You probably thought we just went through a national election, but it turns out what really happened was Most Americans were sending a message in a bottle, and for some reason which will go unexplained they were addressing it to David Brooks's information bubble so he could get a better idea of what's going on in Most Americans' lives and share it with his readers ("What the Voters Are Trying to Tell Us"):
Yup, I wanted a grand rebuke, too. I wanted Trump demolished by 10 points. But elections are educational events. Voters are not always wise, but they are usually comprehensible. They know more about their own lives than we in our information bubbles do, and they almost always tell us something important.
The first thing we heard from most Americans — since Joe Biden’s popular vote victory seems all but certain — is that Donald Trump is unacceptable. We live in a divided, dug-in nation, but millions more white evangelicals voted Democratic in 2020 than in 2016. Many people voted against partisan predilections to remove a man who is a unique menace to the foundations of this country. That is no meager accomplishment.
The second thing voters told us is this: Separate church and state. We’ve long had political polarization in this country and we still will. But over the last few years polarization has transmogrified into something worse: a religious war.
Even the worser angels of David Brooks's nature are so much better than ours, it's no surprise that the better angels are totally insufferable.
We don't at the moment know by what percentage Biden has beaten Trump, other than that it wasn't by 10 points, as David Brooks would have wished, but we do know how to interpret it, in a way that David Brooks coincidentally might approve of. It's enough to prove that nobody wants Donald Trump to be president, but not enough to prove that those of us who wanted Donald Trump not to be president were right. I hope that's clear.
