Joe Biden’s first campaign for president, in the 1988 election cycle, met with a swift and ignominious demise. The Delaware senator’s attempts to cast himself as the candidate of youth and change — the standard-bearer of the “Pepsi Generation,” a Kennedy for the ’80s — fell flat. (Perhaps voters had some premonition of the senescent egomaniac we know today.) Three months after the campaign’s launch, the scandals, or, more precisely, the lies, began to surface: a speech clumsily lifted from the British politician Neil Kinnock; a fabricated past as a civil rights movement activist; mendacity surrounding his academic record at Syracuse University College of Law. When a New Hampshire primary voter pressed him on allegations of yet more plagiarism in law school, Biden snapped: “I think I probably have a much higher I.Q. than you do.” That just about sealed things up. 

In his final, never-completed presidential campaign, the collapse was excruciatingly protracted. But it was accompanied throughout by another hailstorm of lies. The biggest insult of all was, once again, the insistence by Biden and his sycophants that, against all evidence to the contrary, they were simply smarter than the rest of us. We spent over three years watching the president’s mind and body fail him — the raspy whisper with its improbable syntax, the sallow skin, the shuffling gait, the all-encompassing sleepiness Donald Trump mocked at every opportunity — while the regime and its media stenographers asked us to trust them instead of our lying eyes. (Even after the fever broke this summer and journalists began to write honestly about Biden’s condition and its impact on his electability, the president’s lackeys whined about how unfair such scrutiny was in light of Trump’s failings.) As popular sentiment on the Biden economy turned increasingly sour, prominent pundits insisted that dissatisfaction was completely baseless. Cynical Biden haters were responsible, they argued, for concealing the truth about the historic prosperity the administration’s technocrats had engineered. While the United States committed an apparently inexhaustible supply of weapons and tactical and logistical support to Ukraine and Israel, including the deployment of American troops to both Europe and West Asia, Biden repeatedly insisted that under his leadership the country was not at war for the first time in a generation. The administration was actually working tirelessly toward a ceasefire in Gaza, we were informed, even as the arms kept flowing and the slaughter continued apace. 

One of the most consequential lies was that Biden and his campaign team knew how to defeat Trump. Jon Favreau of “Pod Save America” revealed after the election that internal Democratic polling before Biden’s exit showed Trump was on pace to win four hundred electoral votes. But the Biden camp kept asserting that their guy was, in fact, the only candidate who could win, which was why the party had been justified in short-circuiting its 2020 primary competition in order to block Bernie Sanders’s ascension. (While it is impossible to know whether Bernie really would have won, it is hard in retrospect not to look back on his track record of success with the demographic groups that swung the 2024 general election and wonder what could have been.) Anyone who warned that Biden was disappointing the party’s progressive base encountered a blitz of kettle logic. Biden was the most transformative president since FDR; a pragmatist who knew where to compromise to get what he really wanted; a helpless victim of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. And anyways, the election wouldn’t be won by emphasizing divisive policy issues, but by focusing on something everyone could get behind: Donald Trump’s threat to democracy. This judgment defied all the available evidence. As Biden’s term wore on, it became clear that Democrats’ incessant quest to use the legal system to hound Trump out of political life was doing nothing to dull his appeal, and perhaps was actually bolstering it. But Bidenworld remained determined to elevate Trump’s venality over any other campaign theme — including the fight to defend abortion rights, an issue that, if Democrats’ surprising success in the 2022 midterms was any indication, actually did have strong cross-partisan appeal.

