Now we must hold Democratic elites accountable for this disaster.

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The presidential election was not announced until early Wednesday morning, but by midnight overwhelming evidence had emerged that Democrats were headed for a disaster comparable to 2016. Donald Trump was already leading in every battleground state. Republicans were poised to win the Senate, but the House remains narrow. Once the final votes are counted, there is a real danger of a trifecta for Republicans. Donald Trump also appears to have won the popular vote, something he didn’t get in his first two presidential bids.

Mr. Trump is now in a position where he could do great damage during his second term. Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are expected to resign from the Supreme Court and be replaced by similar, much younger right-wing ideologues. This will lock the right wing in the nation’s highest courts for generations to come. President Trump could also renew the 2017 tax cuts, ensuring that trillions of dollars in wealth is held by billionaires rather than being taxed to benefit the country. President Trump could also implement the extremist policy of Project 2025, a plan to rebuild the American government along plutocratic lines.

Now that Trump has won a second term, it’s worth noting that there was absolutely no accountability for Democrats when Trump was elected in 2016. Losing an election to someone as dangerous and corrupt as Donald Trump will force political parties to take some serious action inwardly. Reflect on the failures of their own policies and political strategies. Instead, every Democrat responsible for the failures of 2016, including Hillary Clinton, found a way to blame someone other than themselves. This was most evident in the spread of the Russiagate fantasy, which had little kernel of truth but became an elaborate liberal myth to avoid the failures of their own policies.

In addition to Vladimir Putin, other alleged culprits for Trump’s victory include the Bernie brothers, who nonetheless reportedly sat out the election, and James Comey, who released two letters regarding the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton. , including the media that exaggerated the Clinton email story and fed it to Trump. Too much airtime and the prejudice of the American public as a whole. While some of these factors played a role in Trump’s victory, they primarily served as a distraction from the inconvenient truth for party elites: that Clinton and the Democratic Party bear far more responsibility. did. While Clinton ran an uninspiring campaign that focused too much on Trump’s personal weaknesses, her party is determined to take responsibility for the neoliberal policies that have pushed America’s working class to its knees. refused. Additionally, Clinton focused her message on winning over suburban, college-educated voters who are typically Republicans but are actually overwhelmingly Trump supporters. This led her to ignore a much larger number of working-class, non-college-educated voters.

The key to understanding the Trump era is that the real divide in America is not between left and right, but between pro-establishment and anti-establishment politics. Pro-establishment politics is a bipartisan consensus between establishment Democrats and Republicans. It is politics that respects NATO and other military alliances, trade agreements, and economists (as when economists say that price gouging is not the cause of inflation). Trump does not subscribe to a fixed ideology, but rather criticizes this consensus altogether.

A key fact of American politics in the post-Obama era is that more Americans than ever before are angry about the status quo and tolerant of anti-establishment politics. Trump won in 2016 as a candidate who expressed anti-establishment anger, but in 2020 he took on the responsibility of maintaining the status quo as the coronavirus ravaged the world. But by 2024, he hopes to bring about change, buoyed by fond memories of the economy under his presidency and the welfare state, which was temporarily but generously expanded under coronavirus emergency measures. I was able to come back as a spokesperson.

On October 14th, I published a column claiming that Kamala Harris was repeating Hillary Clinton’s mistakes in 2016. I wrote this:

Tragically, Harris has spent the final weeks of the campaign trying to win over Never Trump Republicans at the expense of emphasizing her economic populism and abortion rights advocacy.

The tactic is an inevitable reminder of Hillary Clinton’s singular focus on Trump’s unfitness for office, and her campaign has used it as a way to win support among suburban, college-educated Republicans. It raised the issue. As Sen. Chuck Schumer infamously declared in 2016, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in Western Pennsylvania, we gain two moderate Republicans in suburban Philadelphia. You can repeat it in Illinois and Wisconsin.” Schumer’s calculations were outrageously wrong for obvious reasons. Voters without a college degree outnumber voters with a college degree by nearly two to one (64 percent to 36 percent). So it was no surprise that Clinton lost Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin. The only thing keeping the Democratic Party afloat is its strong support from non-college-educated black and Latino voters, but polls in recent years have shown that support from these groups has also been declining. is shown.

One of the big reasons Clinton lost in 2016 was that she ignored the party’s working-class base at the expense of trying to win converts from “Never Trump” Republicans.

I went on to argue that Harris could still change course and recommit to economic populism. And it is also true that there were efforts along these lines, particularly in her campaign ads that ran in local media in battleground states. But as it turned out, this wasn’t enough. Harris has self-defeatingly tied herself to the policies of unpopular incumbent Joe Biden. This gives Trump an easy path to once again become a voice of discontent and change.

If the Democratic Party wants to defeat the radical right, it will need to fundamentally reinvent itself. They need to recognize that they need to support voters without a college education, who make up two-thirds of the electorate. For dissident Americans, they need to realize that the promised return to bipartisan civility is simply a restoration of the Ancien Regime. They need to be a party that not only manages a broken system, but is willing to embrace radical policies to change the status quo. This is the only way for the party to rebuild itself, and the actual defeat of Trumpism, which without such effective opposition would outlive its standard-bearer.