There’s been much talk about the President not facing reality… and that’s obvious… and unfortunate. It’s already led to street violence between Biden supporters and Trump partisans who can’t and won’t accept the fact that Trump lost in a free and fair election. Trump is fomenting the illusion that the election was stolen because that illusion preserves his power. No great surprise there.

But there’s another illusion, one less obvious, that could prove far more dangerous over the years to come… that’s the failure of the Democratic Party to understand that, in all practical terms, it lost the election of 2020, if narrowly.

In an election where the Republican Party ticket was headed by a lying, crooked, misogynistic racist, who mishandled the greatest pandemic in a century, and whose mishandling resulted in enormous economic damage to the entire country and especially to the poorest segments of society, the Democrats lost seats in the House of Representatives, and so far have failed to gain enough seats to capture control of the Senate (despite the fact that 23 Republican Senators were up for re-election and only 12 Democrat Senate seats were on the ballot). Democrats also lost ground overall in state-level elections.

If this was the best the Democrats could do against a ticket headed by Donald Trump, unless the Democratic Party does a complete overhaul of its strategy and messaging, the 2022 mid-term election will be a disaster for Democrats. Some perceptive Democrats have already voiced that concern, but the loud voices of the “progressive” wing of the party seem to be prevailing for the moment.

One well-known and progressive F&SF writer has publicly opposed the idea that “‘defund the police’ should be called something else.” That author goes on to say, “This argument is the same tactic that misogynists use re feminism and racists re BLM, derailing conversations on substance into pedantic nonsense about the name.”

Frankly, while I respect the author and that author’s work, the comment misses the point that any author should know. Words and labels matter. People are overwhelmingly in favor of the “Affordable Care Act,” but a majority oppose “Obamacare.” And too many don’t know that the two are exactly the same thing.

The columnist and author Carl Bernstein [one of the two who uncovered the Watergate conspiracy that ended the Nixon Presidency] has observed that Donald Trump has ignited the “civil cold war” into a hot civil war. And in war, labels become “truths” even when they’re not true at all.

James Clyburn, the black U.S. Congressman whose endorsement ignited Joe Biden’s candidacy has said, “Make headway, not headlines.” And he’s right. When rhetoric gets in the way of accomplishment, it’s time to ditch the rhetoric.

Several others have claimed that progressive Democrats won, while centrist Democrats lost. That’s not quite accurate. Progressive Democrats won progressively inclined districts; they lost ground in less progressive districts. To obtain enough power to change things, they need to win both.

Whether Democrats really understand this or will do anything about it remains to be seen.

Joe Biden got a personal mandate to do his best to unite the country, but the voters delivered a very different message to the Democratic Party. Voters don’t want radical change, and they especially don’t like radical rhetoric. They didn’t like Trump’s inflammatory statements, and they didn’t like what they heard from the far left of the Democratic Party, and what they did hear resulted in losses in the U. S. House and the squandering of an opportunity to flip the Senate.

Now, I just heard a newly elected Democrat Congressman dispute that, saying that the progressive movement elected Joe Biden and that candidates should be free to choose the message that galvanizes their own voters. I agree with the second point, as well as the fact that Biden wouldn’t have been elected without progressive votes, but what the Congressman ignores is that Biden also couldn’t have won with just progressive votes. He also said that he didn’t see how such slogans would matter in other districts. There… I disagree. Given today’s communications systems, Republicans and Democrats alike have taken words and slogans from anywhere in the U.S. and weaponized them. The Republicans were far more effective… and used lies effectively to make people see red, literally and figuratively.

What Democrats need to do is to craft their message in ways that don’t do that to their opponents while still maintaining their goals and positions. As I’ve written more than a few times before, Democrats are too often totally tone-deaf in choosing their slogans and rhetoric. They pick or adopt phrases and terms that, while they resonate within their own groups, absolutely alienate the majority of the body politic.

“Defund the Police” is an example. First, the very words frighten most whites and many others, while unnecessarily angering most police officers. Second, those words misstate the aim of the movement. What those behind the movement want is not to reduce policing, but to reduce bad policing and police brutality, to incorporate better community relations, to develop better strategies and tactics for avoiding confrontation, to develop expertise in dealing with individuals with mental problems [rather than immediately shooting them]… in short, to improve policing so that police force is a last resort rather than the immediate option. But no one simply wanted to rally behind “Improve Policing!”

