Ever since Barack Obama left office in 2017, being American has felt a bit like living inside of a pinball machine: We’ve been flying between extremes, pinging off edges, rolling toward what feels like end times and then shooting back into the game.
Stroll down memory lane with me: The promise of the first woman president crashed into the shock of reactionary Trumpism, which itself was met with defiant resistance—Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the Women’s March—each of which was in turn the subject of furious backlash. In the midst of a badly destabilizing pandemic and a chaotic Trump administration, and the lesson that running a woman after a Black man made entire segments of the country lose their collective minds, Americans elected Joe Biden: A moderate, predictable white guy. In response, Trump superfans rioted their way into the Capitol building, Trump’s vice president was threatened with lynching while much of Congress hid from the mob in fear for their lives, and then Republicans largely coalesced around Trump and his stolen-election lies.
Four years later, Donald Trump is running yet again, this time against Kamala Harris, who, despite being a groundbreaking candidate, has not led with her race or gender. And somehow this election is still a nail-biter, so close that even the usually confident numbers guys are saying it’s a coin toss. I’m an American living abroad, which means I’m often asked to explain to people outside of the U.S. how this election remains so close; the problem is, even when I’m back home or speaking with American friends, we’re all flummoxed: This guy might win again?
One thing, I believe, continues to explain the push-pull of Trump’s appeal: Fairness (and, often, a perceived lack thereof). Americans are a fairness-obsessed people, and no candidate in recent years has been as effective at pushing the it’s-not-fair button as Trump. No candidate has so completely perverted the concept of fairness, either. We can only hope that he has finally overplayed that same hand—but we’ll find out for sure on (or after) Tuesday.
As the campaign cycle nears the end, Trump has retreated to the far corners of his worst impulses: fearmongering, conspiracy-theorizing, self-pitying. His replaying of these greatest hits is good news for Democrats: Trump the Bigot may play well at a hardcore MAGA rally, but it turns off more voters than it draws in. Harris’ promise that she’ll be a president for everyone and a champion of individual freedom is far superior messaging. But much of what voters will be weighing when they head to the polls is which candidate they believe will give them and their loved ones a fair shake.
A strong sense of fairness has animated America’s most successful social movements. Americans love the concept of equality under the law: That’s part of why the cases made by the Civil Rights Movement, the feminist movement, and the movement for same-sex marriage were so successful, even if these movements remain unfinished; it’s why programs like affirmative action have long been controversial, and why equality between groups with real biological differences—men and women—has been particularly hard to legislate and enforce. Americans don’t always assess “fairness” the same way. But the concept perpetually shapes Americans’ political preferences—and while both parties lay claim to it, both have managed to lose support when they’ve exceeded the public’s definition of what’s fair and what’s not.
Take immigration. The resonance of Trump’s harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric has shocked and appalled many Americans, myself included. In response to the Trumpian cruelty of the border wall, family separation, and threats of mass deportation, many liberals (Joe Biden included) moved left on immigration, and Biden had many Americans behind him: Trump’s words and actions felt both inhumane and unfair. But that liberalizing impulse has now been significantly scaled back. While unlawful border crossings are now down, they really did spike during the Biden administration; large numbers of immigrants reeling from economic collapse in Venezuela, violence in Central America, and instability worldwide came not just into border states but into cities and towns across the U.S., and even true-blue metropolises felt overwhelmed by a flood of newcomers with few in-country connections and fewer means. This has pushed even many reliably Democratic voters to the edge of their empathy, because it simply feels unfair: Housing, health care, and social supports are in short supply, there are long waitlists of people seeking to come to the U.S. through legal means, and we’re offering our limited resources to people who have jumped the line?
Much of Trump’s case against immigrants is just flat-out racism and xenophobia—there’s no other explanation for assertions like Stephen Miller’s chant of “America is for Americans and Americans only.” But Democrats have shifted right on immigration too, because voters have demanded it—not universally out of racism, but partly out of a sense that the system is being abused.
The Trump campaign has tried a similar tack to secure the suburban female voters they’ve been hemorrhaging since the Dobbs abortion decision. Their “this isn’t fair” case for those voters focuses on trans rights, and specifically, the supposed unfairness of transgender girls playing on girls’ sports teams. On its face, this is an odd issue to latch onto, given that it directly affects just a teeny-tiny number of Americans and, in the grand scheme of things, is pretty low-stakes. But the concept itself feels unfair to a majority of voters, including half of Democrats.
