The Democratic Delusions That Led to a Historic Defeat
The Roosevelt Republic—the progressive age that extended social welfare and equal rights to a widening circle of Americans—endured from the 1930s to the 1970s. At the end of that decade, it was overthrown by the Reagan Revolution, which expanded individual liberties on the strength of a conservative free-market ideology, until it in turn crashed against the 2008 financial crisis. The era that followed has lacked a convincing name and a clear identity. It’s been variously called the post–post–Cold War, post-neoliberalism, the Great Awokening, and the Great Stagnation. But the 2024 election has shown that the dominant political figure of this period is Donald Trump, who, by the end of his second term, will have loomed over American life for as long as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s dozen years as president. We are living in the Trump Reaction. By the standard of its predecessors, we’re still at the beginning.
This new era is neither progressive nor conservative. The organizing principle in Trump’s chaotic campaigns, the animating passion among his supporters, has been a reactionary turn against dizzying change, specifically the economic and cultural transformations of the past half century: the globalization of trade and migration, the transition from an industrial to an information economy, the growing inequality between metropolis and hinterland, the end of the traditional family, the rise of previously disenfranchised groups, the “browning” of the American people. Trump’s basic appeal is a vow to take power away from the elites and invaders who have imposed these changes and return the country to its rightful owners—the real Americans. His victory demonstrated the appeal’s breadth in blue and red states alike, among all ages, ethnicities, and races.
For two and a half centuries American politics alternated between progressive and conservative periods, played between the 40-yard lines of liberal democracy. The values of freedom, equality, and rule of law at least received lip service; the founding documents enjoyed the status of civic scripture; the requisite American mood was optimism. Although reaction has dominated local or regional (mainly southern) politics, it’s something new in our national politics—which explains why Trump has been misunderstood and written off at every turn. Reaction is insular and aggrieved, and it paints in dark tones. It wants to undo progress and reverse history, restoring the nation to some imagined golden age when the people ruled. They want a strongman with the stomach to trample on the liberal pieties of the elites who sold them out.
This is why so many voters are willing to tolerate—in some cases, celebrate—Trump’s vile language and behavior; his love affairs with foreign dictators; his readiness to toss aside norms, laws, the Constitution itself. Asked by pollsters if they’re concerned about the state of democracy, these voters answer yes—not because they fear its demise, but because it has already failed them. They don’t think Trump will destroy democracy; he’ll restore it to the people.
The triumph of the Trump Reaction should put an end to two progressive illusions that have considerably strengthened it. One is the notion that identity is political destiny. For a long time, the Democratic Party regarded demographic change in America, the coming “minority majority,” as a consoling promise during interim Republican victories: As the country turned less white, it would inevitably turn more blue. In the past decade this notion was absorbed into an ideological framework that became the pervasive worldview of progressives—a metaphysics of group identity in which a generalized “people of color” (adjusted during the social-justice revolution of 2020 to “BIPOC”) were assumed to share a common experience of oppression that would determine their collective political behavior, driving them far to the left on issues such as immigration, policing, and transgender rights.
The 2024 election exploded this illusion. Nearly half of Latinos and a quarter of Black men voted for Trump. In New York City he did better in Queens and the Bronx, which have majority nonwhite populations, than in Manhattan, with its plurality of wealthy white people. M. Gessen of The New York Times called it “not a good night for solidarity,” but the presumption of like-mindedness among immensely diverse groups of voters should be retired, along with the term people of color, which has lost any usefulness for political analysis.
[Read: The cumulative toll of Democrats’ delusions]
Adjacent to the demographic illusion is a majoritarian one. By this theory, the Democratic Party is kept out of power by a white Republican minority that thwarts the popular will through voter suppression, gerrymandering, judicial legislating, the filibuster, the composition of the Senate, and the Electoral College. By this thinking, the ultimate obstacle to the American promise is the Constitution itself. The United States needs to become less republican and more democratic, with electoral reforms and perhaps a second constitutional convention to give more power to the people. This analysis contains some undeniable truths—the public’s voice is thwarted by structural barriers, partisan machinations, and enormous quantities of plutocratic cash. As long as Republican presidents continued to lose the popular vote, the majoritarian argument was tempting, even if its advocates ignored the likelihood that a new constitution would turn out to be less democratic than the old one.
But every election is a reminder that the country is narrowly divided and has been for decades, with frequent changes of control in the House of Representatives. Now that Trump has won the popular vote and the Electoral College, the majoritarian illusion, like the demographic one, should be seen for what it is: an impediment to Democratic success. It relieved the party of the need to listen and persuade rather than expecting the dei ex machina of population and rule changes to do the work of politics.
When Democrats lose a presidential election, they descend into a familiar quarrel over whether the party moved too far to the left or to the center. This time the question seems especially irrelevant; their political problem runs so much deeper. The Democratic Party finds itself on the wrong side of a historic swing toward right-wing populism, and tactical repositioning won’t help. The mood in America, as in electorates all over the world, is profoundly anti-establishment. Trump had a mass movement behind him; Kamala Harris was installed by party elites. He offered disruption, chaos, and contempt; she offered a tax break for small businesses. He spoke for the alienated; she spoke for the status quo.
Democrats have become the party of institutionalists. Much of their base is metropolitan, credentialed, economically comfortable, and pro-government. A realignment has been going on since the early ’70s: Democrats now claim the former Republican base of college-educated professionals, and Republicans have replaced Democrats as the party of the working class. As long as globalization, technology, and immigration were widely seen as not only inevitable but positive forces, the Democratic Party appeared to ride the wave of history, while Republicans depended on a shrinking pool of older white voters in dying towns. But something profound changed around 2008.