A second area is health care. Millions of people need affordable healthcare, but right now, government healthcare replacing private insurance isn’t going to fly economically, politically, or practically, and endorsing it raises the spectre of “socialized medicine,” a spectre that a number of Democrat politicians have said cost the party seats in the House and Senate. It also fails to address the real problems, which include the sky-high cost of healthcare itself, the lack of adequate healthcare at all in too many rural and inner city areas, and the high cost of medical education, which forces doctors out of lower-paying medical practices such as in rural areas, or in family/general practice. Making healthcare insurance cheaper and expanding availability while not addressing costs is a recipe for disaster.

Taxes are another area where the Democrats blew it. Raising taxes in any form and on anyone just doesn’t resonate well with most of the electorate, besides which, the tax rates themselves aren’t the real problem and increasing them won’t raise that much money, not without other reforms. The problem is all the special treatments in the tax code. Non-renewable resources can get up to a fifteen percent “depletion” allowance – effectively reducing taxable income by fifteen percent. That’s a subsidy pure and simple, and the tax code is filled with such subsidies. That’s one of the principal reasons why companies and millionaires often don’t pay taxes. Merely increasing tax rates on high earners is likely to be a cosmetic measure that won’t do much at all to increase tax revenues from billionaires, or corporations, but which will scare everyone else.

The Green New Deal and a confused message on energy and environmental issues definitely hurt the Democrats in energy-producing regions… and it was unnecessary. All they had to do was to press for economically-efficient clean energy… and insist that fossil fuels meet clean air standards – which is all they’d ever be able to get out of Congress anyway… if that. But the “progressives” pushed hard for the “Green New Deal” and that alone hurt the Democrats badly in Texas and in other energy-producing areas.

As I’ve also written before, the Democrats need to gain power before they start pressing for radical change. Pressing for such change without power is a sure way to assure that you don’t get power in the Congress, where all changes in law have to occur – and so far they don’t have that power, and likely won’t get it, even if they manage to win both run-off elections in Georgia.

While replacing Trump will improve a great many things, what it won’t do is improve the laws. For that, you need control of both House and Senate, which is looking highly unlikely. And if the Democrats don’t stay focused and united, matters will get even worse… both for the party and the country.

To begin with, stop trying to thwart the will of the electorate. While Donald Trump certainly has the legal “right” to lie [so long as it’s not under oath], to create frivolous lawsuits, and to keep the incoming Administration in the dark for as long as possible, that doesn’t make it right, and it’s certainly not good for the country…and you don’t have to go along with it.

But then, much of what the Republican Party has done in this election hasn’t been good for the country. You’ve whipped up the old-line conservatives, the misogynists, the ultra-conservatives, the rednecks, and the non-college-educated white males into a rage with lies about what the Democrats haven’t done, won’t do, and can’t do. That was enough to trim the Democrat majority in the House and will likely retain your hold on the Senate.

Now you’re pandering to a lying, narcissistic, bullying crook by supporting unsupported charges of non-existent voting fraud, an effort which strongly appears to resemble an attempted coup at worst and delaying and attempting to undermine the transition to a new Administration at best.

All this is, of course, a culmination of the past four years, where the majority of Republican accomplishments were largely destructive, based on an unthinking visceral attempt to gut anything accomplished by the previous administration, regardless of the impact on the country, the economy, public health, or the environment. So far as I can determine, the majority of the positive Republican “accomplishments” in the past four years consisted of a tax bill that provided small tax cuts to most Americans and enormous tax cuts to the wealthy and a modest criminal justice reform bill.

The trade war with China hurt U.S. farmers more than it punished China; China just bought soybeans and other crops elsewhere. The costs of parts and components manufactured in China went up, and so did the prices of U.S. products incorporating them. Despite promising a better health care plan for four years, no plan was ever even drafted. Being against masks and not taking Covid-19 seriously for most of the past year showed a total lack of positive leadership, with the possible exception of speeding up the development of a vaccine. The “deregulation” effort increased air and water pollution and added to the U.S. contribution to global warming. The great Trump wall largely consisted of rebuilding existing barriers and was funded, likely illegally in part, by shifting federal funds Congress allocated to other uses, while the most notable feature of immigration efforts was to rip infants and children from their parents.

Foreign policy, if it can be called that, consisted of being friendly to dictators and other authoritarian governments, while attacking and/or minimizing long-time allies, and, of course, steadfastly refusing to condemn Russian interference in U.S. elections.

And to top it all off, most elected and appointed Republicans in Washington have now demonstrated that they’re largely Donald Trump’s bitches, with neither the guts nor the decency to stand up for democracy and for a peaceful transition of power to a new president.

