If Trump loses the election, our nation can finally rest

Let's not bring back the wacky 2010s.

As always, there’s last-minute election drama. At a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in NYC, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”, angering many Puerto Rican voters. He also made a joke about a black person carving a watermelon for Halloween instead of a pumpkin, and said “These Latinos, they love making babies…they come inside, just like they did to our country.”

The Trump campaign and other Republicans are scrambling to distance themselves from Hinchcliffe’s jokes. That’s a little cynical, given that Hinchcliffe was vetted beforehand by the Trump campaign, and has a history of making similar jokes. But ultimately, I expect the whole affair not to end up mattering that much.

Here’s the problem, though: If Trump wins the election next week, as he is currently favored to do, this is just going to keep happening.

I don’t mean that there will be stupid comedians making racist jokes at every Trump press conference. I mean that there will be outrage after outrage, every week, over and over, just as there was during Trump’s first term. Trump’s constant mix of defiance, clumsiness, and aggression will define our media environment for the next four years, just as it defined 2016-2020.

It would be silly to blame the social unrest of the late 2010s entirely — or even mostly — on Donald Trump. For one thing, the unrest began years before Trump even seemed like a viable presidential candidate — it began in 2013-14 with Gamergate, with the protests after the shootings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, and with the online culture wars on Twitter and Facebook. And although Trump’s presence in the White House was certainly used as a justification for many of the wacky things that progressives did in 2020 — tearing down statues of Grant and Lincoln, implementing ridiculous DEI trainings, embracing politicized pseudoscience in the social sciences, and so on — it would be wrong to assign him the lion’s share of the blame. 2014-2020 was a time of national unrest, and there were excesses, overreach, and flat-out insanity on both sides.

I want to put those days behind us. Just as the roiling chaos and political conflict of the late 60s and early 70s gave way to the more tranquil late 70s and 80s, I want the next decade to be a time of healing and calm.

In fact, I’ve often written that I think the 1970s are the best analog for the era we’re in now:

The New 1970s

When I read a bunch of books about the 70s in an attempt to understand the current political moment, I found one book entitled It Seemed Like Nothing Happened. That’s exactly what I want for 2025-2040. I want it to seem like nothing happened — nothing except whatever the modern equivalent is for bell-bottom jeans, disco, new wave, hair metal, kids’ cartoons, and silly movies. I want a time when Americans are free, if they choose, to live their daily lives without being forced to think about politics. In short, I want to end the recent wave of unrest.

During the four years of Biden’s tenure in office, I’ve felt unrest beginning to ebb. For one thing, a large variety of data sources shows the massive crime wave of 2020-21 petering out:

Yes, of course crime is way down

That’s actually something that didn’t happen in the late 70s and 80s; crime stayed very high all the way until the 90s. But it’s happening now, and I’m happy about it.

For another thing, the violent street battles between rightists and leftists that characterized the years of 2016-2020 seem to be over. The Palestine protests are still going, but they’re much smaller than what we saw in the previous decade. The wave of “stochastic terrorism” — the mail bombings of 2018, a string of shooting attacks on minorities, etc. — seems to have petered out as well.

The online discourse, too, has gotten much calmer. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter may have turned the platform into a swamp of antisemitism and bots, but it’s not culturally relevant in the way it used to be — stupidity and misinformation still reign supreme on TikTok, but they do so at arms’ length. Instead of screaming in each other’s faces all day, young people passively scroll through infotainment. It’s not great, but I’ll take it over 2017 any day.

This slow calming of America is not entirely due to Donald Trump’s departure from the White House. The social movement popularly known as “wokeness” has lost much of its energy since 2020. Musa al-Gharbi has been chronicling how woke language has been slowly getting less common in media and academia,¹ while many DEI programs and other concrete manifestations of wokeness appear to be on the way out. The movement’s ideas still reign as a sort of stuffy orthodoxy within deeply progressive institutions like universities and many nonprofits.

But Trump’s absence is definitely a big part of America’s calming trend. From 2016 through 2020, online discussion centered around Trump’s constant stream of inflammatory tweets — there were so many of these that they’ve been compiled into at least one book. In fact, he’s still at it:

Normal politicians don’t talk like that. Normal people don’t talk like that. It’s a rhetorical style deliberately designed to provoke conflict, division, fear, and unrest.

