The Day After the Iowa Shitfest
Stresspoint 16 Jan 24: 4
Today’s Stresspoint on a 1-10 scale: 4 (it started out higher, but got lower through the afternoon and evening)
I wrote an “I’m back after an extended hiatus” piece yesterday. I explained that I’m going to begin, again, to record my stress levels in a “Stresspoints” Diary.” My motivation in this endeavor it to make regular comments on my stress levels over the next year or so. My anticipated stress, of course, stems from the transformation of the GOP into an army of mindless trolls who clamor for the canonization of Trump and to replace our Liberal Democracy with a Theocratic Authoritarian state.
I went on to say that if I can sustain the discipline to regularly fret publicly, by means of this blog, I might succeed in diminishing my own distress at reading and watching news about the serious threat to just about every moral, political, and intellectual principal that I hold dear. I understand that it might seem unlikely that writing about my inner writhing might be therapeutic. But I know from experience that self-conscious analysis allows me to relocate my stress from the emotional to the intellectual plane … which actually does help put my misery in perspective.
Anyway, I made a post yesterday that it my plan to begin. But by the end of the day, though, I hadn’t written anything. So it go put off to today.
Which is OK, because the big news of the day yesterday, and what made it such an appropriate day to start a blog about the stress of the 2024 election, was not just the anniversary of a real American hero, but the flaming desecration of the Iowa Republican Caucus, the results of which came only as my bedtime arrived.
So … for posterity and future reference, I’ll state what we all know: that Trump won by 51%, and Ron DeSantis squeezed out a 1% victory over Nikki Haley. There was pretty sound consensus that Ron’s 1% second place did nothing to liven up his campaign with a smidgen of hope; and that while Haley may theoretically still have a path to victory, in real life she’s out, too. We’ll see next week in New Hampshire, but the survival of either will be an astonishing change in the trajectory of American politics.
Nobody at all was surprised that Trump won. And while there was a shared disappointment that he got more than 50% of the vote, which is what he needed not to feel unduly threatened, nobody was particularly surprised about that, either. But scrolling through the various newsletters and headlines that populated my email box this morning, the only real questions that jumped out at me were about whether the results could support any conclusions about how soft or hard support for Trump really is.
I found both sides of that question argued convincingly, and at least in my mind there are equally valid narratives … leading to a more solid conclusion that ‘nobody knows yet.’ In my moments of angst throughout the day, I accepted the logic articulated by Daniel Pierce in Esquire entitled “There’s no Silver Lining In Iowa.” He is absolutely correct in this article, which is a rejoinder to piece by Mona Charen, mentioned below, that anybody who is still a Trump fan is highly unlikely to undergo a conversation experience and find decency and reason.
While reading his opinion, I was reminded of an interview a few days ago on the PBS Newshour with the Iowa evangelical Bob Vander Plaats, who said he believed that there are a good number of decent and relatively intelligent Republicans who would rather vote for a reality-grounded and moral Republican rather than Donald Trump. He was proven wrong in that assumption, of course. But that’s not even what stood out to me. Rather, what grabbed my attention is he said he “would choose the Trump administration over the Biden administration every day that ends in Y and twice on Sunday.”
Given Vander Plaats support for DeSantis and his demeaning comments about Trump does nothing to bolster any hope that any significant number of Republicans in Iowa will abandon Trump, who increasingly seems like the Bad Messiah for misguided quasi-Christian evangelicals.
But after learning more about what transpired in Iowa yesterday, I became less stressed and more optimistic. And when I’m slightly more optimistic, I kind of believe that Vander Plaatt is right that there’s more silent resistance to a messianic vision of Trump than we know among self-proclaimed conservatives. In that same NewsHour segment that interviewed Vander Plaats, a woman said she simply couldn’t bring herself to vote for Trump, and would vote for some other third party candidate. I heard several more street interviews of Iowa voters who said the same thing today on MSNBC.
Beyond this kind of anecdata, I am impressed by another narrative presented by Mona Charen in this morning’s Bulwark entitled “Iowa’s Silver Lining.” She makes very good points about the numbers coming out of Iowa that cast doubt on Trump’s ability to defeat Biden. One number in particular that made me hopeful was that 11% of Iowa Republican Caucus voters said they would vote for Biden.
If that kind of sentiment holds at all consistent across the country, Biden will indeed – as former GOP operative Stuart Stevens – said on MSNBC just now, win the election with a much more comfortable margin then he did in 2020.