phgaming The Real Reason Harris and the Democrats Were Always Doomed

PHcity

Updated:2024-11-17 03:56 Views:67

The 2016 election was a heartbreak for America’s sentimental liberals. This one arrives with more of a deadening thumpphgaming, with less hope of resistance energy being uncorked by the result than a sort of acquiescent despair.

It remains to be seen how much of the former president’s burn-it-all-down agenda will be actually carried out, given the erratic campaign bluster that gave rise to it. But to take seriously the broad outlines, the re-election of Donald Trump could usher in the most profound period of top-down change the country has experienced in living memory, even if he stops well short of liberal fears of fascism.

The stakes were not secret; in fact, Democratic messaging around Project 2025, in particular, has been remarkably successful, through an otherwise policy-light campaign. And yet the country walked into Election Day worrying about inflation that had long since receded and immigration that had long since peaked, and it delivered an affirmation of Trump that doubles as an effective endorsement of sweeping change — vows to deport many millions of people living in America, impose across-the-board tariffs, take a blowtorch to the regulatory state, cut almost a third of the federal budget and potentially scrap the income tax. (Not to even mention the possibility of a further restriction on reproductive rights or the possible end to water fluoridation.) The victory was, by recent historical standards, a decisive one. Still, this is not the kind of transformation, of the country and its future, that should follow from a victory of this margin.

For months or even years, liberals have frantically asked themselves how it could be that the race was even close — that this guy, running this campaign, even had a shot. Some hypotheses were lightly shrouded spiritual laments — that the country was just that ignorant or that sick or that angry, that the information environment or the trajectory of cultural change was just that broken. Others involved campaign tactics and the terrifying contingency of political history: postpandemic surges in prices at the supermarket and asylum seekers at the border, President Biden’s age and unpopularity, the choice of the “wrong” V.P. or the decision to largely support Israel in its war in Gaza or the perception that Democrats had moved too far to the left.

But to this list I would add another factor, more fundamental. The Democratic Party has held the White House for 12 of the past 16 years and was fighting to make it 16 of 20. The one Republican interloper in that time styled himself as an outsider and then governed like one, unable to achieve very much legislatively, however many judges he appointed and however much informational and social chaos he sowed in the country. No Republican, including Trump, had won the popular vote in a presidential election since the Great Recession of 2008, and only one had won the national vote since 1992, after the end of the Cold War — a period of 32 years in which Democrats had secured more supporters in seven of the past eight presidential elections.

That is an astounding run, though few liberals appreciated it — the first time in modern American history either party has achieved such popular-vote dominance. But these days, it also represents a profound political headwind. For several years now, political commentators have noted the anti-incumbency turn in global politics: that in the long aftermath of the Great Recession and the short aftermath of the Covid emergency, voters across the wealthy world were turning against those in power and looking for alternatives, often but not exclusively on the right.

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