Reaction: 11/8/24 "Letter"

I don’t want to single out

Heather Cox Richardson

as a target for my responses, because I think there are others (yes, on both sides) who are worthy of notice and reaction. I had planned on sort-of keeping track of what Heather wrote in her daily "Letters From an American” and maybe compiling a “Weekly Heather” response post. I DO think I’ll do that in the future. Today I thought there was enough in the 11/8/2024 post to warrant a response:

First, Heather mentions that social media is flooded with "stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information." She notes that popular items like PS5 Gaming consoles may end up costing $1,000 and that some manufacturers are planning to shift their factories from China to elsewhere in the Pacific rather than back to America. These are legit observations and I agree with her that Trump seems to misunderstand tariffs (although his statements may have been campaign lies rather than actual policies he plans to implement), but I find the "told-you-so, idiots" attitude a bit annoying.

She also notes that Elon Musk's wealth increased after the election by $13 billion, bringing his total to about $300 billion. This is a 5% increase in Musk's wealth, most likely caused by a nearly $80 per share rise in his Tesla stock. Tesla is the electric car manufacturer that Joe Biden refused to recognize as even really existing. Is it a surprise its stock exploded when the Biden team lost the election? She goes on to say Musk has been "in frequent contact" with Putin and had joined a phone call between Trump and Ukraine's Zelensky. It's unclear what "frequent contact" means: Musk once tried to buy an ICBM from Russia before deciding to make his own rockets. And his company SpaceX has donated Starlink satellite internet capabilities to the Ukranians, so Musk has presumably talked with Zelensky before.

Heather says,

In Salon today, Amanda Marcotte noted that in states all across the country where voters backed Trump, they also voted for abortion rights, higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and even to ban employers from forcing their employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union meetings. She points out that 12% of voters in Missouri voted both for abortion rights and for Trump.

Heather uses this to suggest that voters have been bamboozled and that the country "is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage." Another way of looking at this might be, Americans want a bunch of these things, but don't trust Democrats to deliver them.

Heather actually puts her finger on what I think was one of the big issues when she quotes the New Republic's Michael Tomasky complaining that right wing media have portrayed Republicans as "your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter." But does this complaint mean what Tomasky thinks it means? Or does it actually reflect a really poor choice of campaign focus on the Democratic Party's part?

The second half of the 11/8 post is a historical analogy. Heather compares the "stupid-making" tactics she attributes to Republicans to the efforts of the slave South to hide the truth from southerners, regarding the damage the slave economy was doing to their region. She describes southerner Hinton Rowan Helper's 1857 book, The Impending Crisis of the South, which sold nearly 150,000 copies in the North but was unknown in the South (aside from the men who banned it). I'm not sure I draw the same conclusion from this comparison. It seems to me it would be infinitely more difficult to ban The Impending Crisis, if it came out today. Helper could post it online and anyone could access it, as long as the internet remains free and private.

If I was telling the story, I would be focusing on how "light is the best disinfectant" and looking for ways to help people who may legitimately have been bamboozled because they're in a media bubble (which some Trump voters undoubtedly were -- but what about Harris voters?). Ways to create public discussion spaces that can tolerate calm, reasoned arguments and stories from both sides. I think the message of her story of the South's suppression of a southerner's warnings is that this type of censorship is both wrong and destructive. Why do I feel like the endpoint of her argument might ultimately be some type of call for tighter controls over "misinformation" and "disinformation" online?