2024 race shapes up: Elites vs. pitchforks | Will Bunch Newsletter

Miami had a reputation for political sanity when both major parties held successful conventions there, but something changed after Hunter S. Thompson raced his red Chevy convertible off the Fontainebleau parking lot in 1972. A dark new millennium brought a Brooks Brothers riot, an influx of Proud Boys, and, starting Tuesday, the United States v. Donald Trump. Storm clouds are moving south.

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📮 Last week’s question about the teen mental health crisis in America really struck a chord with readers. Nearly a dozen of you responded — many with long notes and passionate ideas. A couple of threads emerged, including social media. “Young folks are overwhelmed and super saturated with a universe that really does not exist[,] on social media,” wrote Mary Ann Petro. “They are trying to live up to standards that are not real and easily stumble in trying to live up to and replicate these standards.” Others, though, blamed the messed-up world handed them by grown-ups. “Maybe imagining the hellscape that the Earth will be by the time they reach 40 years old due to climate change may have something to do with it,” wrote Jim Landers.

This week’s question: Summer travel season has finally arrived. What’s a great, go-to destination within a half-day’s drive of Philadelphia? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

It starts with two of the most unpopular major-party nominees in American history. The Democrats’ effort to anoint their aging pick — and hopefully avoid a messy primary — proves impossible, as a New England-y outsider enters the race and starts defying expectations. On the right, Donald Trump’s inevitability flummoxes both his overcrowded field of GOP rivals and a Beltway, Ivy-educated punditry stumped by his appeal. Trump has something else going for him: the distraction of two third-party candidates in the form of a centrist from a small state and a left-wing radical.

I just described the 2024 presidential election. I also just described the 2016 presidential election.

A few weeks ago, HBO’s popular Succession aired a ”U.S. election night” episode that had a lot of viewers taking to social media to say they were creeped out by how much they were reminded of Nov. 8, 2016 — the night Donald Trump was elected 45th president. They weren’t wrong, but maybe political fanatics should be more freaked out by something else eerily similar to 2016: the 2024 election, at least so far.

It gets late early out there, Yogi Berra is said to have said, and while there’s nearly 17 months to go until the next painful election night, one can start to see that a second 100-year political perfect storm of the variety that promises chaos — if not a stunning return of the twice-impeached, twice-indicted (so far) Trump — is blowing in the wind.

Consider: a decaying political system dead-set on offering voters the choice between Trump and President Joe Biden — even though both just posted dismal approval ratings of 31%. A middle-class electorate that seems just as angry as in 2016 — but now drunk on conspiracy theory. And this story is missed by TV pundits who seem clueless that the voters who hate today’s politicians hate them even more.

The casting for this remake has been exquisite: Joe Biden in the role of Hillary Clinton, handed the inevitability cloak by the Democratic establishment and yet forced to quell a mini-rebellion in his ranks. Donald Trump is starring as himself — but this time he’s out for revenge. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a much darker take on the old Bernie Sanders character of a left-field primary rival, opposing brainy scientists instead of greedy billionaires. The writers reprised the role of unlikable Florida governor, getting Ron DeSantis to play Trump foil Jeb Bush, but with authoritarian energy. They even brought back Chris Christie!

But the most ominous development for the American voter watching from their couch is the return of the third-party candidate, with the self-proclaimed centrist group No Labels seemingly dead set on launching West Virginia’s Sen. Joe Manchin as a new, better funded version of 2016′s pointless centrist, New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson. And now comes academic firebrand (and former hardcore Bernie Sanders supporter) Cornel West, who could appeal to just enough disaffected leftists and young voters to tip the final outcome toward the Republicans — just as the more-obscure Jill Stein arguably did in 2016.

I think the reason that we’re seeing the same personality types and dynamics as 2016 is that voters are in the same rage-driven mood as 2016, except more so. Over the last decade, a cottage industry of experts has developed to analyze the bitter divisions between the left and the right. That fissure is real, but it seems the split that truly animates 2024 is clueless elites against everyone else, with there being a lot more of everybody else.

Joe Biden is clearly the candidate of rationality, facts, and expertise. He is the one who believes in a public-health response to COVID-19 and in the efficacy of vaccines. He also spent some of his priceless political capital to get a bill that actually spends good money on climate change. Under his watch, unemployment hit record lows while the inflation spike is fading. The former guy had “Infrastructure Week” but Biden actually got a bill — something to remember when interstates are collapsing in your hometown.

You’d think that guy would be clobbering the double-indictment guy, but he’s not. The cliché is the angry, working-class voter shouting “(Bleep) your feelings,” when today he’s screaming “(Bleep) your facts.” On the right, voters who swooned in 2016 about Trump “telling it like it is” — code for rants against immigrants, Black people, or women — today blame any indictment, impeachment, sexual-abuse lawsuit, climate disaster, or pandemic as just the newest conspiracy by “deep state” bureaucrats, mad scientists, and the media’s “enemies of the people” to take out their protector.

But there is also restlessness on Biden’s left flank. The latest sign was the move by the well-known ex-Harvard academic West — who worked within the Democratic Party in 2016 and 2020 trying to elect Sanders — to enter the race on a leftist People’s Party line. “Neither political party wants to tell the truth about Wall Street, about Ukraine, about the Pentagon, about big tech,” West said in announcing his bid. “Do we have what it takes? We shall see.”