Luckily for Democrats, Trump and his GOP are masterful at overplaying any advantage they may gain in the “fairness” stakes. Conservatives never stick to the limits of what’s fair; they quickly segue into a politics of entitlement, resentment, and control, carried out with enthusiastic cruelty and intentional maliciousness. We see this in Trump’s rhetoric around immigrants and trans people and minorities; we see it in the GOP’s abortion bans. Because the real MAGA goal is not a fair playing field or fair systems; it’s an imbalance that favors white men. Trump’s impulses are not toward fairness; they’re to securing his own power. All of this severely weakens any GOP claim to leveling the playing field. That’s why voters outside of Trump’s core base tend to be repelled by it when they see it.
But Democrats have their own fairness problems. The Trump era brought with it important movements against police violence and male sexual impunity, both efforts to correct centuries-old wrongs. With the Black Lives Matter protests came important if limited changes to policing and prosecutions in various states and cities, including decreased penalties for some minor crimes, an end to cash bail, and greater awareness of racism in policing and society more broadly. With the #MeToo movement came laws better regulating nondisclosure agreements, temporary windows for victims to file old sex abuse lawsuits, and broader recognition of how some men use their power to harass, manipulate, and abuse women and girls. But both movements also saw some overreach. “Defund the police” was a much-used and quickly unpopular slogan that is now (in my opinion unfairly) tied to the perception that cities are more disorderly and crime-ridden than they were before BLM. Progressives didn’t exactly help themselves here, often simply denying that violations like shoplifting or turnstile-jumping were problems. While it’s true that those acts are minor, allowing them to occur en masse and without penalty touches the fairness nerve: “How is it fair that I pay my subway fare and I purchase my own deodorant when scores of others do not, and are not seeing any punishment?”
In this same period, the language of privilege and power moved from the academy to the progressive workplace to the mainstream. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs suddenly seemed to be everywhere in reaction to #MeToo and BLM, and this seemed like a good thing: Finally, Americans were talking a touch more honestly about racism and sexism. But within a few years, much of the public was turning on DEI, frustrated by the sense that these programs created simplistic villains and victims and essentialized people on the basis of their race and gender. What once felt groundbreaking and educational began to feel like a power play—but perhaps most problematically, it began to feel unfair.
The Harris campaign has gone to great lengths to recalibrate. Harris has emphasized her aim to be a president for everyone, downplaying the historic nature of her campaign. And Democrats, even with some historic excesses, really are the people who are trying to make life in America better and fairer for all, rather than putting a thumb on the scale for a long-favored minority group (white men).
The most devastating component of Trumpism has been to manipulate faith in our most basic systems of democracy. Trump, and especially the savvy people around him, surely understand that the 2020 election was not actually rigged, and that the 2024 election won’t be either. But they have exploited that American commitment to fair play—a commitment that extends to American systems. It is a long-held American value that we may not always like a particular outcome, but if the process and the system were both fair, then we accept it. And so, to undermine our faith in the vote, Trump and his allies have not complained about the outcome but about the fairness of the process (even without evidence). Today, scores of Trump supporters, some of them in positions to influence the election outcome, are convinced that there are widespread efforts underway to illegally throw the election to Harris. And Trump has made clear that if he loses, no matter the context or the facts on the ground, he will claim that the election was stolen.
It is a cliché to say that a person’s biggest strengths are also often their most vulnerable weaknesses, but the same may be true for a country. The U.S. has never been a fair or equal place, but throughout our history, there have been people and mass movements that have fought to make it so. There have been counterforces and backlashes and overcorrections, and then forward motion again—usually when the public is convinced that a change is only fair. Many, of course, have labored to maintain inequality and to keep unfairness working in their favor. But the fundamental ideal that things should be fair has animated activists on both sides of the political aisle (if disproportionately on the left). Trump is not the first politician to exploit that admirable aim. But he is the first in the modern era to so avidly try to deform the desire for fairness into the destruction of American democracy—and to have an entire party apparatus behind him.
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