Thoughts on American individualism and the election

Something I noticed a day or two after the election was that I had very few people I felt I could process it with outside of my home. I sent some short text messages to a few people, but I mostly found myself in conversation with people I don’t know in real life on social media platforms, namely Threads and Bluesky.

I constantly lament the fact that it feels like I don’t have a strong community around me, even though I live only 30 minutes from where I grew up. I know a lot of people and have a lot of “friends” but life in the U.S. often feels deeply anti-social to me. I have always hated this. And that feeling has only grown since I became a parent 12+ years ago. It takes a village to raise kids but the way we raise kids is in our little individual silos. People with large families who live close to them, or even those with small but very involved families, may not experience this feeling of alienation. I suspect most non-white Americans may not have this experience either, as their parents or grandparents come from cultures and marginalized situations where mutual aid and communal gatherings are important, where socializing is essential.

I’ve written about it before, but my in-laws in Cuba are a good example of this. Cubans socialize with their family members and even neighbors and they help each other because they have to. This doesn’t mean there’s no conflict; in fact, conflict is common. But there’s not this overriding belief in “fending for oneself” like there is here. The vast majority of countries in the Global South live this way, though even in Europe many societies are more socially-oriented than the US.

I keep coming back to the thought that so many of the problems with this country stem from its pathological individualism. I believe that is how we get outcomes like this election, where people either can’t think past their own pocketbook to vote for the candidate who will protect democracy, or they actually aspire to be rich like Trump or Musk and are deluding themselves into thinking they live in a meritocracy where the system isn’t rigged against them.

This is not to put all the blame on working-class, non-college-educated voters, who voted for Trump in large numbers. One of the biggest stories of this election is that these voters are no longer only white. Many of them consume media filled with misinformation, and this is particularly bad in Spanish-language media. But also, Democrats simply did not speak to their very real struggles with inflation. They tried to say, no you’re wrong, the economy is good, rather than leaning into people’s pain. While this was the truth, and of course inflation is not Biden’s fault, it’s clear that Democrats expected far too much from American voters. They thought voters had the critical thinking capacity to analyze why inflation was happening, that it was a global phenomenon related to the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, etc. But, and I know this will sound elitist, most American voters are not very smart or curious. They don’t want to hear that problems like inflation and immigration are complex. They just want to hear someone float a solution, even if it’s preposterous and/or scapegoats groups of people who have absolutely nothing to do with the problem.

There’s no one reason Democrats lost. There are many reasons. Sexism: YES. Racism: YES. Global anti-incumbent sentiment: YES. Transphobia: YES. I know there are many people in this country who will never vote for a woman, especially a Black woman, but I also absolutely believe there are non-ideological voters who don’t really care who’s in the Oval Office—they just believe Trump is gonna lower prices at the grocery store. And they haven’t thought through what is for me the quite obvious implications of deporting millions of immigrants and imposing tariffs on China: higher prices!

Regardless of their reasons for voting for Trump, this is the choice Americans made, and I don’t think we can explain it all away by talking about media disinformation or inflation. At the end of the day, we are all adults. We have choices and we have agency. And Black voters, who disproportionately feel the effects of inflation, still voted for the candidate who did not try to overthrow the government, who is not a convicted felon and rapist. There are many Black media outlets that traffic in misinformation, and yet, although there was an uptick in Black men voting for Trump, they still voted overwhelmingly for Kamala. As some people I follow on social media have pointed out, this is because Black voters are used to having to choose between two terrible options. They have never had a viable candidate who truly put their needs first, including Obama, and yet they have always voted in a way that will do the least harm for the most people. This tells me there’s still a very strong current of communal thinking in the Black community—and this sadly seems to have waned a lot among Latinos.

One thing we still don’t know (as far as I know) is how voter turnout looked in terms of race, but we do know millions of Democrats sat this election out. You could also view this decision through the lens of American individualism, in that these voters placed their personal ideology before the good of the country as a whole—whether it was because of Gaza or something else, I believe withholding your vote in protest is ultimately a selfish decision. And this is not because I’m not horrified by our country funding a genocide—I am and I was very put off by the fact that Kamala completely ignored the issue on the campaign trail. But I also think it was fairly obvious that Trump wouldn’t be better for Palestinians, and Netanyahu openly rooting for him was a huge red flag. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the people who withheld their vote were white leftists who were so short-sighted in wanting to punish Biden/Harris for Gaza that they have now put countless fellow Americans at risk.