There was no one like Cornel West siphoning votes from Biden in 2020. Likewise, there was no group like No Labels promising to spend $70 million or more on a centrist alternative. Instead, in that election, the daily insanity of Trump as it faced a pandemic that claimed the lives of 1 million Americans created a sense of urgency that caused people — albeit just barely enough people — to rally behind the rational guy and a return to normalcy.

A lot of TV talking heads assumed 2024 would be a 2020 repeat, and maybe that will happen 17 months from now, but it feels less likely. The (sort of) ended pandemic has turned out to be a lingering source of resentment for many voters, just as the Great Recession was in the 2010s. A lifetime public health servant like Dr. Anthony Fauci has become a punching bag for DeSantis on the far right and for RFK Jr. on the left. The college/non-college divide, in which a resentful and growing number of the 63% percent of Americans without a 4-year degree don’t revere expertise but revile it, is getting wider and wider.

The Democrats may lose their claim on rationality if the 2024 election shows they keep repeating the same thing and expecting a different result. The Beltway pundits who seems so befuddled and even a bit angry that Trump looks unbreakable on the GOP side and that Biden is drawing dissenters don’t seem to get what most excites those voters — their own elite, Ivy-covered befuddlement. Time is running out for the folks with the diplomas to figure this one out.

Question: How long before I-95 is repaired? — Via Kathy @MsCappy1015 on Twitter

Answer: Kathy, you are one of several readers who asked variations on this question. The official answer, as of Tuesday, is some variation of either a) “months, not weeks” or b) “we don’t know, exactly.” Some folks have claimed that Sunday’s stunning collapse of Northeast Philadelphia’s northbound lanes of the Eastern Seaboard’s main artery (with collateral damage on the southbound side) — the tragic result of a fatal oil-tanker-truck crash and ensuing fire — is a dramatization of America’s infrastructure crisis. That crisis is real, but in this case the accident occurred on a stretch that the feds and the state had already spent hundreds of millions of dollars to modernize. The real test here is how efficiently Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Gov. Josh Shapiro and other leaders can spend the dollars allocated by Congress in 2021. I would challenge them to turn I-95 into an around-the-clock demonstration of what the American worker can do. Let’s show the world that the U.S. of A. can open a road in weeks, not months!

This may be the most bizarre thing in American politics right now, which is really saying something. There is no stranger hill for today’s Republican politicians to die on than that of Civil War Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg, whose own soldiers would also probably die on that hill if he were in command. Indeed, Bragg was such a poor battlefield leader, not to mention a moral midget, that the North Carolinian should surely have been mostly forgotten to history. Instead, his fellow North Carolinians — during a moment of peak antebellum nostalgia from the Daughters of the Confederacy, in 1918 — chose Bragg as namesake for the local U.S. Army base that grew to become a major American military landmark.

Last year, after a racial reckoning that had the millions of Americans who’d marched over the police murder of George Floyd also wondering why so many of our military bases are named for men who fought to preserve slavery, a renaming commission empowered by Congress ditched the Fort Bragg moniker in favor of Fort Liberty. Somehow, this slap in the face of “tradition” or whatever Southerners are calling white supremacy this week, has found its way into the 2024 presidential race.

“It’s an iconic name and iconic base,” DeSantis told a gathering of Tarheel State Republicans, vowing to restore the Braxton Bragg nameplate if he’s elected America’s 47th president next year. “We’re not going to let political correctness run amok in North Carolina.” A second challenger for the GOP nomination, former Vice President Mike Pence, picked up this political hand grenade and ran with it, also promising to re-rename the home of the storied 82nd Airborne and “end political correctness in the halls of the Pentagon.”

A lost cause? A 2016 biography of Bragg is titled, Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy, earning that honor — according to the synopsis — with “a reputation for incompetence, for wantonly shooting his own soldiers, and for losing battles.” Wrote history scholar John Potter: “He was vain, petty, jealous of any successes won by his subordinates.” His Confederate troops lost every battle save one, Chickamauga, where Union forces committed a tactical blunder. There’s also this, from Duke University visiting historian Michael Newcity: “Between the Mexican War and the Civil War, Braxton Bragg lived the life of a genteel planter on a sugar cane plantation in Louisiana where slaves put in backbreaking labor in unspeakable conditions to bring molasses to market and earn Bragg a profit.”

Indeed, the more one learns about Braxton Bragg, the more you can see him as an avatar of the 2024 Republican primaries. Isn’t he what their campaign is all about: the right of thoroughly mediocre white men to rise to the greatest heights of American society?

Would the Tea Party — the far-right political uprising in the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency that came to dominate political chatter — grow up to become something more violent and dangerous to U.S. democracy? I was fascinated by that question on this date 13 years ago, as I highlighted on my blog Attytood a New York Times op-ed by J.M. Bernstein. He wrote: “But if their nihilistic rage is deprived of interrupting political meetings as an outlet, where might it now go? With such rage driving the Tea Party, might we anticipate this atmospheric violence becoming actual violence, becoming what Hegel called, referring to the original Jacobins’ fantasy of total freedom, ‘a fury of destruction?’” Bernstein’s question seems beyond prescient today. Read my June 13, 2010 post: “The Tea Party: A show about nothing?”