The 2016 election was a heartbreak for America’s sentimental liberals. This one arrives with more of a deadening thump, 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 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: post-pandemic surges in prices at the supermarket and asylum-seekers at the border, Joe 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.
In the United States, the Democrats have largely bucked that trend, remaining a relatively popular center-left coalition, partly thanks to negative polarization and the basic derangement of Republicans under Trump. The result had been, for a generation, a natural if slim majority, which looks even more commanding if one considers the leftward tilt of Hollywood, the legacy media and academia, and perhaps above all American business. (Blue counties represent more than 70 percent of American G.D.P., and the country’s executive class has been growing steadily more progressive now for several decades.)
An unpopular White House, with a mute and much-mocked president, weighed on the campaign, perhaps more than anything the vice president actually did or said since her surprise elevation to the nomination this summer. But the albatross was not just Joe Biden; it was the longer-term perception that liberals constituted the country’s ruling class. This is something the otherwise inchoate conservative moment has emphasized consistently and effectively in recent years: that the Democrats were now the party of power and the establishment, and that the right was the natural home for anti-establishment resentment of all kinds — of which, it’s now clear to see, there is an awful lot. Most on the left haven’t seen it this way, frustrated by legislative stalemates and judicial setbacks and too-close-for-comfort elections seemingly every cycle, with a feeling all along that liberals were always swimming upstream. But in profound ways that the party’s voters rarely recognize, the Democrats have been the country’s incumbent political force now for a full generation.
Now, it seems, that may be over — the second Trump term promising, if not necessarily delivering, the wholesale replacement of one establishment elite, which presided for a generation, with a new one almost unrecognizable to the last.
This was the first post-pandemic presidential campaign, and though Covid rarely took center stage in the campaign, its aftereffects can be seen all across the political landscape — an accelerating distrust of institutions and establishment wisdom sufficient to reinstall as a national figurehead a retributive narcissist whose “collection of political liabilities are so vast that they defy all attempts to summarize them,” as Jonathan Chait put it this week. Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed vaccines may have saved over three million American lives — and millions more abroad. But his own disdain and the disdain of his supporters for any established authority is such that he not only barely mentioned the success story on the campaign trail but has also publicly pledged to hand the reins of public health over to someone who believes even standard vaccines are a mistake.
The consequences appear quite profound and, in many obvious ways, quite dire — we’ll now have grim years in which to unpack the meaning of an emboldened and unencumbered MAGAism for reproductive freedom, public health, the respective responsibilities of the state toward its citizens and its billionaires, the path of the country’s future and its changing pursuit of progress. Perhaps the expansive second-term agenda will be stymied, as much of Trump’s first-term agenda was, though a more loyal and well-prepared MAGA army is ready to pursue it this time. For already dispirited liberals, it has already gotten much harder to really believe in a progressive future. When you look at the map showing county-level shifts from 2020, it’s a nation painting itself red. And at the end of a campaign in which little concrete policy change was even proposed, and Kamala Harris appears to have underperformed Joe Biden’s 2020 vote count dramatically, the Democrats look today like a party quite short on ideas.
But the results also cast a different light on the recent past, suggesting the end of an era we may retrospectively identify as a high-water mark for Democratic governance in the modern era. Perhaps you date the beginning of this period to 2008, when Barack Obama won what proved to be an anomalous landslide that also secured him a filibuster-proof 60-seat Senate caucus (and stoked dreams among liberals of a permanent Democratic majority). Or perhaps you date it to 1992, when Bill Clinton turned the page on Reaganism in the first of those eight elections in which Democrats notched seven popular-vote victories. Much of this period featured lower interest rates, which might’ve enabled much more expansive social spending; instead, it makes the ultimate returns appear, in retrospect, only more paltry.
In simplistic political mythology, the period has been treated as a sputtering era of American decline. But the data tells a different story, at least when compared the experience of our peers. Since 2008, the American economy has grown at an enviable clip, with many measures of inequality falling, too; since the pandemic, the American anomaly has grown even larger. Legislation and cultural progress was insufficient for many on the left, but nevertheless the progress was significant: Over 40 million people with health insurance via the Affordable Care Act, a serious effort to combat climate change and industrial decline, a genuine revolution in gay rights. At several points — when Obama stormed into office, when Bernie Sanders seemed to revitalize the left — it seemed as if much more was possible. Progressives spent much of the time dismayed, or outraged, at the shortfalls. But for now, the job turns to preserving an insufficient status quo.
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