From the moment Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2024 election, Democratic leaders and their allies in the punditocracy have made every effort to give the appearance of soul-searching introspection. Yet much of this inward turn has missed the point. Just as in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election, the party’s self-appointed social prophets are popping up to denounce rampant identity politics and wokeism; now, as then, a chorus of elected officials and strategists say that Democrats must recover their roots as economic populists, and meet ordinary voters where they are, rather than indulging their well-known penchant for lecturing and scolding them.
Yet this battery of counsel typically remains mired in the mythology of message tweaking: If the Democrats merely add a phrase here, or pull back on some florid social-justice jargon there, then the ship will be righted. No dramatic rethinking of the party’s identity or reason for being needs to happen; the same senior stratum of leaders will thus be empowered to continue cleaving to power, and the same class of consultants and campaign managers can continue making handsome livings.
All this surface tumult and deeper structural stagnation call to mind a key insight from Hegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History. “By repetition that which at first appeared merely a matter of chance and contingency becomes a real and ratified existence,” he wrote. Prior to his reelection, one could easily dismiss Donald Trump as a kind of fluke, an aberration made possible by an archaic constitution, but now, after he’s won the popular vote, we are contending with something new: the possible national ratification of Trumpism. So the central dilemmas facing the Democratic opposition run much deeper than a ritualized pledge to tweak the messaging and do better the next time out. These are the questions that urgently need to be settled now: Is this the triumph of “Donald Trump’s America”? Does Trump embody the true spirit of America? Or is it merely another “matter of chance and contingency,” an election the Democrats lost through a series of mistakes? Is this a realignment and new order or just another squeaker? Was it an issue of strategy or tactics?
The sheer volume of blunders committed by the Democrats might prompt one more bout of wishful thinking: Maybe this election’s rendezvous with Trumpism isn’t an expression of ineluctable fate but rather the result of a series of simple fuck-ups. The biggest fuck-up, of course, is named Joseph Robinet Biden. His decision to run again was unpatriotic: He betrayed his country, and so did his advisers. The decision of his close aides to hide his condition and his evident political vulnerability from the rank-and-file and the public was Trumpian in its recklessness and delusion. It revealed a total lack of seriousness about the gravity of the situation—a gruesome inversion of one of Biden’s pet applause lines: “We’re the United States of America. Nothing is impossible for us.”
Breaking down that mantra in the cold light of the 2024 election, it’s clear that Biden never took the sentiment seriously—indeed, he tried cynically to invoke a brand of rearguard institutional patriotism to narrow the range of meaningful choices for the electorate to a vanishing point. Viewed in the fuller sweep of historical change, the November election was, if anything, a mandate for the broadest possible scope of debate and deliberation. A great democracy was getting ready to pick its leader, the most powerful man in the world. The world faced unfolding catastrophes, our allies were fading and foes were emboldened. A would-be dictator was banging on the gates.
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We were told repeatedly by Biden and the Democratic establishment that the fate of the Republic was hanging in the balance—yet the party’s leaders and campaign strategists never acted as if that were in fact the case. The man in charge was not up to the task, and the public was unhappy with him. Nevertheless, the party obliviously stayed the course—after years of banging on about how the Republican Party was a personality cult built to protect a manifestly unfit leader.
Once Biden’s unsuitability was exposed, harshly and humiliatingly, in his June debate with Trump, a clean-up job ensued—after an anguished month of behind-the-scenes infighting and rising discontent among party funders, campaign hands, and congressional leaders. In a still more rushed and insulated fashion, Vice President Kamala Harris was anointed as the successor to the enfeebled candidate—probably the only viable option given the late date. The party with “Democratic” as its name, and that had spent the better part of the last decade positioning itself as the last best hope for defending the country’s beleaguered democratic political order, failed at a moment of utmost crisis to behave in anything like a democratic manner. The arbitration of the crisis was left entirely in the hands of the same party elite that had done so much to precipitate it; the broader public nominally charged with rescuing the republic was consigned to the role of puzzled onlookers, second-guessing the calculations of the power brokers close to the real action. At the last minute, the party elites made the only available decision, but too late for it to make a significant difference in an election cycle that was already trending away from their governing legacy. For better or worse, there’s no going back to the days of smoke-filled rooms or the brokered convention: the people expect a say, and it’s dangerous to ignore their will.
