VOTERS THINK EVERY PARTY IS THE LEOPARDS EATING PEOPLE'S FACES PARTY

In the opinion section of The New York Times, Lydia Polgreen and Tressie McMillan Cottom discuss the election results. Something Polgreen says made me think:

... to me, this election really turned on this question of who has a stake in the system as it currently exists and who feels that they could benefit from just blowing it all up.

This was a big thing that came up for me in 2016 when Bernie Sanders was running. I ultimately thought Bernie was not going to be able to win because there are just too many people who have 401(k)s who think, like, “If this guy is elected, tomorrow, my 401(k) is going to be worth 40 percent of what it is now, and I know I can’t count on Social Security.” So that sense of having a stake in the status quo — and the Harris campaign, if it was about anything, it was about a kind of “What we got ain’t perfect, but we got to hold on to it.”

I think I felt hopeful that here we had a generic Democrat who had these plain vanilla policies that were not that exciting. They tried to address around the edges some of the issues that people needed from government.

I thought maybe that could work. Maybe there’s just enough chaos, just enough of a sense that this is too dangerous. That gamble was just wrong....

What this suggests to me is that millions of voters didn't think they were voting on a choice between chaos and stability. They think both parties destabilize the country. So they chose Trump's promise of a form of destabilization they found appealing over the status quo, which they see as an unappealing destabilization.

In the famous meme, a supporter of the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party says, "I never thought leopards would eat MY face." Donald Trump won because millions of voters think Democratic policies lead leopards to eat their faces, and Trump's policies will make leopards eat the faces of people they don't like.

In particular, young men of all ethnicities think liberal culture has created a pro-queer gynocracy that's eating the faces of straight males. They want leopards to eat the faces of people they think are benefiting in this culture. They loved it when Tucker Carlson portrayed Trump as a father about to give "a vigorous spanking" to his "bad little girl." And here was the most notorious tweet to appear on Election Night, from a white supremacist and Holocaust denier who once dined with the president-elect:

Your body, my choice. Forever.

— Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) November 6, 2024

Normie voters think inflation is the face-eating that's happening under Democratic rule, and yes, they still believe this even though current inflation is low, because prices haven't dropped and they're paying off credit cards at 20+ percent interest. They naively believe that Trump will reverse all the price increases -- but they think there's no way to eliminate face-eating altogether, so it's preferable to sic the leopards on undocumented immigrants and trans people. That way they assume no one they know will suffer an eaten face.

LGBTQ voters, at least, know who'll be the targets of Trump's leopards, and they voted accordingly:

Eighty-six percent of voters self-identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender voted for Harris in the presidential election, according to an NBC News exit poll, a 22-point increase over 2020, when Biden won 64 percent of the LGBTQ vote against Trump.

Twelve percent of LGBTQ voters in the NBC News exit poll said they voted for Trump, a 15-point decline from 2020.

Forty-one percent of Trump's TV ads were anti-trans ads. Surprise! LGBTQ people noticed!

But because they were one-day stories at best, some Black men seem not to have noticed Trump's promise to give police officers total immunity from prosecution and his fantasy of offering cops "one really violent day" as an anti-crime strategy. If the police are given even more leeway to abuse citizens, young Black men, including many who have done nothing, or maybe have a busted taillight, will be the prime targets of the resulting brutality -- and they're certainly the people Trump, a lifelong anti-Black racist, assumes will be the targets. The overwhelming majority of Black men rejected Trump, but his numbers went up in that group. They'll be the classic victims of the leopard meme, never expecting the leopards to eat their faces -- or assuming that they would have done no better under Harris, who campaigned as a law-and-order ex-prosecutor and never denounced these authoritarian ideas of Trump's.

A majority of Hispanic men appear to have voted for Trump despite the fact that some will be caught up in his crackdown on undocumented immigrants. These Trump voters believe that only the undocumented will have their faces eaten, and they're fine with that. (Harris campaigned on a border crackdown, so she didn't talk much about how heavy-handed Trump's immigration policies are likely to be.)

Trump chose popular victims of the leopards -- women, trans people, immigrants, criminals. Democrats could have chosen the rich, but bashing the rich reportedly scares some moderates. It sets off alarm bells in the "liberal" commentariat and reduces the big-money contributions that are necessary for Democrats to run one of our country's staggeringly expensive presidential campaigns.

And that sucks because once upon a time you could sell the idea that everyone could do better. What made that impossible was the drastic reduction in rich people's taxes since the time of Reagan. Now, for non-billionaires, everything really does seem to be zero-sum. You really do have to choose which faces get eaten. Harris tried to run an everybody-wins campaign, but not enough people believed that everyone can win. So they chose the guy who promised to sic leopards on the faces they hate the most.