From Misfeasance to Willful Malice: What Election Post-Mortems Get Wrong

Before the election, a Republican cousin of mine commented, “If my party’s candidate was in danger of losing the election to someone as flawed as Donald Trump, I might be asking myself if maybe my candidate or my party is doing something that causes roughly half the people in the country to support him.” 

The same question is being asked by a host of self-appointed coroners, conducting post-election autopsies. Voices from the center and the left have concluded the fatal wounds to the Democratic Party were self-inflicted, or at least the death was a justifiable homicide.

After reading an article by the famously moderate David Brooks, a friend suggested that instead of a mea culpa, maybe blue voters (and candidates) owed the country a WE-a-culpa. Other progressive friends have echoed Bernie Sanders in their come-to-Jesus criticisms of Harris and the Democrats.

All these questions and answers are being offered in good faith. I think they come from an honest and sincere place.

I also think they’re wrong. And harmful.

It feels like these pundits are standing at the scene of a sexual assault, and after expressing sympathy for the victim and criticism of the assailant, they cock their heads and ask, “Buuuut, what was she wearing?”

The extent to which we do not identify the source of moral failure is the extent to which it will continue. If we don’t carve out space for our jeremiad, a time for our moral outrage, we normalize the reprehensible values, character and behaviors that got us here. 

Trump and his surrogates are responsible for a level of rhetorical violence we’ve never seen in modern American politics. If we don’t reckon with it now, the reckoning will come later, at an even greater cost.

Early in 2016, I posted on Facebook, “If you’re a Trump supporter, that doesn’t automatically make you a bad person, it just makes you a bad person eventually.”

I think that was unfair then. There are ways to see early support for Trump as a mistake – a decision based on a lack of information and experience. 

As time has gone by, however, his supporters have co-signed his behavior – the thousands of lies, threats, name-calling, sexual abuse, racism and misogyny. It all belongs to them.

What might have once been misfeasance has become willful malice. 

I still don’t believe most Trump supporters are monsters, but monstrous things have been set in motion. When Hannah Arendt wrote about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, she described the behavior of Nazi leaders as driven by the “banality of evil,” a pattern of everyday disregard for the needs of others, especially for “the least of these.”

How does a pattern like that begin and grow? When good women and men fail to point at it and call it what it is.

I’m a strong supporter of epistemic humility. To make progress of any kind, we should acknowledge how our “ways of knowing” might be flawed and work to consider the perspectives of others. But humility doesn’t require us to become victims or submit to untrue or unfair propositions, which is what I believe some of these post-mortems are calling for. 

Arguing that Democrats were dominated by those who put too much effort into identity politics and not enough priority on the needs of the working class, these pundits push the idea that educated, progressive elites control the party.

It’s as though they believe Democrats are all priggish intellectuals who sit around posh faculty lounges in the Northeast, pontificating about the unwashed masses while getting manicures and sipping Negronis. I’m sure that tracks with the privileged circles within the Beltway, but it hardly describes the tens of millions of Democratic voters (or candidates) in this election.

I was a professor at an evangelical university in the rural Midwest for two decades. After the 2016 election, my wife and I quit our jobs, sold nearly everything, bought a van and traveled the country for over a year, engaging the topic of polarization with all kinds of people. I firmly believe there’s a time for self-interrogation and dialogue. I’m just not convinced now is that time. 

Do Democrats need to do better? Do they need to work on their language and policy priorities? 

Of course. But, if we think that’s the main story, we’ve lost the plot.

I’m not advocating prolonged fury and bitterness, but correctly identifying guilt is the start of rehabilitation. Most of my scholarship has been on the topic of image repair – responding to accusations with apologies, justifications, etc.

I don’t think Democrats are the ones who owe us an apology, and if we continue to focus on their wrongdoing, we do so at our peril.

Brett Miller teaches communication ethics at Drury University. He’s the author of Divine Apology, as well as numerous articles and essays on religious and political rhetoric.