There are many ways to define the liberal elite – the assistant deans, the network anchors, the public health officials and, yes, the mainstream newspaper reporters – but there is no doubt that on Tuesday night there was had a total rejection of their dominant value system. America not only elected a cowardly candidate whom more educated people had deemed unacceptably dictatorial, even fascist, but the nation did so in such a way that President-elect Donald J. Trump’s agenda will now be largely free , thanks to Republican majorities in the Senate and, most likely at the time of writing, the House.
And, adding insult to injury for Democrats, it is likely that the outcome of the election will also deliver Trump from his countless legal challenges.
The party that said democracy was on the ballot found that democracy had reared up like an orange tiger to bite them in the neck.
Democratic Party nominee Vice President Kamala Harris failed to outperform President Joe Biden in a single state. On CNN very late Tuesday, they had trouble even finding a single county where it was true.
“Donald Trump is going to be our president,” Hillary Clinton found herself saying on Wednesday, no doubt through gritted teeth. “We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead.”
For some on the left, this kind of largesse toward a convicted criminal will be impossible. We can understand this. But results are results.
As a troubled America woke up to a new political reality Wednesday, an armchair discussion about why Harris and Tim Walz lost was already underway. We also have our theories.
Harris, as we have noted repeatedly here, failed to respond clearly and directly to questions about what she would do as president, an essential thing to do if you want voters to be able to see you to this position. The problem in our view was not only that her managers kept her away from the difficult questions, but also that her answers were not coherent enough when she finally came out.
Trump, palpable flaws and all, was known; Harris remained unknown. The gauzy biopics of the Democratic National Convention weren’t enough.
A majority of voters were clearly uncomfortable with Democrats’ shift in position after the party belatedly discovered that Biden was unfit for another term as president. Essentially, party leaders then asked voters to line up, calm down, ask no questions and demand to stop making choices. The Americans, it is now confirmed, did not care. (We never did.)
Not having an open contest for the nomination was a fundamental mistake, and those of us who attended the conventions of the Republican and Democratic parties found that the former was more open and friendly than the latter, much more tense and more controlled, despite the eloquence of many DNCs. speakers and bloviant candidate stroll in milwaukee. Democrats tried to push Harris into the nation because they sincerely believed she deserved to be the party’s nominee and wanted to make history, but that’s just not how politics works. democracy. As the party now knows.
Then there is the question of whether Democrats should have treated Trump as if he were a Nazi dictator. Harris explicitly told CNN host Anderson Cooper that she was running against a fascist, inevitably implying that her supporters were either fools like sheep or fascists themselves. That meant left-wing commentators had to twist themselves into pretzels on Wednesday trying to explain the logic that Harris should now quietly give in to a man she had called a fascist and presumably believed was a fascist. Whenever Democrats used terms like “normalization” and “sanity washing,” the evidence suggests that they mostly served to embolden the opposition because Trump supporters saw those terms as applying to themselves. And they were hardly wrong. Half of America thinks the other half are fools.
We will highlight a few other factors. We need a global perspective. Incumbent leaders on the right and left were driven from power in established democracies around the world this year as societies recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, with no coherent political explanation save for one omnipresent truth: widespread economic insecurity resulting from rising prices. much faster than salaries.
The other is even simpler.
The Republican Party has become a party no longer made up of business and nonprofit leaders, now predominantly members of the Democratic Party, but of the working class and lower middle class. Throughout history, elites have found the hard way that there are so many of these people, even though we don’t hear much about them. By effectively abandoning the working class, especially men, by deeming much of what they found unacceptable, Democrats found themselves on the wrong side of the numbers game.
A multitude of Americans saw Trump, who survived two assassination attempts during the campaign, as their protector and not the troublemaker that elites saw him as. And ordinary people tend to vote what they consider to be in their economic or cultural interest, regardless of race.
This is a difficult lesson for Democrats to learn, as they have generally been taught otherwise, but it explains, in particular, the crucial defection of some black men to Trump, just as it shows that many native-born U.S. citizens or of Latin American origin do not. I don’t necessarily approve of a border that is easy to cross without authorization. And they voted accordingly.
Take, for example, the decision of many voters of Puerto Rican descent to ignore the insults uttered by the appalling comedian at Trump’s rally in New York. Democrats had pushed the narrative that these aggrieved voters would shake things up, especially in the crucial town of Allentown, Pennsylvania, because they believed racial identity would trump all. But they failed to understand the condescension inherent in the belief that these voters would care more about a comic book than their own economic concerns when it comes to paying their bills and helping their children find jobs .
Today, thanks to the most difficult nights, Democrats understand better.
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