The Democrats talked about abortion, of course, but in the same way they talked about everything their base cared about: with an unearned assurance that voters would reward them for having the right opinions. Once a coalition of Biden-skeptical Democratic insiders, helmed by Nancy Pelosi and The New York Times opinion section, succeeded in supplanting him with Kamala Harris atop the ticket, this cynical overconfidence only intensified. No matter what the polls said, the Democrats were bound to triumph, because this was the Dobbs election. Women, even Republican women, would turn out to vote for their rights — and, now, to vote for the first female president. Never mind that the Harris campaign, like the Biden campaign before it, did precious little to explain how a vote for its ticket amounted to a vote for abortion rights, a claim that, despite the reassurances of party consultants, was far from self-evident. The repeal of Roe, after all, had transpired under a Democratic administration that knew it was coming — especially once the decision leaked — and did next to nothing to prepare for the inevitable blow. The Biden-Harris regime’s response, once the verdict came, was predictably vacuous: no action against the Supreme Court, no filibuster reform, just the old rhetorical bluster and a summer devoted to the party’s characteristically too-little, too-late attempt to document Trump’s malfeasance on January 6. 

As it turned out, women were more complex political actors than the dutiful girl-power automatons imagined by Democratic strategists. Shortly before Election Day, The Washington Post reported on the Harris team’s embrace of “girl culture” — its constant invocations of Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Barbie on the campaign trail. The spectacle of female celebrity eclipsed any substantive case for gender liberation: the idea that this ideological battle still needed to be fought despite Barbie’s billion-dollar box-office haul was apparently unthinkable to a party for whom pop-culture hegemony often seems to have become the whole of politics. Quite a few women solicited for their votes seemed to have their doubts that Kamala was, in fact, Brat. They were pissed off about the same things that men were pissed off about, incredibly enough. Many of them were ideologically conservative, and not just because their husbands were forcing them to think that way. Some of those Republican women who did care about their reproductive freedom felt satisfied voting to enshrine abortion rights at the state level and also for Trump. 

Liberals puzzled by the cognitive dissonance of pro-abortion, pro-Trump voters should consider how it was possible for Harris and Biden, after campaigning on the idea that Trump was a fascist who would put an end to American democracy if he were ever to return to the White House, to calmly congratulate him on his victory and promise their full cooperation with his transition. In the end, the fascism talking point was one more lie, something else Democrats were pretending to believe for the votes, secure in the belief that the rubes whose support they were courting would never know the difference. But the act was less convincing than they imagined. If they really believed that Trump was a dictator-in-waiting, why did the criminal case against him — those much-ballyhooed felonies — focus on issues like his mishandling of classified documents and his hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels? Why, for that matter, were they legitimizing the use of the judicial system against one’s political opponents? Why weren’t they trying to fix anything about our hallowed American democracy? If it was on the verge of elevating a known fascist, after all, it must have already been in pretty bad shape, regardless of the outcome of the election. Democratic strategists simply did not seem to believe that most voters were smart enough to ask questions like these. Always, always that same intimation, barely unspoken: I think I probably have a much higher I.Q. than you do. 

All the lying, all the posturing about their intellectual superiority, the commitment to responding to criticism with accusations of disloyalty and treachery — how did the Democrats ever hope to differentiate themselves from Donald Trump? The group of party operatives and consultants accumulated by Biden and inherited by Harris, like a cursed amulet in a fairy tale, never realized exactly how Trumpy they were becoming. The only thing they added was sanctimony — a quality that, as Trump identified perceptively in his primary struggle against Ron DeSantis, voters abhor more than anything. “Whoever becomes president, Donald Trump’s ideas will win,” The Economist warned a month before the election. “He, not Kamala Harris, has set the terms of this contest.” Despite the howls of outrage from party loyalists this judgment provoked, it now seems undeniable, and, if anything, too modest. From our current vantage point, it looks like Donald Trump succeeded in setting the terms not merely of the 2024 presidential election, but of the entire Biden administration. In the long run, Donald Trump’s ideas won in 2020 as well. As Andrew Elrod and Adam Tooze have both recently argued, the Biden administration allowed Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to euthanize its early political-economic vision, centered around generous welfare-state expansion and federal support for the care sector. In the wake of that agenda came a program focused on industrial competition with China, and fueled at the core by military spending. Paeans to American greatness suffused the rhetorical soundscape of the late Biden administration. The president goaded on the nationwide repression of student protestors enraged by the genocide of Palestinians he was enabling. On immigration, he enthusiastically ran what Gabriel Antonio Solis describes in his preview piece as “a race to the right that only Republicans can win.” 

