1. A long ribbon
Imagine a long ribbon. On the left it is blue, red on the right.
But you don’t have to imagine this. This is the way we have been told to think about our politics for a long time, now. The pundits and the press have long framed things in this way. It became our only mental model, the only way to analyze our world.
And it became the only way our leaders formulated their political strategies, at least it became the only way blue-side leaders defined their strategies. Everything became a matter of triangulation, required incremental accommodation to pull more and more read-leaning folks under the blue tent.
No need to spend time talking to the already-blue folks. They were safe votes. Instead, tinker a bit with your proposals and decrease your ambitions just enough to make a slightly more red-sounding sale, and… well you’ve got more folks under the blue tent.
2. The angry ones
This is what the Clinton revolution was all about. And it worked, for a while — barely, but it worked.
Still, there was a flaw in this theory that Bill built, a flaw that lay unrecognized by the elites and cogniscenti, because the blue-red mental model didn’t permit us to conceive of it.
Way over there on the left side of the ribbon, there was growing dissatisfaction: blue but angry. Angry as hell. And way over there on the right side of the ribbon, there was growing dissatisfaction: red and angry. Angry as hell.
As the leaders from the Clinton generation triangulated their incremental strategies, these nominally stalwart allies (the angry ones around them) got madder and madder. These were the millennials — whom we came to label the Bernie Bros. The leadership looked down on them. Mocked them. Ignored them. Marginalized them. And shoved them in a box to shut them up.
3. What happened Tuesday
A while ago, I was on the phone ranting to someone about something that made me angry. (I am prone to do this if you push the right buttons.)
“You sound like Trump,” they said.
And bang I was shut up and in a box. And I never brought up my fury on that subject with them again. The fury wasn’t gone, mind you, it’s just that they never heard it from me again.
This my friends, is what happened on Tuesday night.
The Democratic establishment had boxed up the very millennials whom they thought formed the vanguard of their blue future. The pundits had ridiculed them. The pollsters didn’t really see the box they were in. And so those nominally solid allies whose anger was marginalized either gave up and stayed home or they let their anger get the better of them and said, “Screw it, I’ll just join this other angry crew over there.”
And in that moment, the red-blue space we lived in warped back on itself. The two ends of the ribbon came together, and that vanguard of the blue future cast their votes red.
Don’t blame the haters. Sure the hatred runs deep. But they didn’t make the difference Tuesday night.
We did it to ourselves. We let our future walk away, and we didn’t even see them leave. Heck, we can’t even see it, now.
