We Are Never Going Back

One of the hardest things to face about Donald Trump’s victory is that it comes with an undeniable democratic mandate. Trump prevailed over Kamala Harris in all seven swing states, and became only the second Republican since the end of the Cold War to win the national popular vote, powered by dramatic gains from voters in nearly every part of the country and across diverse demographics. In 2016, Trump’s surprise win against Hillary Clinton came in spite of a popular vote loss and amid allegations of foreign election interference, which helped rally progressives in a campaign of “resistance” that cast Trump as an accidental aberration from American norms. Back then, that framing felt plausible to many; this time, however, there is no escaping that the American electorate decisively prefers Trump and his reactionary platform over a standard Democratic ticket. As a result, longstanding liberal hopes that the nation’s shifting demographics would ultimately lead to a permanent Democratic majority have collapsed, with a far-right campaign demonstrating its appeal to at least some immigrants and communities of color. It turned out that Trump could weather blowback from a supporter’s racist joke, but Harris could not overcome Joe Biden’s historic unpopularity, attributable first and foremost to a globally punishing inflation crisis, but also to an anti-immigrant panic stoked by Republicans and further encouraged by Biden, and, at least among certain subsets of voters, to Biden’s steadfast support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

At first glance, the electorate’s decision to return Trump to the White House may seem ideologically incoherent. Voters came out in favor of enshrining abortion rights in seven out of ten states where it was put to a vote (abortion protections also received majority support in Florida, but fell short of a 60% threshold necessary to pass); yet many of the same voters chose a president whose Supreme Court appointees are responsible for outlawing abortion in half the country and whose party is eager to ban it everywhere else. And while white college-educated voters overall stayed Democratic—Harris outperformed Biden’s 2020 numbers with them—various other constituencies upended conventional wisdom about American politics: Many Latinos supported the candidate pledging to put undocumented Latino immigrants in prison camps; many young voters opted for the candidate threatening to reverse student loan forgiveness; many observant Jews voted for the candidate known to associate with neo-Nazis; and many Muslims voted for the candidate who once attempted to ban Muslims from the country (those last two groups were targeted in mutually contradictory ad campaigns funded by the far-right billionaire Elon Musk). Democrats lost significant ground even in some of the traditionally bluest parts of the country; in New York City, for instance, Trump improved on his 2020 showing by more than ten points, with particularly strong gains in Asian and Latino neighborhoods that matched nationwide trends. With this result, Trump demonstrated definitively that he is liberated from making what many of us regard as sense. Instead, he offered vibes—cruel and vindictive compared with the “joyful” vibes cultivated by the Harris campaign, certainly, but still the vibes that resonated with Americans outside the most rarefied precincts.

Indeed, in gravitating toward Trump, voters seemed to be reading past the candidates’ slogans to identify which party was truly promising to overhaul an untenable status quo. Even though Trump continued to use the backward-looking catchphrase “Make America Great Again” he actually campaigned on radical disruption: mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, steep tariffs on foreign imports, a total gutting of the federal bureaucracy overseen by Elon Musk, and a healthcare system run by the anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., among many other proposed horrors. If he delivers on even a fraction of this, American society will be irrevocably changed. Meanwhile, while the Harris campaign attempted to repudiate Trump with “We Are Not Going Back,” they were the side that seemed to long for a bygone, mythologized era of American greatness—one of bipartisan Cold War liberal consensus defined by civility and a confident establishment. This is the past Harris harkened back to when she toured the battleground states with Liz Cheney and promised to include Republicans in her cabinet, and when she marketed herself as a prosecutor who would uphold the rule of law in contrast with Trump’s multiple felony convictions and flagrant contempt for the Constitution.

