Final Reflections on the Lessons of 2024

A Paper Presented to the Society of Christian Ethics, 1/10/25

WHERE I WAS BEFORE 5 NOVEMBER 2024

The election results came as a shock and great disappointment to me and many academics (of course, not all!).

While we knew that Trump could win, I now see some of us were self-soothing by screening out information that we did not like. My favorite pacifiers were the Palmer Report and MSNBC.

My outrage-oriented anti-Trumpism was so deep, and so existential, that I really needed to believe that he simply would not win again, regardless of what the most disturbing polls said.

I personally had a lot invested in defeating Trump.

By 2021, I had become convinced that opposing Trump – not supporting any particular Democrat but opposing Trump – was an obvious Christian moral obligation and a vocational calling for me as a Christian ethicist.

In my 2023 democracy book, Defending Democracy from its Christian Enemies, I argued that Trump was part of a class of leaders around the world who could be described as Authoritarian Reactionary Christian politicians. (My preferred term to Christian nationalism.) I described this as a kind of toxic reactionary religious populism, made more dangerous when and where it has slipped loose of the moorings of democracy.

I argued that Trump posed a red-alert emergency for democracy –rule of law, checks and balances, separation of church and state, not to mention clean government, emoluments, nepotism, grift and graft, and retrospective and prospective election denial that undercuts essential public confidence in our electoral system.

For this reason, all year I was breaking my usual pastor-scholar rule of not opposing candidates by name – lecturing around the country, saying he must be defeated in the name of democracy, and in turn giving reasons why Christians should recommit to democracy.

Oh well.

In the end, I underestimated the social and economic discontents within our nation. I also underestimated the damage done by Biden’s late exit and the credibility problem his debate performance posed for the Democratic party. I perhaps overestimated the effectiveness of the Harris campaign, though I still believe she did very well under very difficult circumstances. I refused to see how much nimbler the Trump campaign was compared to what the Democrats managed – including dominating the relevant (mis)information space as that space has evolved. And I discovered how little I understood our neighbors.

MOST NOTABLE DISCOVERIES IN THE ELECTION RESULTS AND POLLING

CNN exit polls yielded some striking numbers.

White Christian people voted pro-Republican, not just white evangelicals at 82% but white Catholics at 63% and white Protestants overall at 72%. These were worse numbers than I had expected even in my most pessimistic moments.

For me and others who had been stating explicitly and repeatedly that Christianity had implications that demanded an anti-Trump vote, it was a stinging repudiation – and another reminder that most white Christians do not understand Christianity and its political implications the ways that progressive Christian academics like I do.

Latino men swung to vote for Trump at 54%, while Latinas were at 39%. Asian/Asian American voters went with Trump at 40%, Native Americans at 68%. Trump got 55% of first-time voters and did well enough (43%) among the youngest voters (18-24) to remain competitive overall.

Black men voted for Trump at 21%. This was obviously not close to a majority, but it was a substantial bleed on the Democratic side.

A significant number of former Biden voters just stayed home in 2024, due to indifference, hopelessness, or mixed feelings.

Exit polls revealed again the gap between women and men. A striking contrast: 61% of unmarried women voted for Harris, while 60% of married men voted for Trump. Overall, the “bro campaign” was effective for Trump.

People who said their family finances were worse than four years ago voted for Trump at 82%. In terms of annual income, Harris only won those who made more than $100,000. In this election, the party once identified with the poor and working class only won among the relative minority of the population both perceiving themselves to be undisturbed by recent economic disruptions and making the most money.

We saw an electoral college sweep by Trump of the swing states, inroads in the blue states, gains pretty much everywhere. The New York Times reported that 89% of counties shifted in Trump’s direction since 2020. Even though it was only a 1.5% victory margin, in our country both that almost universal “red turn” and that margin can be described as pretty decisive.

Before saying more, I need to name the brokenheartedness that many black women have communicated to me. As a group, they voted for Kamala Harris at 92%. Their hopes were dashed.

I also want to name the sense of outrage and fear I have been hearing from some women -- that men found responsible for sexual assault and predation were not punished but were and will be rewarded with very high positions.

A final note in this section: We should perhaps feel some relief that we did not have months of uncertainty about the winner. The election results were accepted as legitimate. There were no protest votes at the certification on January 6^th this time around. In our scarred, divided, tense body politic, that is a gift. It may mean election denial and an attack on the Capitol was a one-time anomaly. But it may not. It buys us four years.