Is that the kind of legacy and reputation you want?

Donald Trump won’t be president for the next four years, but I don’t see him going way. And Trumpism won’t vanish, even if Trump did. A good reason for that is because Trump effectively personified the anger and resentment of a large segment of the population, and they saw him as their voice against a society they believed had ignored them.

Over 70 million people voted for a lying, narcissistic, marginally competent at best, and totally corrupt incumbent president. One exit poll I saw showed that 85% of his supporters voted for him because of his stand on the issues.

They like the fact that he started a trade war with China, despite the fact that it meant the U.S. government had to provide massive subsidies to U.S. farmers. They like his stand on immigration, despite his stealing money from other programs to build an almost useless wall and despite the absolute cruelty with which his immigration policies were carried out. They either like his racist stands or those stands don’t bother his supporters. They want more coal mining jobs, despite the fact that those jobs will eventually lead to the early death of most miners and that the use of coal-fired power plants make it harder for millions of Americans to breathe. They support the existing structure of police forces despite a police culture that too often relies on brutality, especially against minorities. They like efforts to reduce the voting power of minorities. And most of all, they like his brash attacks on the “liberal” and “elite establishment.”

Now… most of his supporters won’t admit to supporting those specific policies, but there’s no secret about what his stands are on any of those issues… and 70 million angry people voted for him. Some will claim that his supporters are only angry because he lost. That’s bullshit. They were angry before this election. That’s why they voted for him in 2016.

They have reasons for their anger. All across the United States, rural communities are suffering, and many are dying. The income, standard of living, and lifespans of white, non-college-educated American men have dropped over the last thirty years. They don’t like it, and they blame the government and “the establishment.” Many of them also blame women, particularly educated and powerful women.

Because of the cost of environmental regulations, many “dirty” industries went off-shore, and those that didn’t either went high-tech and automated or closed up. The men – and they were largely men – who lost jobs blame the environmentalists and federal environmental regulations. To them, clean air and water come second to having a good paying job. Balanced eco-systems just mean greater chance of failure to farmers and cattle ranchers.

I even know a fair number of writers who violently opposed the Democratic ticket. They equate Democrat proposals with authoritarian dictatorship. I also know more than a few educators and business people who feel the same way, and for all of those people, Trump’s abysmal personal characteristics are secondary to their fear of what they see as the excessively prescriptive and over-regulated nanny state.

So…for these reasons, and quite a few others, Trumpism isn’t going away any time soon, and, if the coming Biden administration doesn’t act to defuse at least some of that anger with specific policies and programs, the 2024 election could revert to one like 2016.

As I was plodding through my editor’s comments on the manuscript she’d returned to me for revision, I couldn’t help but think about those comments in regard to those who might read the book, and it got me to thinking about books and readers in another light.

Certainly, people read fiction for different reasons, but primarily for escape or enjoyment, I’d guess, unless they’re critics, editors, reviewers, or agents… or possibly other writers. I read some books primarily to find out about how that author writes, and I may enjoy or escape into them, but that wasn’t why I picked up those books or loaded them onto my Kindle.

But those are reasons why, and whatever the reason why might be, it doesn’t address how individuals actually read. Does an individual attack the book as though the book represented a track to be sprinted through to get to the end as fast as possible? Or does a reader approach it like a snack, reading it a bit at a time as if between meals, just for a taste at any one time? Or does a reader sink into the book, enjoying every word and phrase, letting the book carry him or her along, not worrying about the pace? Or is the reader an analyst, trying to figure out what’s going to happen, why the author did or didn’t do something, pouncing on every typo as an indication of someone’s fault? Or perhaps the reader’s the type who seeks action or significant revelation every few pages.

Now, obviously, most readers have a bit of all of the “types” I’ve listed, as well as other reading preferences and characteristics, but I’d guess that in every reader, one of those “types” predominates more than others, sometimes varying by their mood and the book they’re reading.

But when a writer does something different, such as adopting more intricate internal structures and more measured pacing, readers who are used to something sparer or faster-paced often get angry or claim such a book is a failure, even when it’s well-written. The same often happens if a thriller writer attempts something more measured and detailed. That’s one reason why the traditional publishers often insist that authors adopt a different pen name for work that’s more than marginally different.

Readers aren’t all the same, and even the same reader can read in different ways depending on many factors. Yet some publishers – and even some readers – seem to think that writers should deliver every book the same way. I’m very fortunate my publisher isn’t one of them.