A little perspective to offset the shock and bewilderment of the moment.
The Democratic Party was in a structurally bad position in 2024. Very bad. As the political scientist John Sides, who has been called “probably the leading authority on campaigns in the United States,” recently pointed out on our podcast, The Lede, “If you were imagining a year in which the Democrats were fighting into some headwinds in terms of [President Joe] Biden’s low popularity, the shadow that inflation may continue to cast in people’s assessments of the economy, it’s easy to see this as a year that would be a comfortable win for the Republicans.” The election was a toss-up only because of Donald Trump’s huge negatives, Sides noted.
Of course, this analysis will offer precious little consolation to those who voted for Kamala Harris, who are probably experiencing a range of emotions — not just shock and bewilderment, but disgust with and alienation from those Americans who voted the other way.
After all, Harris voters might say, you could be forgiven for voting for Trump in 2016. He was a real estate tycoon and reality television host famous for his brashness and bluster. Sure, he was a flamethrower and a provocateur, but he had never held elected office at that point. How serious could he be, after all?
The widespread relief and euphoria over Trump’s loss in 2020 served to obscure the sobering fact that more people voted for him that year than in 2016. Indeed, in 2020, Trump received the second-most votes of any presidential candidate in American history. Biden received the most that same year, which handed Trump a defeat, but the fact remained that millions of Americans voted for Trump after his four years in office — in spite or because of his performance in office. The elation over his defeat served to block a proper reckoning with the reality of the vote.
This time around, a reckoning is unavoidable. Trump has now triumphed after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; after campaigning on an explicitly authoritarian vision laced with increasingly unhinged rhetoric; after the endless stream of lies and conspiracy theories. And this was his most decisive victory yet — he won the popular vote for the first time and swept all of the battleground states. That will not be easy to forgive, or to understand. It will deepen the already profound alienation that pervades American life. It is likely to have far-reaching and long-term consequences beyond the realm of politics, extending into people’s social, family and romantic relationships. This process has already been intensifying since 2016, but the election results will push it to new heights.
There was a major paradox at the heart of the 2024 U.S. presidential election: The case for defeating Trump was arguably even stronger this time around than it was in 2016 or 2020, and yet there was less of a sense of urgency about doing so.
“I can’t help but feel like there’s something oddly subdued about the whole thing,” Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid recently observed. “Most politically-minded folks I know are saying that the election is ‘existential,’ but they don’t seem to be acting like it,” he noted. This is my sense of the political temperature as well.
But it’s not just a vague impression. Lots of progressives (we don’t yet know exactly how many) who voted for Biden in 2020 did not vote for Kamala Harris in 2024, opting instead for Green Party candidate Jill Stein or independent Cornel West — or just didn’t vote at all — in protest over the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the war in Gaza.
What made the case for beating the former president more acute this time is that Trumpism 2.0 has morphed into something much darker, a more explicitly authoritarian project, than the first iteration. The talk of migrants “poisoning the blood of our country”; of “rooting out” political opponents “that live like vermin within the confines of our country”; of using the military against “enemies from within”; calling for the execution of retired Gen. Mark Milley, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and former Rep. Liz Cheney. Trump recently said to Tucker Carlson: “Let’s put [Cheney] with the rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it — you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
And then there are Trump’s detailed plans to round up tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants, detain them in camps and then deport them “on a scale unseen in modern American history,” according to The New York Times. Not to mention the scheme to purge as many as 50,000 career civil servants and replace them with hardcore ideological loyalists. Trump disavowed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for government during the campaign, but whatever happens to the policy proposals, Project 2025 has the resumes in place to staff the new administration.
It has been widely reported that Milley called Trump “a fascist to the core” and that another general who served in the administration, former White House chief of staff John Kelly, considers Trump a fascist. More significant is that two leading scholarly authorities on fascism who had been skeptical about using the term to characterize Trump during his presidency have recently changed their minds in light of Trumpism’s new incarnation. The events of Jan. 6, 2021, forced Robert Paxton, author of “The Anatomy of Fascism,” one of the definitive books on the subject, to reconsider his views. Trump’s “open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line,” he wrote shortly after the storming of the U.S. Capitol. “It just seemed to me that a new language was necessary, because a new thing was happening,” he told The New York Times.
Historian Christopher Browning, author of “The Origins of the Final Solution,” acknowledged that Trumpism 1.0 exhibited certain fascist elements: “the inflammatory rallies; the incessant mongering of fear, grievance, and victimization; the casual endorsement of violence; the pervasive embrace of conspiracy theories; the performative cruelty; the feral instinct for targeting marginalized and vulnerable minorities; and the cult of personality.”
By the same token, Browning emphasized that Trumpism in its original version was quite different from 20th-century fascism in key respects — but a second Trump presidency, he argued, would present something much more ominous, perhaps a whole new kind of fascism.
So, if a Trump victory in 2024 presented an even bigger threat, why was there less urgency about stopping it?
