The morning after the night before

Yesterday was election day in my temporary home of Washington DC (an event that almost no one on the planet can have forgotten). With vague threats of conflict hovering over us, I decided to come home from my office early, to assemble the frozen goodies I had bought for a long evening picnic, and to open a bottle of wine in readiness for the first results. It turned out to be not such a long evening after all. By midnight or so, seeing the way the wind was blowing, I went to bed with BBC Radio 5 Live in the background. Things became even clearer as I dozed during the night.

It was very odd finally to wake up to a straightforward and speedy result, when I had prepared myself for a wait of days or weeks (and, following advice, had stocked up the freezer expecting a long haul). Could it be over already? And how did a neck-and-neck race come down to a clear winner within a few hours?

Donald Trump at a campaign rally, Prescott Valley, Arizona, 2016 | Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Over my coffee in the morning, the radio and social media gave voice to many who were either triumphant or stunned. And there were also plenty of commentators being wise after the event (if they really had known all along that Trump was a shoe-in, why had they not said earlier?). But what I noticed most of all – on my walk to the office that I never thought I would have walked so soon after the event – was the strange quiet. Very few people were about, and that stayed true most of the day (I booked a last-minute dinner, without problem, at a local restaurant that is usually completely packed). Maybe people had been up longer than I was and chose to work from home. But it was almost a replay of the morning after Brexit: quiet shock (at least in DC).

I found myself thinking more directly back to Brexit, and to the question of why it all turned out this way. It is too easy to rage about the populism of Trump (and I do that, I assure you). But the soft-to-hard-left (and I am somewhere on that spectrum) need to think about whose voices they are not hearing and why they might look out of touch with loads of people who see themselves as “ordinary”. I thought something similar after the Brexit vote, as I said here (about half the way in), and some of that is relevant now.

If the left has a job, it is as much to persuade as to object.

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