It’s also dangerous to ignore clear signals from below, like when the American people were very clearly angry about inflation. Instead, Democratic strategists fixated on defending the status quo, telling voters struggling to make ends meet that they didn’t understand the economy and that it was doing fine. If the public is upset and an incumbent party just replies, “No, it’s OK, you just don’t get it,” that incumbent is cruising for defeat; this is a lesson Democrats should have underlined when Hillary Clinton’s smug rejoinder to the Trump movement—“America is already great”—fell so completely flat.
But because of their own class-inflected blind spots, that continues to be the basic message liberals send to the American people: “You don’t get it.” And the message in return was, “No, you don’t get it.” A political party is meant, among other things, to be a system of feedback between the populace and the governing classes. Among Democratic Party leaders this cycle, the feedback mechanism broke—or worse, was deliberately ignored. In these conditions, uptight Republican politicians, sweating out the renomination of a serial liar, sexual abuser, coup-plotter, and (yes) convicted felon, came to realize that Trump was no longer a threat but a potential asset: Here was a guy with a genuine relationship with the crowd, and who had real popular support—core political gifts that were in desperately short supply for the Democratic ticket. In his perverse way, he is a gifted public speaker. Even in the era of information technology, the core of any political campaign is the ability to give speech after speech in an engaging manner. Harris never mastered this.
Measured in raw vote counts, Trump’s reelection likely doesn’t qualify as a realignment. Yet in deeper structural terms, there may be a realignment in the offing—one that bodes poorly for the Democrats’ electoral prospects. The basic terms of political rivalry that have prevailed at least since the New Deal have been turned upside down: The Democrats became Republicans and Republicans became Democrats. The Democrats, in retreat from any meaningful mandate of popular accountability, have transformed themselves into the party of the establishment: wonks, statisticians, professionals, hectoring nonprofit advocates, celebrities, reformers, lecturers (in all senses of the word), assistant professors, and corporate beancounters. They worship G-men, spooks, and generals as minor deities. In a postelection piece for The New Yorker, Rachel Maddow lamented that the American people didn’t listen to the “experts.” That sentence alone tells you everything you need to know.
On the other side, meanwhile, the Republicans saw their populist opening and seized it. Much of the campaign was a jury-rigged effort to bluff and bluster their way from mobbish rump into a majority, a “multiracial working-class coalition”—the thing that the Democrats have long claimed to be. That was the broader logic behind what seemed to be a long regress of reality-TV stunt casting for Trump on the campaign trail. By first impersonating a McDonald’s worker in Pennsylvania, and then a garbage truck driver on a Wisconsin airport tarmac, Trump was adopting the basic strategy that the cochair of his campaign, Chris LaCivita, had honed for the 2004 Bush campaign’s dishonest “Swift Boat” assault on John Kerry: Directly target the campaign theme your opposition sees as a strength, and relentlessly dismantle it. Republicans well knew that Democrats had long been losing their grip on their traditional base of working-class voters; it’s arguably the central dynamic in US politics since the rise of Ronald Reagan. In cynically dramatizing their ticket’s connection to the grievances and struggles of ordinary working Americans, the Republicans symbolically highlighted the unequal political economy that Biden had presided over—and meanwhile, the Harris campaign adopted the same Versailles-celebrity strategy that Hillary Clinton banked on during the disastrous homestretch of the 2016 campaign, forking over massive amounts of cash for events with celebs who only made the party seem that much more out of touch with the electorate.
The Democrats became small-r republicans, too: believing power properly belongs to an aristocratic official class rather than the great unwashed. They ran a prosecutor against a hood, forgetting somehow the predilection of most Americans for a freewheeling outlaw over Poindexterish procedures and processes. Their “industrial policy” sounds good on paper, but that’s exactly the problem. Its constituency was mostly eager young post-Keynesian technocrats, but not anyone who doesn’t know who Keynes was or why they should care. Yet again, this left the ground clear for the Republicans to declare themselves the party of everybody else: everyone who felt left out and left behind, condescended to, and browbeaten. And so the Republicans became small-d democrats, yelling about the sovereign rights of the masses. The masses liked the sound of that more—or else, in mounting disgust with each party’s political-economy cosplaying, they sat the election out.
In Democratic election postmortems, there’s been a lot of talk about the media ecosystem—but typically, minimal engagement with the content coursing throughout the right-wing mediasphere. The counsel to summon up a left version of right-leaning podcasts such as Joe Rogan’s once more supposes that the Democrats don’t need to retool their thinking or their fundamental worldview—they just need to launch new platforms for their flailing message.
