It seemed nature was telling us something: Wednesday, November 6, was not only an unseasonably warm day in eastern North America, but a mini-record heat wave. Temperatures exceeded 80°F in New York, Boston and Washington – for our international readers, that’s about 27°C – in all cases exceeding records for that date by at least three degrees.

You can read this as a coincidence, a demonstration of climate change, or a metaphor: What had happened during the previous night and early Wednesday morning, there was certainly some form of explosive combustion occurring. that of Donald Trump A resounding victory in all the so-called swing states and in the national popular vote was not only a defeat for Kamala Harris and the Democrats. The loss of U.S. Senate seats in Ohio and Montana, while disappointing, could be understood as the normal operation of a pendulum swing. electoral politics. Trump’s massive victory could not happen.

What happened to the Democratic Party in 2024 is a catastrophe, and it must be understood in those terms. If the party and all of its supporters fail to understand that this is a moment of reckoning – a moment that demands a fundamental reconsideration of what Democrats stand for and who they represent – ​​​​the disaster could prove fatal.

Defensive chatter about how this election was close (it wasn’t) and how the Harris-Walz campaign fought hard in every state (and failed in every area) doesn’t simply won’t be enough. After a final week of overconfident, hopium-smoking, vibing vaporware – which appealed to me at least a little, and quite possibly you too – the paper tiger of Demo-normity was completely crushed by a clearly unqualified and probably deranged adversary whose message, if that’s the right word, was built on a delusional, hateful fantasy. But hey, at least he had a message. There is a lesson there, of sorts.

Harris and her team of Clinton-Obama advisers went all-in on appealing to middle- or center-right voters with a slightly updated version of the back-to-normal message that got Joe Biden elected there. four years ago. It was like a PowerPoint presentation demonstrating, over the course of seven or eight slides, that we are rational, trustworthy people who will attempt to reach consensus with minor technocratic solutions to the country’s massive, intractable problems, while this other guy is a dangerous sucker F Word dictator who just wants to break things. Far too many voters walked away or fell asleep by the second slide and concluded – reluctantly, in many cases – that given the options, breaking things sounded like a lot more fun.

This electoral calamity seriously undermines the Democratic Party’s already tenuous claim to represent an American majority, and all but completes its alienation from most of the American working class. (With the important exception of blacks of all socioeconomic levels, whose particular history makes them either more rational, more stubborn, or more loyal than other Democratic constituencies.) According to leaving the pollsTHE only The economic stratum that Harris clearly won was people with household incomes above $100,000.

How to resolve these critical and potentially terminal problems is a matter of debate, and God knows the Internet is already overloaded with half-baked positions: Democrats are too woke, too cautious, too corporate, too contaminated by politics identity or black money or both. I have opinions on these things, and if you’re reading this, you probably do too.

Should Democrats break away from Wall Street and Silicon Valley and rebrand themselves as a multiracial social democratic alliance focused on economic justice, or step into the space abandoned by center-right Republicans and become a pro-business and pro-military alliance? The “Cold War liberal” question is a huge and ultimately unavoidable one. (These trends, oddly enough, are almost perfectly symbolized by two Latino members of Congress from neighboring New York City districts: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the left and Ritchie Torres right.) But the crucial point here is that either of these things would represent a real identitywhich is clearly lacking in the current party.

The current Democratic leadership has failed decisively and must not be allowed to persuade the party’s voters – whether they are described as moderate, liberal, progressive or otherwise – that, darn it, we lost, but we sure as hell won. beaten hard, and one way or another, Elon Musk and the Russians are to blame. Next time, with a few tweaks to messages, regrouping of focus, and better management of memes and podcasts, you’ll be fine. This impotent shrug-and-emoji narrative is not simply a signpost to the abyss, which is pretty much where the party already is, but a death march toward erasure and nonexistence. -relevance.

I’m not just talking about the party’s consumer-oriented candidates or Democratic National Committee officials, problematic as they are, but its entire class of Beltway consultants and advisors and their accumulated body of collective wisdom. There’s no point in making a list of the usual K Street suspects, but if any of them (or their assistants) are reading this, they know who they are. Let’s assume they had good intentions, sort of, and thought they knew what they were doing. But hey, Napoleon was feeling pretty good before the Battle of Waterloo. They ultimately and completely failed. We must not let them fail again. To quote a well-remembered Democratic campaign slogan, it’s time for them to go.

It’s impossible not to feel a certain compassion for Kamala Harris, who, after the sugar high of late August and early September, turned out to be the wrong person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. She ran a playful but incoherent campaign and could escape neither her unpopular boss (to whom we owe even more compassion) nor her own personal and political limitations. It is impossible to know whether a different candidate might have produced a different outcome, but as I have already suggested, that outcome was likely overdetermined by the Democratic Party’s trajectory of self-destruction.

In her short and kind speech On Wednesday at Howard University, Harris said that while she conceded defeat to Trump, she had not “conceded the fight that fueled this campaign…the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for equity and dignity of all. What stands out, unfortunately, is the fatal vagueness of this list of buzzwords. What do these words mean for the Democratic Party? How can we fight the “fight” for such abstract concepts?

We cannot and must not ignore the pernicious effects of sexism and racism on this election, especially when these attitudes are often superficial or largely unconscious, and certainly not limited to white men. The combination of race, education, culture and class has become Donald Trump’s death zone against Democrats: Whites without a college education made up nearly 40 percent of this year’s electorate, and two-thirds of them voted for Trump (with a particularly insignificant percentage). gender gap).

I don’t imagine that even the most woke liberal Democrats are willing to dismiss this enormous portion of the population as being composed entirely of unregenerate racists. But even beyond this intractable problem, it became clear that the Democratic Party’s decades-long faith in demographics as destiny was a disastrous mirage. Exit polls suggest that Trump won a majority of white women (as he did in 2020) and a majority of Latino men – a change that will mark our times and a first for any Republican presidential candidate. presidential. He also made significant gains among Asian American voters and (contrary to stereotypes held by many whites) dominated the Native American vote.

Harris performed no better among female voters than Joe Biden in 2020 – or even a few points worse – and the overall gender split, with men favoring Republicans and women favoring Democrats, was no different from other recent elections . Voters in several states where Trump won easily also voted to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitutions. Were these rational choices? Certainly not, but political decisions are driven by emotion and narrative, not instrumental logic. The Harris-Walz campaign initially appeared to be effectively tapping into these more visceral forces, but it was unwilling or unable to follow through.

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One final statistic, the most damaging of all, suggests the depth of Democrats’ predicament. Although America’s two-party system is virtually entrenched, we should not assume that it is entirely static: I recently wrote an article about historical essay this partly concerned the demise of the centre-left British Liberal Party during the First World War, which was destabilized and ultimately destroyed after its collision with a local authoritarian movement. Some of the same dynamics are now present, although the specific context is undeniably different.

Joe Biden received approximately 81.3 million votes in 2020. With counting almost complete in an election that Democrats have loudly proclaimed as the final showdown between democracy and fascism, Kamala Harris is currently counting a little more than 68 million votes. Democrats need to carefully examine this staggering arithmetic: Thirteen million Biden voters they either switched to Trump or, in most cases, just couldn’t be bothered. If this isn’t an existential crisis, one of the most overused terms of this decade, then I haven’t seen one.