A few years ago, Malcolm Gladwell
wrote a wonderful book called Outliers:
The Story of Success. He offered intriguing theories about life and
achievement, including the notion that real competence in any endeavor requires
doing that endeavor for 10,000 hours. Leaving aside the fact a few social
scientists scoffed at Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule because, they contended, he
offered insufficient empirical data in support of it, we’ve found the 10,000
hour idea, and others he advances, compelling. One of those offers a path for analyzing the
election, his way of looking at airplane crashes.
Gladwell
devoted most of his attention to cultural factors, like inadequate cockpit
communication born out of the reluctance of co-pilots from some cultures to
challenge captains about things they saw going wrong because to do so would
have been to question authority in a way their societies don’t permit. Gladwell, however, also made a point some others
make about air crashes – that many result from the cascading effect of little
things going wrong that add up to a major catastrophe. In most instances,
removal of any one of these “little things” from the equation would have
averted the crash. As we think about
Gladwell’s view of air crashes, the more parallels we see with the election.
Little Things The issue of race figures prominently
in most analyses we’ve seen of the election.
Pundits point out Donald Trump’s support among white working class
voters, add in his offensive rhetoric about ethnic groups, and the instant
analysis says Trump won because of a white backlash against immigrants,
Muslims, the first black president, etc. More left-leaning analysts saw Trump’s
appeal to white voters in general, and Hillary Clinton’s weakness among them,
and concluded that out-and-out white racism decided the election.
Then, there
is the matter of Clinton’s complicity in her own defeat. People supporting this theory look at both
the technical/strategic and the personal.
At a technical/strategic level, they point to her campaign’s failure to
see—until it was too late – Trump’s surge in the upper Midwest and her
selection of Tim Kaine as a running mate instead of a Hispanic, like Housing
Secretary Julian Castro, who might have produced a larger Hispanic vote for the
Democrats. These analysts, in effect,
argue that Clinton could have denied Trump the White House just by running a
better railroad. On the personal front,
others take her to task for the flaws that created some of her heaviest
political baggage, such as her penchant for privacy and secrecy that likely led
to installation of the private e-mail server. Another variation of this
argument focuses on ill-advised decisions Clinton (and her husband) made before
the campaign – giving the Wall Street speeches, how the Clinton Foundation
operated, filling her circle with corporate and social elites instead of cultivating
more relationships with working class people.
Happenings Then, of course, some things just
happened, beginning with FBI Director James Comey’s meddling in the election in
the name of keeping a promise to Congress.
Nothing required Comey to make that promise in the first place and
nothing compelled him to speak on either of the two occasions he did during the
last days of the campaign --- October 28 when he dropped his first bombshell
letter and the Sunday before the election when he tried to clean up the mess
with an exculpatory letter. The damage was done.
We could go
on with the list of theories about why Trump won and Clinton lost, but we’ve
made the point. Any of these things, if changed just a little, could have
altered the outcome of the election. In
that sense, the 2016 election resembles the air crashes Gladwell describes in Outliers. No one will ever explain the result by
reference to just one thing or one set of things. The outcome just shows how
complex and nuanced a world we inhabit.
Lessons What do we learn from looking at the
election through this disaster prism? Three lessons, we suggest. First, be careful about drawing broad
simplistic conclusions. As journalist
Mark Shields reminded us last week, many of the rural and small town areas in
Michigan and Wisconsin that Trump carried so solidly went for Barak Obama in
2008 and 2012. That should give us pause
about automatically casting the inhabitants of those areas as bigoted,
narrow-minded racists promoting mass backlash. Without absolving them from
complicity in Trump’s nastiness, we can acknowledge that maybe they mostly seek
a magic bullet that will expunge the effects of the things that make them feel
left out of the new economic and cultural order. Obama promised “change” too. Maybe that
message, not the color of the messenger, rings truest with them.
Second,
campaigns matter. Trump ran a terrible
campaign as measured by traditional standards of the craft. But, it didn’t
matter, given his celebrity status. Clinton, on the other hand, supposedly the
superior technical politician, made critical mistakes. The three of us are avid sports fans and we
know what will get any football or basketball team beat, no matter the
difference in talent – turnovers.
Hillary turned the ball over plenty in this campaign and it eventually
caught up with her.
Finally, in
campaigns as in air crashes, some things happen that no pilot can control. If
the tail section breaks off no amount of pilot skill can save the plane. That’s
probably the best analogy for the Comey letters. Sometimes things just happen.
A zillion
ways exist to look at this election. For progressives like us, it was a
disaster of the first order. But trying to assign one simple explanation makes
it all the more likely something like this will occur in the future. We need to
know all the possible causes, no matter how small.