After Harris took up the mantle, she squandered a billion dollars sticking to this tack resolutely. While focusing obsessively on Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, her campaign was never able to offer a coherent alternative vision besides a kinder, gentler Trumpism. Playing up the law-and-order credentials she shied away from in 2020, Harris promised to be tough on crime and tough on the border — channeling, as Sophie Lewis documents in her Issue Fourteen essay, a tradition of “cop feminism” with roots in the same interwar fascism so often cited as the precedent for Trump himself. In the face of the cartoonishly cruel transphobia on display in Trump’s campaign ads — “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” — Harris shied away from a full-throated defense of trans rights, promising obscurely only to “follow the law” when it came to providing access to gender-affirming care. While opposition to the “Muslim ban” galvanized liberal activism early in the first Trump administration, the Harris campaign followed Biden’s lead in subjecting Muslim and Arab American communities to insult after insult, refusing to allow a Palestinian-American speaker at the DNC, and dispatching Bill Clinton to Michigan to explain the ancient right of the Jewish people to “Judea and Samaria.” Meanwhile, Harris’s plans to defend democracy had no place for even the modest checks against economic despotism proposed early in the Biden years (remember the PRO Act, which would have been the biggest expansion of labor rights since the New Deal?). Instead, she launched a doomed effort to appease crypto moguls and stanch the Democrats’ bleeding among Silicon Valley oligarchs. 

If this soft authoritarianism was what the Democrats had to offer, why wouldn’t voters opt for the full package, especially when peddled by a salesman who at least made them laugh? It might be pleasant to imagine that disgust at Harris’s rightward turn was at the root of her underwhelming performance — that voters stayed home or flocked to Trump because they saw him as offering an alternative. That is the diagnosis many left-wing commentators have arrived at in the aftermath of the election, just as they did four years ago, to explain why Biden squeaked past Trump by a much smaller margin than expected, even amid the perfect storm of Covid shutdowns. It implies a relatively optimistic short-term prognosis, all things considered: the American people voted against the failed Democratic establishment more than they voted for Trump; if next time we can finally succeed in nominating a true left-wing critic of the establishment, in the vein of Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, those voters will happily abandon Trumpism for authentic populism. There were, to be sure, plenty of votes cast against the Democrats in this fashion, like in the Arab American community of Dearborn, MI, which turned out overwhelmingly for Rashida Tlaib and by a thin margin for Trump. And we certainly wouldn’t mind if a reconstructed Democratic Party elevated a socialist firebrand as its next leader, though we aren’t holding our breath.

But there’s a clear element of delusion in the belief that despite strong showings in three presidential elections over nearly a decade, including two victories, “real” support for Trump remains confined to a small coterie of lunatics. Trump is the center of gravity of American politics. Exit polls indicate he captured 95 percent of the Republican vote, despite Democrats’ persistent fantasies about masses of Cheneyites joining the resistance, suburbs turning blue, Republican women secretly casting ballots for Democrats and lying to their husbands about it (on Julia Roberts’s advice). Trump has also worked hard to build an edge among loosely or nonpartisan Americans, embracing his identity as the candidate of Joe Rogan, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK, Jr., and the artist formerly known as Kanye West. The “weird” demographic — youngish, heavily male, surprisingly multiracial, hyper-online, alienated and distrustful — has clearly found a home in the Trump movement. He is, after all, weird in his own way: a post-decorum politician, swaying to “Ave Maria” and extolling Arnold Palmer’s penis. For wide swaths of the population, Trumpism has become the default political ideology, where those without a strong reason to arrive at some rival set of principles inevitably wind up. Why wouldn’t it be? The Democrats have nothing to offer as an alternative but a simulacrum of MAGA politics stripped of the libidinal pleasures of rage and transgression, like the caffeine-free version of Trump’s favorite beverage, Diet Coke. 