This nostalgic approach was grimly epitomized by Biden’s unshakable, ironclad commitment to Israel in the wake of October 2023—a Cold War era position he and much of the Washington foreign policy “blob” have maintained unadjusted despite Israel’s steady rightward descent and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extensively documented war crimes and brazen defiance of Biden’s own publicly declared red lines. Harris did little to distance herself from this record, even as courageous activists worked to persuade the administration she serves in to reconsider its financial and military backing of Israel’s genocide. The Harris campaign even spurned the Uncommitted movement’s bare minimum ask that a single Palestinian speaker be permitted to take the stage and deliver an anodyne speech at this summer’s Democratic National Convention. Many of us warned the campaign that it risked alienating Arab, Muslim, and younger voters in Michigan and other swing states. But Harris ignored us, preemptively refused to hold Israel materially accountable for anything, and ultimately did lose Michigan by less than two points, or around 80,000 votes. In the heavily Arab American city of Dearborn, where Biden won 88% of the vote in 2020, Harris won only 36%. And an exit poll conducted by the Council on American Islamic Relations showed Harris winning less than half of Muslim voters nationwide, a dramatic drop from Biden in 2020, with anger over Gaza as a key reason for the shift. Even if polling suggested the issue was a low priority to most voters, the administration’s palpable disregard for Palestinian life—and refusal to engage with the young voters who had spent a year seeing images of murdered children on social media—impeded Harris’s ability to energize an activist base, and reflected her broader instinct to privilege imagined past glories over the current demands of her core constituents.

The electorate’s rejection of Harris’s timid strategy may represent the last gasp of the old consensus, as the elite pillars that have oriented generations of liberals crumble under their own contradictions. These institutions—reputable newspapers and magazines, Ivy League universities, nonprofit foundations, publishing houses, and the Democratic Party itself—are hollowed out, anachronistic, and widely distrusted. Colleges and universities, for instance, have played into the right’s hands in the accelerating campus culture wars. Rather than defend the academy as a site of free expression, they have spent energy and credibility beating back the left to capitulate to Republican witch hunts and pro-Israel donor pressure. Journalism, too, is in crisis, with traditional publications facing steep declines in subscribers, revenue, and employment opportunities especially in local news markets, while a handful of nationally influential exceptions are increasingly at the mercy of billionaire owners and their narrow interests. And where elite liberal institutions flounder, the right is waiting to step in. In education, we see this in growing crackdowns on progressive curricula and activist speech, especially against Palestine advocates; in media, the rightwing takeover manifests as an avalanche of disinformation and propaganda from a new ecosystem of billionaire-subsidized newsletters, podcasts, and social media platforms that pander to extremists and disseminate conspiracy theories.

The cruel irony is that even as much of the left has sounded the alarm about liberalism’s impending collapse, we will most assuredly be held responsible for it. We know now that we will not spend the years to come struggling over how best to build our ideal society, but rather struggling to protect what we can against the forces of creative destruction that a disenchanted majority of American voters have chosen to unleash. Trump will dismantle Biden’s accomplishments on every front and then some, and even in a post-Trump Democratic era (should we be so fortunate), we will be hard pressed to win them back. With austerity advocates now able to claim decisive victory in the Biden era’s inflation debate—over whether the public can tolerate higher prices if jobs are abundant and wages are rising—even hypothetical future Democratic administrations are unlikely to risk high inflation again, suggesting little hope for bold new investments in healthcare, education, housing, climate justice, transit infrastructure, or any other progressive priorities. The left’s ability to influence policymakers is itself going to be constrained as Democratic politicians draw ugly lessons from the fact that certain constituencies they normally count on voted for Trump. If 2016 produced a wave of progressive activism on all fronts that Democrats were forced to accommodate, 2024 may push them in the opposite direction.

The ambient misery of this week is a kind of mourning for the hopeful futures that have already been foreclosed and the lives that will inevitably be sacrificed as a result. It would be hubristic to propose a manifesto for progressives at such a time; however, it is not too early to contemplate what might have been done differently to prevent a Trump restoration. It’s certainly plausible that if Biden and Harris had actually enforced a red line against Israel and spoken out against Netanyahu’s genocidal policies with conviction, they could have saved tens of thousands of lives and perhaps earned the trust of large numbers of critically situated voters. But Harris’s defeat can’t ultimately be reduced to a single foregone course of action; it was all but predetermined by a crisis of liberalism years in the making, one born of imperial arrogance, haughty indifference to voter grievances, and an educated elite cloistered from its public and confused about its core values. We are indeed not going back—instead we’re going forward into a dark, dystopian, genocidal future that liberals played no small role in shaping.