AFTERMATH

Retrospectively, we can see that this is the Trump era and has been since 2016. Those of us who consistently belittled him had no idea. His will to power, and his success in gaining, losing, then regaining power, is the astonishing political story of our era.

Time moves on: 2016 is not 2025. The dynamics are different. Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal that while 2016 could feel like an accident, this felt like a national choice. 2016 Trump was a bumbling amateur, this Trump is not. I read this week in the New York Times that by inauguration day the Trump team will have nominated 2000 people for their positions; on inauguration day 2017 it was 75.

Indeed, Trump moved decisively after the election to fill his cabinet with choices both mainstream and sometimes deeply disturbing: Matt Gaetz (gone but not forgotten), Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Kash Patel.

Then there is the Trump-Musk axis of new media/government power, the ultimate bromance of the moment, two billionaires hanging out at Mar-a-Lago and soon the White House. Our information ecosystems are so broken. “What is truth” remains the question of the era.

Don’t miss the Elon-Vivek Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) project to cut government expenses. Together with Patel at FBI, Kennedy at Health and Human Services, and Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, all signal the belief that aggressive disruption of a sclerotic government bureaucracy is needed. A lot of people find this exciting and desperately needed. Some of us find it terrifying.

Trump’s embrace of RFK, Jr. is worthy of closer examination. Trump could have just pocketed his endorsement and ignored him. But somehow, he saw the potential value of what RFK Jr. represented – not just the family name, but perhaps especially in challenging Big Pharma, Corporate Food, Standard Medicine. How is it that Trump saw coalition building and electoral appeal when we good liberals just saw an outlier renegade? Can it be that our loyalty to government officialdom, academic expertise, and standard credentials may have clouded our perceptions of how such are perceived by those who are most frustrated by them/us?

It is easy for academics, who have maxed out their education and believe we understand the world better than most, to be a dangerous combination of proud and blinkered. This is especially the case if we end up replacing a posture of critical inquiry with an ideology which sets not only our values but our way of accessing and assessing information.

I am reminded that academics too are people with a social location, with information bubbles and echo chambers, with limits that mean we don’t see 360 degrees. Sometimes what we think is true for well-founded academic reasons may be what simply appears to be true from our particular social location.

Part of the Trump coalition this time is a disruptor team, an innovationist team. This version of Trump can’t just be dismissed as a religious authoritarian reactionary now. Indeed, he is offering less to his Christian reactionaries than they wanted, but he has them in his pocket, and they have no better alternative.

It would be so easy to say that the message of this election is that America is a racist-sexist-homophobic/amoral/faux Christian nation. It can both be true that such flaws characterize many and that it does not explain everything that we need to understand if we would understand — and affect — this country.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PROGRESSIVE ACADEMICS -- OR AT LEAST FOR ME

I close with a few thoughts about some implications as I see them in my role as a Christian scholar/pastor.

Anger at the other side, and recrimination about the mistakes of our side, is not enough. We need to turn at least part of our critique inside, toward our own information bubbles, our own ignorance of what many of our neighbors feel, believe, and fear. We need to listen much better.

Watching the Trump-Musk partnership form, seeing the way other media titans are cozying up to Trump by the minute, should exacerbate our concern about the manipulation of information and the need for academics to be good sources of vetted, reliable information and analysis, worthy of trust outside of academia. It is also a good case study in the way that power attracts, and fear weakens.

I note that social media was bad and will now get worse. I have left it entirely.

Many of us, perhaps especially of a certain age, feel a sense of disconnection, disorientation, and even exhaustion regarding this country, its culture and politics. To borrow a phrase from Bonhoeffer: we are looking for solid ground under our feet.

That takes me in the direction of a renewed commitment to the university and the church. These two institutions are far older than the Trump era or even the USA.

When I was trained, “speaking to policymakers from a Christian perspective in order to affect US public policy” was my teachers’ dream of what Christian ethicists do. There have been seasons of many of our careers in which we had such moments. I remember them with fondness, pride, and nostalgia, because…well, who is listening now?

But: to nurture gifted and committed students in the intellectual tradition of Christian ethics, this work continues. This is the work of the university/seminary.

And: to discuss with everyday believers how Christ’s life and teachings challenge and compel their own character and choices, this work continues. This is the work of the church.

Being near the center of culture and power brought its own illusion and disillusions.

Those days are past.

Our work continues.