And Trump does this all day, every day. Adam Gurri had a good blog post a couple of weeks ago, chronicling some of the most inflammatory, aggressive things that Trump had said in the weeks prior:

On September 22nd, Trump suggested that in the good old days, they would have executed General Mark Milley…On September 29, Trump argued that all we would need is a single hour of complete unrestrained violence against alleged criminals, and crime would be solved…Just days ago, on October 11, Trump stated that he would use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to authorize deportations…The last time it was invoked was to enable the Japanese internment…Aurora’s Republican mayor has argued that Trump is simply making things up about his town. A pattern in this election cycle, which has included Springfield, Ohio’s local and state Republicans doing the same…On October 11, “It’s the enemy from within. All the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country; that’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia.”…This is just in the past month. One does not have to go back very far to find more. In June, for example, he noted that “sometimes revenge can be justified” in the context of prosecuting people purely for having wronged him personally.

That is only a partial excerpt; I cut out a lot. And Gurri’s post is only about the previous few weeks. The aggressive rhetoric never ends; it doesn’t even pause. If Trump is elected next week, it will continue all day, every day, for four more years. And it will be in front of you, in the news, on your screen, on social media, every day, for four more years.

It is unreasonable to expect everyone in the nation, or in the media, to simply tune out this firehose of invective. When a presidential candidate says things like this, it is newsworthy. When the President says things like this, it is definitely news. And just as it would be unfair to blame Trump for the excesses of wokeness in the 2010s, it would be unfair to blame wokeness — or progressives in general — for Trump’s behavior.

And Trump’s rhetoric has real consequences. When Trump lied about Haitians eating pets in the city of Springfield, Ohio, there was a wave of bomb threats against the Haitian community there. Trump’s lies about Venezuelans taking over the city of Aurora, Colorado forced local officials to scramble to avoid their city taking a huge reputational hit.

Nor is rhetoric the only thing Trump does to foment unrest. He’s the only major presidential candidate ever to fail to accept an election result. He has promised to pardon the people who attacked Congress on January 6th, 2021 — a clear encouragement for repeat violence. If elected again, he will certainly appoint people like Michael Flynn — who has declared that “the gates of Hell — my Hell — will be unleashed” on Trump’s political enemies.

If Trump is elected next week, I expect unrest in America to rise again — not to the level of 2020, and perhaps not even to the level of 2017, but above the level of 2024. A Trump reinstatement would break the trend toward social peace that America has been on in recent years — it would diverge from the historical parallel of the 1970s.

Note that this is not a threat. I am not saying that if Trump wins, the left will run riot. In fact, regardless of whether Trump wins or loses, I expect wokeness, and radical leftism, to continue to decline in force and influence in American society. Not only is the popular fire of wokeness on the wane, but Democrats — who are a strong, centralized party — have acted to exclude the Palestine protesters and to tamp down on leftism in general. You can see this in the Harris campaign’s public embrace of patriotism:

The Democrats embraced patriotism after all

What I am saying is that if Trump becomes President again, the next four years of our politics will be defined by his aggressive and often unhinged rhetoric, his accusatory lies, his petty revenge, his persecution of political and personal opponents, his violation of every possible norm, and his feuds with the military and with other key national institutions. That sort of thing foments and encourages unrest on both sides of the political aisle. It encourages rightists to do violence on Trump’s behalf against his perceived enemies. It encourages liberals, centrists, and progressives to very justifiably take to the streets in protest. And it creates a climate of bitterness, anger, and controversy in every online space.

If Harris wins, in contrast, I foresee a continuation of the national calming trend under Biden. We will not immediately return to the moderate liberalism of the Clinton and Obama days, but we will head steadily in that direction. Wokeness will continue to be quietly pared back in most institutions, and in America’s general culture, without the need for violent public clashes. Policing will continue to be strengthened throughout the country and crime will continue to fall. Online spaces will continue the trend away from “all politics, all the time”. Culture wars will not end, and our politics will still be polarized, just as in the 80s and 90s — but these things won’t dominate our every waking moment.

In other words, if Trump loses, our nation can finally rest. Trump wasn’t the only cause of the craziness of the late 2010s, but he was one cause, and he’s the only major piece of that era that’s threatening to come back. I would prefer that we leave the 2010s in the past, where they belong.

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1. You’ll notice that when right-wing types post charts showing woke language increasing explosively, the charts always seem to end in 2020. Well, there’s a reason for that. Al-Gharbi’s charts go through 2023, and they tell the real story.