A closer look at media dynamics reveals the futility of this strategy: The Democrats don’t need to program differently—they need to think differently. The main feature tying together the shows that young right-leaning men watch and listen to now is curiosity: They include discussions and debates; their hosts might not be particularly knowledgeable and they are open about it, so they ask what might seem like dumb questions without shame. Even when the discussion veers into pure propaganda, it comes wrapped in the appearance of open inquiry. If liberals want more organic intellectuals like the GOP seems to have, they need to be willing to be more organic—to actually hang and talk, not just hector from above. They need to reject their allergy to “debate bros” and learn how to argue and debate again; indeed, they need to recover the central challenge of politics—to persuade people.
Democrats have also been hamstrung by the success of their long-term project, beginning with the Democratic Leadership Council’s efforts in the 1980s, to rebrand themselves as a business-friendly party. By leaving their working-class base to fend for themselves under global trade accords like NAFTA and GATT, Democrats have forfeited credibility to speak convincingly on behalf of struggling workers. This damage is now so advanced that the party’s most consistent foe of job-soaking trade deals, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, lost his Senate seat to car dealer Bernie Moreno—another wealthy Republican freely cosplaying as a heroic defender of beleaguered American workers. That race, indeed, neatly distilled the socio-economic role reversal of the major parties. The car dealers have replaced the New Dealers. In their continued thrall to credentialed wonkery, the Democrats represent the regularity and rationality of bureaucratized, corporate capitalism. The Republicans are the party of entrepreneurs, family businessmen, fat oligarchs, and, of course, freebooters, brand hustlers, and shakedown artists. It’s true as well that Democrats have their share of confidence men (and women), as the party’s entire consulting class makes painfully clear. But practitioners of the Democratic con go for the long con, peddling phony degrees and expertise before the party’s donor class, while the Republicans, offering get-rich schemes in the mold of the many that Trump has peddled, will just grab the money and run. One way of making sense of this election is that enough people decided that the Republican shakedown sounded like the more honest racket, a more attainable and attractive vision of success.
The wages of the Democrats’ credentialed drift were most disastrous in the field of foreign policy—a sphere in which Biden, the longtime chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, believed he possessed unassailable expertise. In fact, the reverse was true: Biden remained mired in an obsolete Cold War vision of global power, most especially in the Middle East, and thus was an unyielding enabler of Binyamin Netayahu’s genocidal Gaza war. No matter what side you were on, all the carefully phrased State Department language about Gaza just sounded like lies, and they were. All the “rationality” and “good sense” provided by the Democrats, and all the rote invocations of their dedication to a “rules-based international order” seemed like so much bullshit, and it was.
The liberals became the “normies,” aping middle-class respectability even as middle-class opportunities faded. Conservatives used to be the party of social conformism, but now it’s the liberals; it’s the other guys who are “weird,” in the attack popularized by Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz. I don’t necessarily mean this in a derogatory way: Liberals believe in the type of wise conformism necessary to exist in a complex, diverse society, to cooperate in a workplace with others, and to live peacefully and civilly in a mass conurbation. They are pro-social. Like their ancestors in the 19th-century Protestant reform movements, they say, “If you behave respectably as we do, you will find your measure of success.” And like those champions of women’s suffrage, abolition, and temperance, their core pitch to the mass electorate is a moral version of the by-your-bootstraps account of social mobility on the right: Be virtuous and magnanimous, just like us.
Ultimately, these are directives sanctioned by HR offices—and conforming to office norms doesn’t deliver much in the way of security or self-determination for those who don’t or can’t aspire to work in one. What’s more, the office itself—the sphere in which liberals most confidently brandish claims to influence and enlightenment—is fading as a public space in the post-Covid world. But pro-sociality in a hollowed-out society just seems to many like cruel harassment. Of course, the right doesn’t answer the conformity of the liberals with some creative alternative of its own. Instead, it dotes on the negative conformity of outraging would-be “woke” censors and “owning the libs.” This model of political belonging is rooted in meeting the lonely masses where they are: sheer petulant aggression as a replacement for complexities of personality, and the chance for atomized and isolated subjects to express painful resentments openly.
