Trump won because the opposition party is committed to restoring the old regime in a country desperate for change.
Although the presidential election wasn’t called until early Wednesday morning, by midnight there was compelling evidence that Democrats were heading for a 2016-like disaster. Donald Trump was already leading in every battleground state; Republicans were poised to win the Senate, and the House remains very close. There is a real danger of a Republican trifecta after the final votes are counted. It also appears that Donald Trump has won the popular vote – something he failed to do during his first two runs to the presidency.
Trump can now do enormous damage during his second term in office. We can expect Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to resign from the Supreme Court and be replaced by much younger right-wing ideologues of their ilk. It would ensure a right-wing stranglehold on America’s highest judiciary for the next generation. Trump will also be able to restore tax cuts in 2017, ensuring that trillions of dollars in wealth are kept by billionaires rather than being taxed for the benefit of the country. Trump will also be able to implement the extremist agenda of Project 2025, a plan to restructure the American government along plutocratic lines.
Given that Trump won his second term, it’s worth noting that the Democratic Party was not entirely responsible when he won in 2016. Losing the election to such a dangerous and corrupt person as Donald Trump should force the political party to take some important actions and reflect on its own failures of policy and political strategy. Instead, every Democrat who was responsible for the 2016 debacle, starting with Hillary Clinton, found a way to blame someone but themselves. This was most evident in the spread of the Russiagate fantasy, which had a small grain of truth but became a perverse liberal mythology to evade the policy’s own failures.
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In addition to Vladimir Putin, other alleged culprits in Trump’s victory included the Bernie brothers who allegedly ran out of office, James Comey for releasing two emails about the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton, the media for exaggerating the Clinton email story and giving Trump too much airtime, and the general bigotry of the American the public. While some of these factors played a role in Trump’s victory, they mostly distracted from the inconvenient truth for the party elite that Clinton and the Democrats were far more responsible. Clinton ran an uninspired campaign that focused too much on Trump’s personal flaws, while her party refused to take responsibility for the neoliberal policies that made the American working class miserable. Also, Clinton focused her message so heavily on winning over college-educated suburban voters, who were typically Republican, and who actually overwhelmingly stayed with Trump. It made her ignore it a much larger number of voters who were from the working class and did not receive a higher education.
The key to understanding the Trump era is that the real divide in America is not between left and right, but pro-establishment and anti-establishment politics. Pro-system policies are the bipartisan consensus of Democrats and Republicans: they are the policies of NATO and other military alliances, trade agreements, and deference to economists (for example, when they say that price increases are not the cause of inflation). Trump stands for the absence of a fixed ideology, but for a general poking nose at this consensus.
A central fact of American politics in the post-Obama era is that a growing majority of Americans are angry with the status quo and open to anti-establishment politics. In 2016, Trump won as the candidate of anti-establishment anger. In 2020, he took responsibility for the status quo even as Covid ravaged the world. But by 2024, he was able to return again as a voice of change, bolstered by many Americans’ fond memories of the economy during his presidency — and of the temporary but generous expansion of the welfare state as part of the Covid emergency.
October 14 I published a column claiming that Kamala Harris repeated the mistakes of Hillary Clinton in 2016. I wrote:
In the final weeks of her campaign, Harris made a big upset by trying to sway “Never Trump” Republicans to her side by highlighting her own economic populism and protection of abortion rights.
The tactic inevitably calls to mind Hillary Clinton’s particular focus on Trump’s unfitness for office, an issue her campaign raised as a way to win over college-educated suburban Republicans. As Senator Chuck Schumer is known declared in 2016: “For every Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we gain two moderate Republicans in suburban Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin.” Schumer’s math was ridiculously flawed for an obvious reason: voters without college degrees exceed in number voters with higher education almost two to one (64% vs. 36%). Therefore, it should not be surprising that Clinton lost in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin. The only thing that keeps the Democrats viable is that they have strong support from non-college-educated blacks and Hispanics, but surveys over the past few years shows that support from these groups is also waning.
One big reason Clinton lost in 2016 was that she neglected the party’s working-class base at the expense of trying to win moves from Republicans to Never Trump..
I went on to argue that Harris could still make a course correction and restore himself to economic populism. And it’s true that there has been some effort in that direction, especially in the ads her company has run in local media in swing states. But in the end it wasn’t enough. To a self-destructive degree, Harris has attached herself to the politics of Joe Biden, the unpopular incumbent. This gave Trump an easy path to once again being the voice of discontent and change.
The Democrats will need to reform radically if they are ever to defeat the radical right. They must realize that voters without higher education, who make up two-thirds of the electorate, need to be won over. They need to realize that for anti-establishment Americans, the promised return to bipartisan civility is simply a restoration of the old regime. They must become a party that seeks to be more than the custodian of a broken system, but rather is willing to adopt radical policies to change that status quo. This is the only way for the party to rebuild itself and for Trumpism — which, without such an effective opposition, is likely to outlive its standard-bearer — to be defeated.
We cannot retreat
We now face a second Trump presidency.
There is nothing to lose. We must use our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger to oppose the dangerous policies that Donald Trump is unleashing on our country. We rededicate ourselves to our role as principled and honest journalists and authors.
Today we are also preparing for the future struggle. It will require a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis and humane resistance. We are faced with the adoption of Project 2025, a far-right Supreme Court, political authoritarianism, rising inequality and record homelessness, a looming climate crisis and conflicts abroad. Nation will expose and propose, develop investigative reporting and act together as a community to preserve hope and opportunity. NationThe work will continue — as it has in good times and bad — to develop alternative ideas and visions, to deepen our mission of truth-telling and in-depth reporting, and to expand solidarity in a divided nation.
Armed with 160 years of courageous independent journalism, our mandate remains the same today as it was when the Abolitionists were founded Nation— to defend the principles of democracy and freedom, to serve as a beacon in the darkest days of resistance, and to see and fight for a bright future.
The day is dark, the forces are building tenaciously, but it’s too late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is just the time when artists go to work. No time for despair, no room for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we make language. This is how civilizations heal.”
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Katrina Vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, Nation
