The Failure Machine
Andrew Sharp on another election that punished being too online:
Strategic logic aside, though, what's relevant to the discussion at hand is that the Trump administration has offered very few credible, coherent explanations for either of its most controversial policies. That's what reminds me of the Biden and Harris administration lost in the sauce a few years ago. I think feeling the pressure of an adversarial media environment is probably healthy for political movements; the alternative is Biden and Trump regimes that felt no urgency to explain themselves to critics or even engage with the consequences of their policies.Indeed, Trump's cabinet members and staffers are all addicted to X, and in the midst of inscrutable blackpill memes and pwning Elizabeth Warren and florid lectures to the world about Western Civilization, they were evidently oblivious to how normal people were interpreting the President's policies and behavior. As for Trump himself, after spending his entire first term obsessed with whatever the New York Times was writing about him on any given day, he's governed in his second term seemingly indifferent to any constraints, anywhere. On tariffs and the war specifically: instead of making a real, mature effort at winning over skeptics in his own party or shoring up institutional support, Trump chose to ignore Congress altogether, randomly declaring victory in Iran every three weeks, while repeatedly promising tariff checks that have never materialized.
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Normal Americans, it turns out, are happy to call bullshit on either side. That's good, and I imagine we'll have to lean on that skill again in the near future. It's not yet clear to me that Democrats have learned their lesson from the beginning of the decade, just as it's unclear that Republicans will learn from this week's results. Both parties have fierce factional fights ahead as they seek to define themselves for the next generation. For now, all that's certain is the perfect symmetry of election night shock ten years ago with the shock of 2026, and a naive hope that we might potentially bring an end to what one writer called "the long 2016."
There are of course race-specific issues and decisions that drove American politics toward the blue tsunami, but I think the broader story here was remarkably familiar: a whole bunch of people who spend a lot of time talking to each other online forgot that they also have to talk to normal people to win elections. Trump seemed indifferent and delusional, and no one in his orbit could pierce that bubble until finally the voters themselves delivered the message.
Adversarial media is friction. Slow, irritating and from outside the room.
Take it away and you cut off the oxygen of the real world.
The shorter and more honest the feedback loop, the faster and fitter the failure machine.