It wasn’t misogyny that defeated Kamala Harris. There is a certain insincerity lurking behind this explanation of the Republican Party’s decisive victory, which led to the installation of Donald Trump, once again, in the White House.

This is the same insincerity with which the Harris-Walz campaign was run for months. Faced with an “unexpected” debacle, American Democrats, along with other politicians around the world, would do well to do some soul-searching. What was really the problem?

It’s easy to use feminism to explain Trump’s triumph over two women in less than a decade. What is easily forgotten here is that she was recruited in a rage to replace Joe Biden, who was sure to have lost to Trump. An afterthought. The Democrats were desperate to fight the ruling powers, but they approached it from the wrong side.

A bait of guilt

Harris was used by her party as guilt bait in the 2024 presidential election, and her defeat holds important lessons for everyone. First, and most obvious, you can’t guilt voters into supporting you unconditionally. The Harris-Walz campaign has doubled down on its efforts to make the undecided voter feel guilty for even considering a change. Campaign designers and ideological Democratic voters were completely unaware that their policies might have anything to do with popular discontent. Or they knew it and smugly ignored it, armed with the weapons of collective guilt. This complacency caused a shift.

The most palpable example is the Democrats’ deafness to the war in West Asia. In a year marked by relentless antiwar campaigns and protests, Democrats viewed Dick Cheney as their trump card. Cheney’s hawkish attitude as George W. Bush’s vice president left a legacy of violence and human rights abuses in the United States and everywhere else the country intervened militarily. Harris’s claims to peace fell flat in the face of such crude irony. Depending on their disappointment or anger, anti-war Democrats sat out the election, voted for Trump, or voted for the third alternative to mark their dissent.

Thick cosmopolitanism

The Democrats’ adaptation of what political scientists call the theory of “thick cosmopolitanism” in the national domain of immigration did not ensure them a second consecutive term. The theory holds that when people realize their group’s culpability in causing harm to people living in distant lands, they adopt a cosmopolitan and helping attitude. The theory’s inherent limitations, as demonstrated by Nicholas Faulkner, and the exposure of Democrats’ hypocrisy allowed voters to reject their guilt-ridden political campaign. This may partly explain why a large diaspora cohort has turned to Trump.

But Democrats were counting on bitter and guilty dissent. Unfortunately for them, this strategy backfired. Researchers Gunn and Wilson suggest that collective guilt, an important political tool, is often weakened by defensiveness. The Democratic Party has forgotten that just as an attack on personal identity makes an individual defensive, people tend to react defensively when their social identity is threatened. Calling voters racist and sexist before, during and after the election, Democrats sparked a wave of defensiveness among several demographic groups.

Nobody knew what Kamala was talking about

Kamala Harris’ campaign raised and spent more money than Donald Trump’s, but what was the substance? The political message barely managed to escape the rhetoric of “Save America from Trump.” Reeling from high inflation rates, American voters felt invisible when no concrete policy measures were proposed for this “Save America” operation. The Republicans are guilty of running the same banal campaign, but they had the anti-incumbents on their side. Memories of Trump’s previous presidency were fading, and that helped. Trump’s campaign relied on the fickleness of public memory and banked on people’s ability to forget the past when they become obsessed with enduring concerns.

Team Harris, for its part, has weaponized memories of America’s fractured past to make this election about righting historical wrongs. Psychologists warn that people do not necessarily respond well when confronted with their own problematic actions. Political scientist Eunbin Chung has proposed, in the East Asian context, that the affirmation of national identity can be used “as a means of disarming the defensiveness aroused by recognition of one’s guilt.” countries, thus allowing the emergence of more prosocial responses. Democrats, however, have failed to offer a positive vision of American identity in an effort to counter its checkered racial history.

Competitive defense

Add to that the Biden administration’s unbridled support for Israel despite the growing anti-war chime, even within the Democratic Party’s base, and we have a competitive defensive game all over the place. Leaders and voters have stopped listening to each other.

To consider this defeat as a simple misogynistic error therefore amounts to oversimplifying things. This is how Democrats want to continue playing the blame game without any introspection.

(Nishtha Gautam is a Delhi-based author and academic.)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author