The Biden-Harris administration made the fatal mistake of assuming that in vowing to “Make America Great Again,” the Trumpist movement channeled a widespread nationalistic mood, a longing to re-center American identity in our politics. This was the moderate complement to the wishful thinking of the Sanders left. It saw authentic Trumpism as a shallow reservoir, joining streams of discontent that could be rechanneled by Democratic politicians — except the discontent it imagined was not rage at economic elites but frustration with the “divisiveness” of liberal identity politics and the culture warring of the 2010s. Democrats could vanquish Trumpism, then, by expelling “wokeness” and replacing particularist rhetoric about race and gender with pieties about American unity. “Freedom” became the campaign’s catchphrase. Delegates sang Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” on the DNC convention floor, as oblivious to its anti-war message as Ronald Reagan’s campaign was in 1984. Pete Buttigieg promised that electing Harris would “get politics out of everyone’s face,” allowing us all to stop squabbling and return to congratulating ourselves on being Americans. Harris appeared at a campaign rally with Liz Cheney accompanied by a sign with an unintended double-entendre straight out of Veep: “Country Over Party.”

Maybe this slogan was a Freudian slip, putting into words what party elites know deep down but don’t want to admit: all their bullshit about American unity is past its expiration date. The Democrats bet the farm on the idea that a desire to defend the shared traditions and symbols of American democracy could transcend profound divides of class and ideology. America, as an ideal, was supposed to smooth over all the contradictions in the coalition. It was how they’d hold the Blue Wall in the Rust Belt while making inroads into Romney-voting Sun Belt exurbs; fundraise in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street while walking picket lines and strengthening labor law; keep the former neocons on their side while reassuring anti-war activists and Arab Americans that they were committed to peace in the Middle East. Everyone would put aside their differences for the sake of America. But “America” in this sense is, indeed, over. Trump supporters certainly don’t see themselves as part of it. The MAGA slogan expresses the Trump movement’s profound disidentification with America in the present moment. It is something fallen, stolen, or “occupied,” in the language of the neo-Nazi right. Its Capitol can be stormed; its ballot boxes can be incinerated; its ostensible foreign enemies can be potential allies in the struggle to take it back.

Liberals understand that the most extreme Trumpists, at least, feel this way — in fact, they can’t shut up about it. But the Biden and Harris campaigns clung stubbornly to the conviction that Trumpian anti-Americanism was pushed by an aberrant fringe, and for that reason would repel good, normal, healthy voters (even registered Republicans, even people who voted for Trump the first two times). This judgment was wrong. The core claim of the Trump campaign — that America is something that existed in the past and may exist again in the future, but that doesn’t have much integrity or coherence in the present — captures something essential about many people’s experience of social reality today. The political theorist Benedict Anderson famously argued that nations are “imagined communities,” and it is hard to sustain an imagined community of America’s diversity and scale in the face of extreme economic inequality; the fracturing of the media monoculture into a bewildering patchwork of social media platforms, podcasts, streams, and cable news networks; and the decimation, exacerbated by the Covid pandemic, of offline social relationships and community institutions. Under such conditions, it is easy to suspect that anyone who insists we’re all in this together is just trying to rip you off — a suspicion that Trump is especially adept at vocalizing. 

Trump, whose scammer qualities have been remarked upon to no end, is in fact a president for a nation of people convinced that they are being treated, as he likes to say, “very unfairly” — a president for belligerents in the war of all against all. He is the president for everyone who resents everything they were asked to give up in an apparently fruitless fight against an unstoppable virus; for immigrants who came here through the “proper channels” and are bitter about others’ avoiding the red tape they struggled through; for people who paid off their student loans and can’t stand the thought of their tax dollars being used to forgive the debt of today’s recent graduates; for working-class men who’ve been told to give up the psychological wage of patriarchy even as their actual wages stagnate and job opportunities dwindle; for women who don’t want to be lectured about how they’re letting down the cause of feminism because they’ve forsaken careers to raise children; for crypto bros and meme stock manipulators. To them he says: Stand your ground. Assert your dominance. Make America your country again, because it isn’t right now. 

