Immediately after an election, journalists such as me write analysis and commentary explaining the result and what it says about the mood of the electorate. In many cases, such as Tuesday's triumph for Donald Trump, the readers know that the reporter was a fairly enthusiastic advocate for one side, in the course of which they made many statements about what people thought and felt, or ought to have thought or felt.
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The postmortems are to explain why this didn't turn out to be true, why some factors or issues, which the journalists had considered very important, had not seemed to weigh at all. We are always open to the charge that if we failed to see the mood before the day, how can write about it, in some cases so elegantly, immediately after?
This was a mood election; it was not a referendum about Kamala Harris. Nor was it a referendum of Donald Trump's character. Trump won it because he and his advisers harnessed the mood to their own purposes, and shaped their campaign in clever ways to make sure it pandered to the mood. One could, at times, see the power of the mood harnessed as a political idea from the way that supporters, from elderly women to college boys, seemed transfixed by the opportunity, and from the tears of joy when Trump's election was clear. The election of Harris would have caused an outpouring of relief (there and abroad). But not any sense of a second coming.
The mood was primarily about disillusion with and disappointment in government. It was a lot less about the government of the moment, than about government at all.
Many Americans, and by no means only Trumpites or Republicans or white Americans, feel disconnected from government, and see it as unresponsive to their needs. They feel, not without reason, that governments have become hostages to and corrupted by vested interests. They feel that elite groups - and Trump's team skilfully conflated that with Democrats in the political class - were dominating the political agenda. Old institutions in government or in broader society no longer seem to exemplify what they see as fundamental culture or values, particularly in relation to sexual mores, and the established order (which is to say, the traditional precedence of the rights and values of the white Americans who had, apparently, been given the US for their own purposes by God.)
The arts, Hollywood, and the mainstream media reflect the values and the snobberies of the coastal elites. As many saw it, they did not show back to the American people their society as they recognised it. It is a part of the grievance that the enemy - call them for the moment Democrats - don't get it. And, indeed, many leading Democrats, including Harris and Biden, don't seem to get it. Or even to accept the fact of this alienation, whether they agree with it or not.
Not all Republicans are thought to understand the mood. Republicans have long been abusing each other about people being RINOs - Republicans in name only. These are people, perhaps conservatives but certainly not radical ones, who see the function of achieving power as to preside without doing novel things or blowing the budget.
Trumpites, and some of their populist predecessors such as the Tea Party, see themselves as radicals. They want government so they can transform it. That includes stripping it of some functions, a few of which will go to the states. But it also includes using the coercive power of government to prosecute a social agenda, such as reproductive rights, and to punish their enemies. And reward their friends, including their big donors.
The Trump agenda is not about some bold actions capable of being reversed by a new administration. It is about a permanent transformation of the structure and idea of government. Its laws. Its functions. Its reach into business, the family and the economy. To make any change too difficult for future activists to bother.
But one cannot yet see what Trump will actually do to achieve this agenda. Many of his followers and funders support the broad vision, but once arguments get to the nitty gritty, there will be wars between........