This election was an earthquake – a seismic shift.  We can’t pretend that this was a one-time aberration and that in 2028 we’re going to return to our old ways with Al Gore running against George W. Bush.  This election was a profound statement of the almost bottomless unhappiness and anger which infect this country, and proof that we have entered into an entirely new political era.  The 40-year era of liberal democracy and the neoliberal economic consensus, which began when Ronald Reagan was president and was accelerated by Bill Clinton, is over.  An era of illiberal democracy has begun.

There is a real likelihood that the prevailing wisdom will become that the U.S. electorate threw a tantrum, that they will get over it after four more years of Trumpian chaos in the White House, and that they will return to voting for establishment Republicans and Democrats once Trump is gone.  But that, of course, is not correct.  In this election, Donald Trump enjoyed gains in vote share over what he achieved in 2020 in over 90 percent of the counties — red and blue — in this country.  These gains were spread over seemingly every possible grouping of Americans.  He improved his vote share among women, Blacks, and Latinos – the very heart of the Democratic Party base.  Remember that after the 2020 election, Trump was impeached for a second time, attempted to overthrow the legitimate results of the 2020 election and fomented a treasonous riot at the U.S. Capitol, was indicted for nearly 100 felonies, and became a convicted felon when he was found guilty of 34 of them.  Did all of this result in him becoming more appealing to voters?  Of course not.  Exit polling showed that  millions of people who hold an unfavorable view of Trump nevertheless voted for him in the 2024 election.  So the fact that Trump won a much greater share of the vote in 2024 than he did in 2020 was not the result of more voters deciding that they liked and admired Trump.  It was the result of more voters becoming unhappy with their lives, the economy, and the direction of the country, and voting against the status quo.  The election wasn’t a referendum on Trump.  It was a referendum on the elites, institutions, and orthodoxies which voters blame for their misery, shame, and despair.

The hard-to-swallow facts on the ground today are these:  The U.S. is a profoundly dispirited and angry country.  The Republican Party, in the form of a Donald Trump-led cult, has for now captured the American zeitgeist and the votes of most of the electorate.  We are a Trumpian country.  And this could last.  As I’ve written before in this essay collection, thanks to our terrible constitution, Republicans will control the U.S. Senate for the rest of our lives.  The U.S. Supreme Court currently has a 6-3 conservative supermajority.  Since any new justices added to the court will need the confirmation of the Republican-controlled Senate, only more conservative justices will join the court.  Every Democratic policy or program put in place during prior Democratic administrations – perhaps going back as far as Franklin Roosevelt’s — is in jeopardy.  The post-World War II rules-based international order and Pax Americana (That’s funny isn’t it?) will soon be in tatters.  We are not the “good country” Kamala Harris claimed that we are.  This will not change for another 40 years.

Can the Democratic Party’s leadership grasp this and adjust to this new political era in which we find ourselves?  No.  Nancy Pelosi, one of the Democratic Party’s most senior leaders, is publicly blaming Joe Biden for the defeat suffered by the party in the presidential election, and insisting that the election was not a rebuke of Democratic Party policies and elites.  That’s her spinning reality and scrambling to avoid responsibility.  The Democrats lost because the electorate voted for change, voted against the status quo, voted against the elites of the Democratic Party whom the voters hold responsible for their economic insecurity and the hardships of their lives.  Nancy Pelosi is the personification of the Democratic Party elites against which they voted when they cast their votes for Donald Trump.  Will she and other party leaders ever acknowledge this and step down from their leadership positions in the party?  No.  They will instead cling to the status quo and the power, privilege, and wealth that it has brought them.  They will put their personal interests and those of the donors who fund them above those of their party and the country.  If change is to come, it will likely be generational.  The Silent Generation (How is it that they’re still around?) and the Baby Boomers will not go voluntarily.  (See Joe Biden, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Diane Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi etc.)

For the Democratic Party to return to relevance and win future elections, it will require new and younger leadership who will own up to the party’s past sins and articulate a vision for a new kind of liberal democracy and economic order with a sense of fairness in which all Americans believe they have a fair shot at economic security.  Is that possible?  No.  Donald Trump will pervert the democratic process in ways that will entrench Republican power.  In addition, there is no such thing as a successful multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-everything democracy.  It’s not possible to sustain such a system in a country like as ours — particularly when you add in the extremes of wealth and poverty in this country.  The many failures of U.S. liberal democracy and the neoliberal economic order — based on free trade, cheap consumer goods, deference to corporate interests and financial markets, and deregulation — are now apparent.  The narrative of liberalism and democracy has collapsed.  The rightward drift of working-class voters and voters of color has accelerated.  There’s no base left on which to sustain the status quo.  An attempt by the Democratic Party to cling to the old order, the old orthodoxies — which is exactly what they will do — will render it incapable of winning future national elections.