Untying our nation’s Gordian knot

Getting to the roots of this election, through an endless tangle of bad narratives.

We know what happened, at least on a surface level. Comparing 2020 to 2024, Donald Trump gained about 1.4 million votes; Kamala Harris received almost 9 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did in 2020. Several states, including Wisconsin, flipped Republican. 

But at the state level in Wisconsin, Democrats did… OK. Not enough to flip the state legislature, but enough to make a sizable dent in Wisconsin Republicans’ lead (not that it makes any difference to Assembly Speaker Robin Vos ). Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin was reelected, though by a smaller margin than I would have expected. Wisconsin still has six Republicans and two Democrats representing the state in Congress. Yet a bullshit referendum built on lies about non-citizen voting passed by 70%.

The real question of this election—why—is going to take a lot longer to unpack.

The reactionary centrists are already blaming the far left, saying it was “identity politics” that damaged the Harris campaign. But Harris was a moderate, whose platform was focused on the kitchen-table issues reactionary centrists accuse Democrats of ignoring. A fair critique of Democrats is that messaging got lost as the campaign shifted its focus on being anti-Trump and courting the right. But my god, how can a candidate be accused of being too leftist when she did a whistlestop tour with Liz frickin’ Cheney? 

There’s plenty of blame to go around: The national media bent over backwards to not seem biased against Trump and downplayed how erratic, unhinged, and dangerous he is. The pundit class responded to the Democratic campaign as Republicans projected it, and not as it actually was. Harris didn’t distance herself from President Joe Biden’s policies, especially in Gaza. In fact, she pivoted to the right and leaned into American belligerence on the world stage to try to win over centrist Republicans, a classic Democratic move that never picks up centrist votes (because they don’t exist) and alienates the base. Also, Democrats need to stop looking at their stock portfolios before talking about the economy, because people are tired of being gaslit and told everything’s going great.

But you know who is really impacted by the economy? Black people. And 83% of Black voters in 2024 chose Harris. As much as the run-up coverage to this election was about which minority demographics were leaning toward Trump, the reality is that Donald Trump would never have become a candidate for President, much less won—twice–if it weren’t for white people. Even the majority of white women, facing the reality of losing their bodily autonomy, voted for Trump. Hell, we wouldn’t even have the Republican Party as we know it today, if it weren’t for white people. 

So we have to talk about whiteness. Whiteness is different from white people—it has nothing to do with Europe, ethnicity, or even skin color. It is a status, or as author Isabel Wilkerson skillfully argues in her 2023 book, a Caste. Whiteness is given, most recently to Eastern Europeans, Italians, and the Irish.

As a culture, we needed to talk about whiteness after 2016, but seemed to find any and every excuse not to. Whites who did not vote for Trump told themselves that it was the other whites—the poor, rural, “ignorant”—who were to blame. But it’s deeper than that. “Liberal Madison” has some of the worst racial disparities in the nation. White supremacy is the very foundation of our country; the root of our problems; the source of the rot.

We also need to talk about patriarchy. The United States is one of a diminishing number of nations that has never elected a woman to its highest office. Nations and cultures that we have been told are more sexist than ours elected women decades ago. Yes, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris were not perfect candidates running perfect campaigns, but they didn’t need to be—they were running against Donald Trump for god’s sake. 

Yet somehow, enough people believed that what this country needed was a white man who performed power via conservative’s distorted form of masculinity—devoid of reason, humility, care, or integrity—and promised to inflict pain on those conservatives hate. It’s a misdirected hate, but it’s an old hate, rooted in the idea that for some to prosper, others must suffer. It assumes that if the tables were turned—if whites were to become a minority—that Black people would treat us the same way we treated them, as if it’s natural and out of our control. In reality, it’s a thin justification for the gross injustices and disparities white people subject Black people to. Rather than share, we drain the pool and deprive everyone. We make our society worse as a whole, because we can’t bear to see the people deemed beneath us share our spaces, resources, and opportunities. This country will tear its future apart to justify its past.

I realize I may once again be a hammer constantly seeing nails. As someone who sees the value of examining our history (and frankly loves doing it), I have once again come to the conclusion that we need to examine our past to save our future. But maybe that’s my path into dissecting whiteness and patriarchy. For others it may be art, poetry, infrastructure, medicine, technology, policy, organizing, etc. Given how deep whiteness and patriarchy are in this country, we will need countless knives to remove this Gordian knot. What will be yours?