Speaking of folks who seem to be allergic to the notion of solidarity, for a third time I was in the minority of white women who voted for Kamala. We are much less likely to feel the material effects of inflation compared to Black, Latino or indigenous people, so we can’t use that excuse. White women have always been foot soldiers for the patriarchy, prioritizing our own comfort and privilege and proximity to white, male power over the liberation and equality of women writ large. And white feminism has always been highly individualistic. I think that’s how we can see outcomes like abortion protections winning in almost every state (only lost in Florida because they needed a 60% vote, not a simple majority). Seems like a lot of people (prob mostly white women) wanted to have their cake and eat it too. Maybe they agreed with MAGA’s xenophobia or transphobia, but also wanted to make sure they could get an abortion. And this voting tactic may backfire spectacularly. Because if the GOP passes a national abortion ban, it will supersede our state protections.

I also see American individualism/exceptionalism rearing its head with respect to immigration. Based on reporting that has come out since the election (sorry I’m not including links here, but I’ve read several pieces saying the same thing): many new Trump voters were immigrants themselves, naturalized citizens who now want to close the border and believe those given humanitarian parole “skipped the line” and should be deported. Apparently many Latino immigrants don’t actually believe they or their families are at risk under Trump—they either don’t believe he’ll do what he said he was gonna do, or they see themselves as the “good” immigrants, not criminals, and thus won’t be targeted. It seems to me these voters wanted to protect their own little piece of this capitalist hellhole, and it will blow up spectacularly in their faces. I don’t wish them harm of course, but I think they’ve fallen into the trap of toxic individualism that seems to infect everyone who comes here.

One of the things that most put me off about Kamala’s campaign was that she never had one good thing to say about immigrants. The incredibly accomplished daughter of two incredibly accomplished immigrants could not muster up one word to counter the most vile, racist xenophobia I’ve ever heard in my life coming from Trump and Vance. She only talked about the border bill and keeping people out. So yes, a lot of Latino voters were engaging in magical thinking when they voted for Trump—but Kamala’s campaign didn’t present an alternative view of immigrants and how much good they do in and for this country. As many people have written, her strategy was to try and out-law-and-order the GOP.

Democrats never seem to learn that moving to the center/right doesn’t work and that it’s just morally gross to continuously throw your base under the bus. I have very little faith in a party that took its sweet time in prosecuting Trump and did nothing to prevent him from running again. (On that note, I’ve discovered

Sarah Kendzior

’s newsletter and it’s 🔥). Perhaps they will learn that they need to stop treating Latino voters as a monolith, and put in the work with the different Latino constituencies to speak to their concerns. Latinos are overwhelmingly working-class and that’s probably why they loved Bernie so much. They’re now getting their news mostly from social media and right-wing media outlets that push a constant stream of misinformation so it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand it would be a grave mistake for Dems to keep taking their cues from CNN/MSNBC pundits. Working-class voters don’t consume that media, they don’t read NYT or WaPo.

(Don’t get me started on how the collapse of the media industry will exacerbate the educated/non-educated divide and keep Americans polarized by class: good-quality, fact-based reporting is increasingly subscription-based and thus available only to those with disposable income.)

Democrats need to overhaul the entire fucking party and their whole strategy if they’re to win back at least the portion of working-class voters who aren’t culture warriors or Christian nationalists.

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I didn’t start out writing this post intending to get into all the election stuff—I’m obviously not a political scientist or expert on American politics, and even as I write, I’m asking myself why any of you would want to read anything I have to say about the election. But I guess in my mind, our country’s political situation feels intertwined with how individualistic American culture and social norms are, which was supposed to be the point of this post.

I want to work toward a more community-oriented life for myself and my kids, and I don’t know if that’s possible in this country. I wish I could put a “but” after that phrase, but really there is no but. Americans re-elected a pathological narcissist whose entire worldview is constructed around exploitative and toxic individualism. That is who we are.