The Ghost of Jean-Jacques Rousseau Drives Men Mad: ANNOYANCE OF THE DAY
It rebukes. It hands out mandates. It shares one mind, one heart, one spirit, and one will. What is it? It is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s General Will, his La Volonté Générale. For, you see, when people vote, they either do or should do so based not on what they personally will but based on what they think the generality wills. And political liberty consists in being able—indeed required—to carry out the general will once majority voting has ascertained it, even or perhaps especially if one were to discover when the votes are counted that one had been mistaken about what the general will actually was. These Rousseauist ideas, or perhaps their ghosts, are leading to an awful lot of fuzzy thinking today. And they may spark a great deal of additional trouble in the future:
And commentators who think they do and certainly would reject Jean-Jacques Rousseau outright are reasoning from him anyway.
The result is a bad reading of a shift at the margin, in a country still split along at least six largely independent lines of division. the move from R+1 to D+13 means only one voter in fourteen chose differently, and 60% of that came from turnout rather than people switching sides. The Republican floor is still about 13/28 of the electorate. The result is real and welcome, but it is not a change of a single unitary national heart. Calling it one is rather clownish.
For example, Andrew Prokop is said and I personally know him to be a smart man.
But Andrew Prokop is simply not anchored in reality today.
Two years ago, a hair less than half the people who went to the polls voted for Democratic candidates. On November 3, 2026, 8/14 of the people who went to the polls voted for Democratic candidates. That’s 1/14 of the poll-goers changed their minds, or dropped out and were replaced by others who thought differently. That is a marginal change in how Americans think and vote. And yet we have:
Andrew Prokop: A Massive Blue Wave Just Hit America. Here’s What It Could Bring Next <https://www.vox.com/politics/508927/midterms-blue-wave-democrats-win-texas>: ‘Democrats won bigger than practically anybody expected Tuesday, and the post-Trump political era is here…. It’s a blue tsunami…. President Donald Trump’s approval cratering, and mounting outrage over gas prices, the war in Iran, healthcare, and corruption…. The historic shift…. Americans are waking up in a different country today — one in which voters have decisively repudiated Trump’s party…. The night was also, as election analyst Sean Trende put it, “a complete collapse of the Republican coalition.” Democrats will now have a chance to carry out the mandate they’ve been handed…
And we have:
Derek Thompson: The Trump Decade Is Over <https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-trump-decade-is-over>: ‘Ten years ago this week, Donald Trump stunned the world to win the US presidential election. Last night, in his final midterm election, the president’s party suffered a historic collapse…. I think the Trump Decade is over. And, frankly, I think I might still be in a state of shock…. When commentators say “I don’t recognize this country,” they typically mean it in a bad way. But, in my frazzled state of disbelief, I’m genuinely finding it hard to wrap my mind around an election result where Kansas voted like New Hampshire and Mississippi voted like Wisconsin…
And:
Timothy Burke: The News: The White Feather <https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/the-news-the-white-feather>: ‘It’s all good news today. It’s great news, in fact. Resist anyone who tries to reductively encompass the electoral results… as just being about a couple of narrow mistakes: a war here, a tariff there. That bullshit is already being shovelled…. This was a strong national majority saying that they’re sick of…the dysfunction… cruelty… the American government… threatening to attack Canada and seize Greenland… masked paramilitary goons drag[ging] men and women out of their cars… the corruption… oligarchs doing as they please… plugging beef tallow and ivermectin… seeing a President kiss Putin’s ass… watching white-collar criminals buy their way to pardons…. Voters who went [Democrats’] way are furious over… the entirety of the last decade, with everything from 2016 until November 3, 2026, including the Biden interregnum…. More than a few actors and screenwriters and publicists and producers… began to laboriously reinvent themselves as loyally MAGA-adjacent…. Our job now [is] to hold the cowards accountable…. It was only two years that they needed to dig in before this country’s people forcibly demanded change. We need that generation… to step aside…. They ran in cowardly disarray…. We need to be ready in 2028 to move decisively into a future where dreams are possible and nightmares a fading memory…
And:
Noah Smith: Normal Americans Punished MAGA <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/normal-americans-punished-maga>: ‘Texas and Kansas and South Carolina have been turned blue by a coalition of voters who aggressively, emphatically neither know nor care about gender-swapped Draco Malfoy, or Anakin Skywalker memes, or any of the other nonsense that bounces around the rightist echo chambers on X and 4chan. It was a coalition that never read Elon’s never-ending stream of tweets about James Talarico wanting to “trans your kids and destroy the border”. It was a coalition that does not know or care whether it’s white French people or brown French people burning down Paris this week…. Normal Americans do exist — in great numbers, in fact….
