Here is a brief anecdote that may help contextualize some recent developments, in particular why anyone black, or brown, or uneducated, or poor may have preferred Trump over Harris.

Two apartments ago, a bit before Covid, we were living in a 2-bedroom apartment in Northwest DC that was absolutely gargantuan by European standards but must have seemed cramped for a family of five-plus-a-house-guest to our neighbors. One neighbor in particular, let’s call her Alice, seemed unusually interested in the goings on of our household: the foreign accents, the visiting grandparents, so many children. So she made a point to, whenever we bumped into each other in the hallway, gather as much information as possible, and give a few bits about herself in return.

Alice worked for a federal agency, you see, and as a hard-core democrat was trying to minimize the chaos that the orange man — this was during the first Trump administration — and his peons spewed on the people. Now the agency in question was healthcare-adjacent so my wife and I, both being physicians, knew that the problems ran deeper than the president and his appointees, but that is not the point of the story.

The point is this: with every interaction, Alice would highlight that we were not US citizens, then highlight some more that we had visiting family members who also were not citizens and who may or may not be in the country legally (they were all, of course, visiting on a tourist visa as they have been in more than a decade since we moved from Serbia), then apologize for what Trump was doing to the immigrants and aren’t we all lucky that DC is a town of welcoming democrats and can you please let her know if we needed any help with anything, at which point Alice would — unironically — wink.

It’s hard for me to say what felt more insulting, the sly and not so sly insinuations that we were there illegally, the entitlement that we must be best of friends because we were immigrants, or the expectation of gratitude to all the democrats for “fighting on our behalf” when there was no fighting to be had. And this is before we even had our green cards, staying on a combination of work and (this is my favorite name for a bureaucratic invention) Alien of extraordinary ability visas. I can only imagine how much worse the feeling would have been if we were citizens with the unfortunate property of having an unusual accent or unconventional (for upper-middle-class-non-hispanic-whites) housing arrangements.

To be clear, I have no idea what Alice’s intentions were. I am pretty sure she didn’t want to insult anyone, and that her thoughts and feelings were true. And it is often the case that someone can feel insulted for reasons completely within their control: a slight sense of shame that you weren’t living up to someone’s arbitrary standards, annoyance that you are spending hours on immigration paperwork when others don’t have to yet feel as welcome, outrage that anyone would give even a hint of a suggestion that you are a family of Anne Franks looking for an attic. All internal and within your own control, but not any less true. Humans being humans.

This was all before Covid-19. After March 2020 our hallway conversations turned into talks about masks, vaccines, and how everyone was grateful to have doctors in the building. About a year into the pandemic another neighbor ran out of their antipsychotic medications and started setting small fires and hitting random hallway doors with baseballs bats so we were soon out — the benefits of renting — but we stayed on good terms with Alice. Still, those first few impressions stuck, and majority of our interactions are only first impressions without the benefit of a pandemic to deepen a relationship.

One of the defining properties of America is, I’ve learned over the years, the tendency to go all-in. People don’t just go on a hike or two a year, they buy hiking gear, download hiking apps, plan out routes and become hikers. They don’t go out for a jog when the weather is nice and they feel like it, they train for a marathon. They don’t enjoy a night out at a restaurant, they rate and review and call themselves “foodies”. They don’t just like their work, they do it on evenings and weekends and holidays too. That is how you get to the highest GDP of any developed country, I guess, but there is also some subtlety lost and the democrats who were all-in on immigration have lost that subtlety and unintentionally — I hope — fanned the flames of indignation across the board. So not only were those pro-immigration efforts insufficient to overcome the feelings about the economy, they may have even hurt.