If Democrats can introspect honestly, they will recognize in themselves the mirror image of this grotesquerie. Bernie Sanders asked them in 2020 if they were willing to fight for someone they didn’t know, and they answered with a resounding “no.” They have spent months insisting that people of conscience abjure their feelings of solidarity with Palestinians facing a U.S.-financed extermination campaign in order to cast a vote to punish Republican justices (for overturning Roe) and Trump (for January 6). Democrats subject skeptical voters to a ceaseless stream of scolding and contempt — warning, as Michelle Obama did, that those sitting out the election would make women “collateral damage to your rage.” They do not believe they share a nation with Trump supporters in any meaningful sense, any more than Trump supporters believe they share a nation with liberals. No less than Joe Biden on the campaign trail in 1987, the increasingly wealthy and highly educated foot soldiers of the Democratic Party are convinced that an unsurpassable intellectual gulf divides them from their political opponents — and from anyone in the electorate who expresses dissatisfaction with their governance. Now the barbarians have won, and they find themselves strangers in a strange land. Trump’s “VICTORY CHANGES NATION’S SENSE OF ITSELF,” The New York Times blared the day after the election, presumably speaking for many liberals who now feel their country is lost, unrecognizable, taken over by outsiders.

In the week since Trump’s win, there has been no shortage of accounts of what the Democrats should do to get their mojo back — including plenty of prescriptions for populism. Even David Brooks is now encouraging the Democrats to “embrace Bernie Sanders-style disruption” to win back the working-class voters who have decisively exited the party’s coalition. For the left, there is certainly some schadenfreude in seeing the Democratic establishment — and its highly remunerated consultant class — discredited so unambiguously. But there is also reason to worry about what a Democratic Party newly converted to elite-bashing will look like in practice. As Nick Bowlin argued in this magazine in 2022, when Democrats become convinced that they need to do more to appeal to regular people, they tend to don cowboy hats and pose with pickup trucks instead of changing anything more substantive about their platform. So far, many pundits and party officials seem to believe that “populism” will require yet another pivot to the right, on culture rather than economics. Trans people are a common scapegoat. The imminent death of “DEI” was widely prophesied for months before the election. Now “identity politics” is once more a synecdoche for Democratic elitism. Kansas whisperer Thomas Frank claimed he knew that Trump could win when he visited a museum that described “the westward advance of the United States in the 19th century” as “settler colonialism,” which of course it was. One imagines Democratic strategists crossing out Barbie in their playbooks and writing in Yellowstone. 

If there is any cause for hope in the now undeniable reality that the working class has “abandoned” the Democratic Party, as Sanders observed shortly after the election, it does not lie in the prospect that the party will suddenly come to its senses and do what it takes to win these voters back. “To the extent that sections of the Democratic Party or elements of the middle strata can be brought to return to more traditional liberal positions,” Mike Davis wrote in 1986, “it will only be because independent forces to their left are militant and well organized, with demands unvetted by the ‘realism’ of consensus-building with establishment politics.” Such militant, well organized, and independent left-wing forces more or less failed to materialize in the decades that followed. Working-class discontent, to the extent it got a political hearing, expended itself in a vain struggle for position in the Democratic Party of Clinton and Obama. Now those days are over — for worse and, with any luck, for better. While working-class “realignment” (or, more accurately, de-alignment, since exit polls indicate a fairly split working-class vote) raises the disturbing possibility of MAGA victories for years to come, it was also a necessary development if any radical alternative to the two capitalist parties was ever going to acquire a mass basis. Perhaps that is not much reason for hope, in the end. But it is reason to contest the Democrats’ outrageous sense of entitlement to their base’s loyalty; to construct an alternative that can block the Republicans’ attempt to reinvent themselves as the party of the multiracial working class; to cultivate leaders who don’t brag about their IQs and insult voters’ intelligence; to replace resentment in our politics with solidarity; and to insist on a radical reinvention of our corporatized, consultant-infested political life. Reason, in short, to try.