There are two sets of answers to this paradox — one pertaining to those Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 and for Trump in 2024; the other pertaining to those who voted for Biden in 2020 and for Stein or West (or sat out the election entirely).
For this second camp, the Gaza war was the defining issue. There was a spirited, at times rancorous debate among progressives about whether or not to back Harris. There was even “vote shaming” that pitted Black Americans against Palestinian Americans. In August, Samer Badawi reported for New Lines on the skepticism toward Harris among the half a million “uncommitted” voters angered by Biden’s stance on Gaza. There is lots to say about this issue, and how the Harris campaign alienated many Arab-American and Muslim-American voters, but I’m going to save that discussion for another occasion, since this bloc was not decisive for the election’s outcome (as many feared it would be, especially in Michigan).
The first (much larger) group was decisive for Trump’s victory, and there were several drivers that flipped Biden voters in 2020 into the Trump camp in 2024, including inflation, immigration and the border, and culture wars. Conversely, many college-educated suburban women voted for Trump in 2020 and Harris in 2024, over reproductive freedom. There were high hopes that this group would be an electoral game changer. That didn’t pan out. Biden-to-Trump voters apparently outnumbered Trump-to-Harris voters.
Inflation and immigration clearly helped Trump and hurt Harris. But there’s a particular aspect of the culture wars that I’d like to discuss. There is widespread discomfort and anxiety among parents over gender-affirming care and trans issues — and not just among deeply conservative parents. And while there are good-faith discussions over issues like the appropriateness of forms of gender-affirming care for different age groups, a frequent progressive response is to dismiss concerns as fearmongering and hysteria, a baseless moral panic rooted in ignorance and disinformation.
I tended to see them this way as well, as an entirely confected series of political talking points. But a series of conversations with my stepdaughter and son-in-law have shifted my perspective on this. They are not right-wing and not particularly religious. I would describe them as generally apolitical. My stepdaughter has voted for Democrats in the past. She graduated from college. Her husband didn’t go to college. They’re both in their late 30s and identify as Latino. And they have three kids, ages 8, 4 and a newborn.
They’re very blunt about this. They’re deeply uncomfortable — as parents — with the gender wars. They’re worried that their kids might be exposed to potentially confusing messages about gender (in school, through media and pop culture) before they are ready to fully comprehend them. They have heard stories about kids receiving gender-affirming care and about children having conversations with teachers about these issues that parents are not privy to, and are afraid of the idea that their children may wonder which pronouns they should use and question their gender identity.
In discussions they’re keen to emphasize that they are not homophobic and have no problem with adults making whatever choices they make about their sexuality; that is, they see themselves as tolerant toward queer people. What troubles them is the idea of young kids being exposed to certain ideas about gender and the potential confusion it might cause — their kids in particular. And that discussions about these things might cut parents out of the picture. They find this unsettling.
LGBTQ+ activists would rightly contend that gender-affirming care reduces the suicide risk among young people and that pandering to transphobic views has the potential to do real harm. Yet these kinds of concerns appear to be growing among people like my stepdaughter and her husband and it may only be possible to deal with such opinions through a more comprehensive and informed public discussion that treats them as held in good faith. They did not come to these views through right-wing media or religious sources, and their concern is the direct impact this issue may have on their everyday lives.
But they are now drifting rightward over these issues. And the perception that they would not get a sympathetic hearing among progressives — indeed that their concerns would be met with hostility on the left — only pushes them further away. I’ve told several friends — including very left-wing and queer friends — about these conversations with my stepdaughter and son-in-law and have been struck by the responses. Without exception, people have said they completely understand these feelings and concerns. They’ve said this privately, to me. But would they feel free to say so publicly, given the potential fallout?
“I’m increasingly convinced that sanctimony is a hindrance to solidarity,” the progressive writer and activist Astra Taylor recently wrote on social media. “We need moral clarity, courage, and conviction. But we also need curiosity. If we wanna move folks we have to season our indignation and judgment with humility and try to see where folks are coming from.”
Back to the question of Trump’s authoritarianism. Skeptics (on both the right and the left) frequently point out that the “Trump is an existential threat to democracy” warning is exaggerated. The republic survived his first presidency intact, after all. The predictions and admonitions about Trump becoming a dictator have failed to materialize. The anti-Trump left is in danger of becoming the boy who cried wolf, the skeptics argue.
But this ignores the increasing authoritarianism of Trumpism. It disregards that Trump will have a much freer hand this time around, with the adults in the room gone and ideological loyalists elevated to positions of power. Perhaps we should listen to Robert Paxton, Christopher Browning and others who have been ringing alarm bells about Trumpism 2.0.
On the other hand, we might hold out hope (or perhaps indulge in wishful thinking) that the checks and balances in government will constrain Trump’s autocratic impulses.
We’ll soon find out. But the thing to remember about the boy who cried wolf is that the wolf does eventually eat the boy.
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