic and interruptions to the supply chain caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The United States has had lower inflation than pretty much every other country on earth.

Turkey, which is led by Trump’s good buddy and fellow “strongman” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had one of the highest inflation rates in the world, after Lebanon. Russia’s inflation situation was also a lot worse than ours.

What Stephens and others want to hear is “We feel your pain and you’re right, this whole thing is Joe Biden’s fault” just because it would make them feel good, when it damn well is not. There is almost no question that this would have been worse if Trump was in office.

As far as the “refusal to see how profoundly distasteful so much of modern liberalism has become to so much of America” goes, that’s a them problem. You’ll notice that most people rarely get too specific on points like this because they are at least self-aware enough to know that if they were to say exactly what they were bothered by, they would sound like monsters.

Stephens gave it a go and did not succeed:

The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. Concerned about gender transitions for children or about biological males playing on girls’ sports teams? You’re a transphobe. Dismayed by tedious, mandatory and frequently counterproductive D.E.I. seminars that treat white skin as almost inherently problematic? You’re racist. Irritated by new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive but feels as if it’s borrowing a page from “1984”? That’s doubleplusungood.

Oh, they’re “concerned”? They’re “dismayed”? Is that what we’re playing at? Sorry, no. It’s not like these people are just meekly saying “Oh gosh, I have some questions about whether a girl who was assigned male at birth would have too great of an advantage in sports if playing against girls!” because if that were true, surely they’d stick around to get some answers to their questions. Surely, if it were merely a concern and not merely the “reasonable” face of prejudice, there would be facts that could change their minds, no?

In 2023, there were a grand total of 15 trans teens playing high school sports in the entire United States. Only two of them were transwomen. There are maybe 30 transgender student athletes at colleges, total. We don’t know how many were transwomen, but it’s unlikely the ratio would change all that much. (Our own Crip Dyke has noted that actually, that’s a problem, because it suggests trans girls have been preemptively bullied out of participation.)

On top of that, current research suggests that, following testosterone suppression, “trans women who have undergone testosterone suppression have no clear biological advantages over cis women in elite sport.”

This is not, by any means, a widespread problem or something that needs to be fixed with legislation. It’s a shoehorn. The goal with this nonsense is to get people to accept the premise and then use it as a way to justify the further persecution of trans people.

On the second point, there have been diversity programs for decades and no one really gave a flying fuck until Christopher Rufo started ginning up outrage over them once he couldn’t get people hysterical enough about “critical race theory” theory anymore. Notice how you haven’t heard that term much lately? It lost its potency, because it was a nonsensical thing to be mad about in the first place. This will soon be true of DEI programs as soon as they switch to another thing.

There are a lot of things wrong with this argument, but the most glaring one is one that Stephens points out himself — that when Harris did pivot to the right on issues, it didn’t do her any favors because she just didn’t bend the knee hard enough to keep the goal posts from moving.

[H]er failure to forthrightly repudiate some of the more radical positions she took as a candidate in 2019, other than by relying on stock expressions like “My values haven’t changed.”

I am going to venture to guess that what he is talking about here is fracking — both because that’s what similar columns (like the one from the Washington Post’s editorial board) have addressed and because he’s previously complained that she didn’t do enough to push the idea that fracking is good (which it is not).

I just wish she could have made a better case for her current position. Like, if she had noted that by producing more natural gas in the U.S., we’ve become less coal-dependent, which is good for the planet. Or that by producing more oil in the United States, we’re also less dependent on the Middle East. Or that by becoming more energy independent, we can do more to ensure that we are extracting the energy in an environmentally sound way — something we can’t do when the oil is coming from Venezuela or Iraq.

So, just to be clear, it wasn’t enough to just say she’ll let oil companies continue fracking up the environment and our groundwater, she would have also had to lie and say it’s good for the planet, just to make someone like Bret Stephens feel good.

It wasn’t enough that she said she would put Republicans in her Cabinet, either. It wasn’t enough when she got endorsements from Liz and Dick Cheney, the latter of which Republicans used against her.

In fact, you will notice that literally every single time Democrats adopt right-wing positions in hopes of courting their votes, Republicans throw those things right back in their faces. It has never worked out, not once — and, in fact, it has only ever made things worse. If Democrats were to capitulate and say “OK, if it will make you feel better, we’ll bully some transgender kids for you,” they would not get a single thank you note in the mail.

Not only that, they’d wait a few years, once everyone had grown the fuck up and gotten over the transphobia, and go “See! They were afraid of trans kids playing sports, too! We weren’t the bad guys!” just like they did with Obama saying he’d only support civil unions, not marriage.

There is nothing wrong with our stances and our policies — policies that people, by and large, actually do support. In fact, a 2021 NBC/PBS/Marist poll actually found that 67 percent of US adults (including 66 percent of Republicans) don’t even want there to be laws banning trans kids from playing sports. Hell, that same poll actually found that Republicans were actually slightly more likely to oppose legislation outlawing gender transition-related medical care for children.

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We have our work cut out for us in a lot of ways, but I promise you all, I promise Bret Stephens, that there is no amount of smoke we can blow up Republican asses or “moderate” positions we can take that will sway those voters. Even if that were true, if we have to throw anyone under the bus to get those votes, we don’t deserve to hold any office to begin with.

What we need, frankly, is better PR and better messaging so that the right-wing interpretations of our policies — so frequently laced with bizarre conspiracy theories — are not the ones that prevail.

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