Republicans and “realigned” pundits will try to get us to forget how Trump got here and make it sound like he offered a simple, positive message of shared prosperity. But there’s no way that so many voters went for him despite all the rancor and resentment. The truth is that many people like such petulance, and seek out a vast range of forums in which to air it more fully. Trump has always been world-class shit-talker, and knows that a central force that brings people together is dragging down someone else. Here, too, the contrast with the Democrats is telling: Over and over again, Harris and Walz insisted that the country was overcoming the false, exhausting divisiveness of the Trump era; America was not only already great; it was already united in the grand pageant of tolerant social accord. This asserted but undemonstrated vision of a higher unity was also the theme of the 2004 Democratic Convention speech that launched Barack Obama on the national stage; his central message was that there was in fact no “red America” or “blue America,” just “the United States of America.” It’s quite fitting that, in relying so heavily on this content-free invocation of unity, the Harris campaign also took up a slogan adopted by John McCain, Obama’s first Republican opponent for the presidency: “country over party.”
Against such bromides, Trump’s stalwart demonization of other people sounds like the truth; it sounds like he’s keeping it real with you. And partly he is. Trump’s vision of America is capitalism, but desublimated and obscene, completely without cosmopolitan liberal jargon, a vast jungle of brutal competition and domination. Racism, xenophobia, misogyny: All of these have in common a vision of a world red in tooth and claw, full of endless struggles, and ineradicable divisions. And someone out there is standing in your way to success and happiness: dirty immigrants, the Blacks, uppity bitches, whiny Jews, creepy transpeople, annoying wokesters—just take your pick of who’s to blame.
Many people might not think of themselves as being driven by racial animus but still continue to view expressions of racism as a form of authenticity, a more “realistic” way of viewing the world. He says it so they don’t have to sully themselves. When you’re tired of hypocrisy and lies, you just want someone to lay it out. What’s more, this brand of transgression is fun: it’s enjoyable to hear forbidden sentiments said out loud. It relieves the pressure of trying to be so damned decent all the time. Trump lets you know that the virtuous swells on TV are just as low and mean as he is—or as you may be in your uglier moments. In effect, Trump says, “The world is a nasty place full of nasty people and you just need to grab what’s yours. I’ll tell you how it’s done. I’ll help you get it. And Fuck ’em.” In response, the crowd howls, an ancient cry that mingles pain and joy, hope and despair.
There’s a pivotal paradox here. Trump’s movement is inclusive and open-ended: The bigotry does not shrink it. A campaign largely predicated on the demonization of Latin American immigrants netted a historic share of the Latino vote for the Republican Party. Trump’s movement offers an invitation. Just as he invites you into the world of celebrity gossip, sharing juicy secrets and rumors, the man educated in the art of politics by Roy Cohn and Brooklyn heavy Meade Esposito invites you into the boss’s hideout, the clubhouse where the deals go down. The social vision of the Trump movement is of an America that operates like the mob. The Mafia is a secret society. Rackets work for a closely knit in-group that exploits an outgroup. But what Trump offers is the clubbiness of the mob for the masses. He’s a wiseguy for middle-America. He offers a big hug and a kiss. He brings you into his “family.” He might menace and threaten the other guy, but to you he’s gregarious and fun: He winks and slaps you on the back. This is what Trump ultimately offers in a cold, alienated, and lonely world: not just the fantasy of money and success, but warmth. The Nazis spoke of a Volksgemeinschaft, folk community—Trump offers us gangster Gemeinschaft.
Going forward, here’s how the right’s multiracial working-class coalition will work: Anybody can join, but not everyone can be a made man. And you might have to have put up with a little humiliation here and there along the way. But hey, that’s the way things are, right? You don’t mind a little joke, do you? We’ll find someone else lower down for you to kick. The boss might take care of you, but not before himself and his people. It’s not nice, but the Democrats aren’t offering anything much more attractive. “This is not who we are!” the nice liberals cry. But for a lot of people, this has always been what it’s like.
If the Democrats willingly take on the role Trump and the Republicans want for them—to be the snobbish heels to the righteous anger of the Trumpenproletariat—they and we are doomed. Trumpism will be thereby ratified. What remains of American politics will just become a pro-wrestling match. In this perverse spectacle, the Dems will be a managed opposition to be slammed and twisted up over and over again in various ways.
For the Democrats to respond creatively to the mood of the country, they need to become democratic again. That doesn’t mean being a carbon copy of Trumpism or picking some loyal constituency to scapegoat or screw over or to stop being loyal to the people and principles they’ve traditionally supported. Those are manifestly uncreative responses. Stop reifying the electorate. Stop shifting around the same old broken categories. Try to think again.
