Democracy Derailed: Trump’s Triumph Signals a Dark New Era

Trump returns with full power, leaving Democrats and half the nation reeling as America faces an unprecedented political upheaval.

When Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016, the result stunned the nation, its political elites and even Trump himself, who hadn’t really expected to win. Fear and anger swept the ranks of liberals and moderates, who hadn’t reckoned on this demagogic, bigoted outsider actually winning state power. Could any conceivable outcome be worse?

Well, yes. This year’s outcome is decidedly worse. For one thing, Trump is now a known quantity to virtually every American and one who, according to the exit polls, is still in negative territory when it comes to his approval rating. The campaign he just waged was more vituperative, more reliant on racist and misogynist slander and big lies than the ones he’d waged in 2016 and 2020. Yet despite all that, when all the votes are tallied, he will probably emerge as the victor not only in the Electoral College but also, as was not the case in the last two elections, in the popular vote.

And this time around, the Trump tide has also swept out the Democrats’ majority in the Senate, which means that Trump will be able to appoint any cabinet and agency heads and federal judges he desires, since these confirmations, by virtue of Senate rules, require a simple majority rather than the supermajorities that are needed to pass legislation. When all the votes are counted, Republicans may also be able to cling to their narrow majority in the House, which will effectively give Trump complete carte blanche to dismantle laws and regulations that ensure public health, mitigate climate change, provide some oversight to financial markets, and secure free and fair elections.

Trump’s gains in the electorate came chiefly among working-class voters, who, as in many European nations, have moved rightward as the transformation from an industrial economy to an information economy has diminished their economic prospects and political clout. Like many centre-left parties, the Democratic base now centres on college-educated and, hence, more prosperous voters. Exit polls showed Trump narrowly winning among voters whose yearly family incomes were under $100,000, with Harris narrowly carrying those voters with family incomes higher than that.

Ironically, Biden’s presidency was the first Democratic presidency since Lyndon Johnson’s to put working-class interests at the centre of its economic programme, bringing about a historic increase in factory construction and clearly siding with unions in their disputes with management. But Biden, hobbled by declining health, seldom appeared in public to make the case for his policies, and his foremost macroeconomic achievement – providing an economic stimulus so massive that it brought about the swiftest economic recovery that any nation experienced following the plunge that came with the COVID pandemic – went all but unnoticed. Voters tend to be oblivious to policies that keep things, even bad things, from happening. What the public most certainly noticed, however, were the high prices that were partly a byproduct of running such a hot economy but were more the consequence of dysfunctional global supply chains and such geopolitical disruptions as Russia’s war on Ukraine.

And so the Biden-Harris Administration went the way of numerous regimes that had the misfortune to govern during a global wave of price increases. But that only begins to address the problems that the Democratic Party faces. A factor that clearly underlies its steadily weakening posture among working-class voters is the nearly complete deunionisation of that working-class. Today’s blue-and-pink collar workers had grandfathers who were able to support their families by virtue of their union wages and benefits. Today, with a bare 6 per cent of private-sector workers enrolled in unions, workers’ ability to bargain and to wield political clout has largely disappeared. Absent any sense of actual agency, many become receptive to a demagogue like Trump, who vows to deport millions of immigrants and argues that that policy will somehow enable them to better their lot.

Just as the exit polls revealed how decisive a role class played in the Republicans’ victory, they also revealed the decisive role of gender. Among white voters, the gap in Trump support between white men and white women was seven percentage points. Among Black voters, it was 14 percentage points, and among Latinos, it was 16 percentage points. While immigrants were the chief target of Trump’s attacks, the “feminised” Democratic Party, personified by Harris, was his second target of choice. Trump’s ground game was nowhere near as extensive as Harris’s, but its choice of turnout targets – working-class young men of all races, who are generally the group least likely to vote – was also reflected in the violence of Trump’s speech. Like all political coalitions, the MAGA movement is made up of a collection of disparate groups, from cryptocurrency speculators to Christian evangelicals, but at its core, it’s a movement of precarious manhood, which is why Trump sought to embody and surround himself with presumable examples of hypermasculinity (like the actors who play professional wrestlers).

Trump’s victories not only plunge the Democrats into playing defence for (at best) the next several years, but also compel them to go through a wrenching period of redefinition and recomposition. I suspect a number of the party’s social concerns – support for immigrants, some restrictions on gun ownership and the like – will be de-emphasised if not altogether dumped for some time to come. I don’t believe, however, that the party will once again embrace the neoliberal policies of free global trade and deregulation of markets that characterised the Carter, Clinton and Obama presidencies and played a decisive, decades-long role in workers abandoning their Democratic voting habits. Harris did not lose because she supported using the government’s power to lower the price of prescription drugs; indeed, the exit polls showed the public’s preference for such governmental interventions over the alternative of a more laissez-faire economics.

That said, the election leaves American liberals, progressives, Democrats – effectively, half of the nation and more than half of its political elites – stunned, disheartened, and just beginning to grope for ways out of the cave into which the nation has plunged. I suspect the party will find its new leaders chiefly among Democratic governors, as they can enact popular progressive policies in their states, even as Congressional Democrats will find themselves unable to do anything other than mounting rhetorical opposition to the neo-fascists who will now control the federal government.