I spent the years after the financial crisis reporting in parts of the country that were being ravaged by the Great Recession and the long decline that had preceded it, and were growing hostile toward the country’s first Black president. Three things recurred everywhere I went: a conviction that the political and economic game was rigged for the benefit of distant elites; a sense that the middle class had disappeared; and the absence of any institutions that might have provided help, including the Democratic Party. It was hard to miss the broken landscape that lay open for Trump, but the establishments of both parties didn’t see it, and neither did most of the media, which had lost touch with the working class. The morning after Trump’s shocking victory in 2016, a colleague approached me angrily and said, “Those were your people, and you empowered them by making other people feel sorry for them—and it was wrong!”
In some ways, the Biden administration and the Harris campaign tried to reorient the Democratic Party back toward the working class, which was once its backbone. Biden pursued policies and passed legislation to create jobs that don’t require a college degree in communities that have been left behind. Harris studiously avoided campaigning on her identity as a Black and South Asian woman, appealing instead to a vague sense of patriotism and hope. But Biden’s industrial policy didn’t produce results fast enough to offset the damage of inflation—no one I talked with in Maricopa County, Arizona, or Washington County, Pennsylvania, this year seemed to have heard of the Inflation Reduction Act. Harris remained something of a cipher because of Biden’s stubborn refusal to step aside until it was too late for her or anyone else to make their case to Democratic voters. The party’s economic policies turned populist, but its structure—unlike the Republican Party’s mass cult of personality—appeared to be a glittering shell of power brokers and celebrities around a hollow core. Rebuilding will be the work of years, and realignment could take decades.
So much of the Trump Reaction’s triumph is unfair. It’s unfair that a degenerate man has twice beaten a decent, capable woman. It’s unfair that Harris graciously conceded defeat, whereas Trump, in her position, would once again have kick-started the machinery of lies that he built on his own behalf, continuing to undermine trust in democracy for years to come. It’s unfair that most of the media immediately moved on from Trump’s hateful rhetoric and threats of violence against migrants and political opponents. His campaign was unforgivable—but in the words of W. H. Auden’s poem “Spain,” “History to the defeated / May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.”
[From the July/August 2017 issue: What’s wrong with the Democrats?]
The Trump Reaction is more fragile than it now seems. Trump’s behavior in the last weeks of the campaign did not augur a coherent second presidency. He will surround himself with ideologues, opportunists, and crackpots, and because he has no interest in governing, they will try to fill the vacuum and turn on one another. The Trump administration, with a favorable Congress, will overreach on issues such as abortion and immigration, soon alienating important parts of its new coalition. It will enact economic policies that favor the party’s old allies among the rich at the expense of its new supporters among the less well-off. It’s quite possible that, approaching 80, Trump will find himself once more among the least popular presidents in the country’s history. But in the meantime, he will have enormous latitude to abuse his power for enrichment and revenge, and to shred the remaining ties that bind Americans to one another, and the country to democracies around the world.
The Trump Reaction will test opponents with a difficult balancing act, one that recalls F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line about a first-rate intelligence holding two opposed ideas in mind while still being able to function. The Democratic Party has to undertake the necessary self-scrutiny that starts with the errors of Biden, Harris, and their inner circle, but that extends to the party’s long drift away from the most pressing concerns of ordinary Americans, toward the eccentric obsessions of its donors and activists. But this examination can’t end in paralysis, because at the same time, the opposition will have to act. Much of this action will involve civil society and the private sector along with surviving government institutions—to prevent by legal means the mass internment and deportation of migrants from communities in which they’ve been peacefully living for years; to save women whose lives are threatened by laws that would punish them for trying to save themselves; to protect the public health from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s security from Tulsi Gabbard, and its coffers from Elon Musk.
Journalists will have a special challenge in the era of the Trump Reaction. We’re living in a world where facts instantly perish upon contact with human minds. Local news is disappearing, and a much-depleted national press can barely compete with the media platforms of billionaires who control users algorithmically, with an endless stream of conspiracy theories and deepfakes. The internet, which promised to give everyone information and a voice, has consolidated in just a few hands the power to destroy the very notion of objective truth. “Legacy journalism is dead,” Musk crowed on his own X in the week before the election. Instead of chasing phantoms on social media, journalists would make better use of our dwindling resources, and perhaps regain some of the public’s trust, by doing what we’ve done in every age: expose the lies and graft of oligarchs and plutocrats, and tell the stories of people who can’t speak for themselves.
A few weeks before the election, Representative Chris Deluzio, a first-term Democrat, was campaigning door-to-door in a closely divided district in western Pennsylvania. He’s a Navy veteran, a moderate on cultural issues, and a homegrown economic populist—critical of corporations, deep-pocketed donors, and the ideology that privileges capital over human beings and communities. At one house he spoke with a middle-aged white policeman named Mike, who had a Trump sign in his front yard. Without budging on his choice for president, Mike ended up voting for Deluzio. On Election Night, in a state carried by Trump, Deluzio outperformed Harris in his district, especially in the reddest areas, and won comfortably. What does this prove? Only that politics is best when it’s face-to-face and based on respect, that most people are complicated and even persuadable, and that—in the next line from the Fitzgerald quote—one can “see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
This article appears in the January 2025 print edition with the headline “The End of Democratic Delusions.”