The risk now is that [Democrats] don’t learn…. Just as MAGA convinced themselves that the average American was a meme-spouting rightist, Democrats might marinate in their own echo chambers, egged on by leftist activists and progressive pressure groups and Bluesky cancel-culture warriors…
And:
Zack Beauchamp: Trump’s Authoritarianism Caused the Democratic Tsunami <https://www.public-reason.com/p/trumps-authoritarianism-caused-the>: ‘This election was primarily a revolt against Trump — and, specifically, his flagrant disinterest in actually delivering… cost-of-living improvements…. The Iran war is the biggest culprit, but corruption and the tariffs seem (among other things) to have mattered. These decisions were… the direct product of the authoritarian structure of the second Trump administration…. American democracy is a lot more resilient than is widely appreciated. There are very few other countries where an elected strongman has received this kind of decisive rebuke from voters less than two years after launching an authoritarian takeover bid…. Deep reservoirs of American democratic strength pushing back on him. That’s pretty damn great…
And:
Matthew Yglesias: The Way Forward <https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-way-forward>: ‘The country that delivered a real mandate to Donald Trump in 2024 — a mandate to secure the border and bring down inflation — turned sharply against him because he utterly failed to bring down inflation and embarked on an alarming orgy of corruption. Those choices set the table for a plausible Democratic Senate majority despite the map, and then Democrats ran very good candidates in a lot of key races…. If they make smart choices, they can spend the next two years putting the boot on the neck of MAGA and the four after that restoring the country’s confidence in Democrats. If they get sloppy, lazy, or undisciplined, we’ve seen over and over again that large electoral swings are very real and they happen in both directions…
To all of these, my friends, I say: NO NO NO NO NO NO NO! NO!!!!!
Probably it was that madman Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s fault. He wrote that when people vote in elections they do not or should not vote for what would be good for them individually but for what would be good for all collectively:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762): The Social Contract <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46333/46333-h/46333-h.htm>: ‘When in the popular assembly a law is proposed, what the people is asked is not exactly whether it approves or rejects the proposal, but whether it is in conformity with the general will, which is their will. Each man, in giving his vote, states his opinion on that point; and the general will is found by counting votes. When therefore the opinion that is contrary to my own prevails, this proves neither more nor less than that I was mistaken, and that what I thought to be the general will was not so. If my particular opinion had carried the day I should have achieved the opposite of what was my will; and it is in that case that I should not have been free…
Thus the electorate, the people, is a hive-mind. Their disagreements are simply different noisy registers of what their collective will is. They really have one purpose, one mind, one set of values. Thus the opinion as registered by the majority is indeed the opinion of all—or of all in their best-self aspects, as fellow-citizens of the republic who believe in and share the general will.
That is the only context in which it makes any sense to find oneself speaking of voters as a group with a single agency that does things that it wills the same way I pick up this coffee cup at my left hand.
This is the only context in which it is anything other than ludicrous bozo-the-clownish nonsense to say that we have:
Prokop’s “voters… decisively repudiated Trump’s party… Democrats… have been handed [a mandate]”,
Trende’s “complete collapse of the Republican coalition”,
Burke’s “voters… furious over… everything from 2016 until November 3, 2026, including the Biden interregnum…”
Smith’s “coalition of… normal Americans… in great numbers”,
Beauchamp’s “decisive rebuke… less than two years after launching an authoritarian takeover bid”,
Yglesias’s “the exact same country… delivered a real mandate to Donald Trump in 2024… [and now has] turned sharply against him…”.
As I wrote earlier today <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/well-that-was-a-thing-bullet-dodged>: The Republican floor is still 13/28 of the electorate: older, whiter, rural, and “evangelical” (and profoundly unChristian, if I may say so). It splits roughly in half between self-described MAGA voters and party loyalists who say Trump wasn’t a factor in their vote. Four-fifths say high prices aren’t Trump’s doing. Few report feeling under affordability pressure. A move from R+1 in 2024 to D+13 in 2026 means only one voter in fourteen chose differently. Only 40% of that was conversion, and half of that was of people who say they dislike both parties. 60% was turnout.
In 2024 the Baddies won. In 2026 the Baddies lost. In neither case did the voters speak with their one single voice which is their shared general will. The country is divided: male-female, white-Black, nonHispanic-Hispanic, rich-poor, uneducated-educated, southernrural-northernurban, and more than those six largely-independent axes. And, since the ascension of Newt Gingrich in 1993, a Republican Party that has gone whole-hog behind the plan of doing everything they can to break the country in two along some of those fault lines in the hopes of coming away with the larger or at least the gerrymandered part so that they can please kleptocrats and plutocrats in this their life in office, and receive the rewards of their subservience in their next life in post-political retirement.
There are grave problems with a political system that rests upon the fiction that a country has a single general will that everyone shares, and that individual voters choose based on their noisy perception of that general will in which they participate. It would be good if there were such a general will. And much of the craft of political action is the use of public reason to construct such a thing.
Work hard to do so. But, meanwhile a great deal of nonsense is being said today, based on lazy and unexamined and false Rousseauist premises and assumptions that such a thing exists.