That half this country could willingly restore Donald Trump to a position of power is a sickening thought. For most liberals, moderates, or people who closely follow news sources not controlled by the Republican Party, it is almost unfathomable.

The incomprehension often leads either to despair or denial. Because Trump is so abnormal, so grotesquely narcissistic and cruel, that his success seems to upend conventional political assumptions and render his triumph into a kind of black magic. Reality is more banal. The American public has not embraced Trump. The decisive bloc of voters always evinced deep misgivings about Trump’s character and rhetoric, even if they didn’t fully recall all his crimes and offenses (who could?) Trump didn’t win by making people love or even accept him. He won because the electorate rejected the Biden-Harris administration. It is important to clearly discern the sources of that rejection. The work of correction is hard, but not complicated.

The seeds of Harris’s failure were planted eight years ago, when the Democratic Party responded to Trump’s 2016 victory not by moving toward the center, as defeated parties often do, but by moving away from it. This decision was fueled by a series of reality-distorting blinders on the Democrats’ decision-making elite. During the first Trump era, public polls showed the president immediately and deeply unpopular, fueling the belief that Americans opposed him so overwhelmingly that Democrats did not need to make any ideological compromises to win. And that delusion was fueled by the pervasive influence of social media, especially Twitter, which fostered a delusional sense that the Democratic base had veered far to the left. Candidate after candidate bowed to demands of progressive groups to endorse unpopular stances favored by the left. This delusional process was shaped by a culture of moral absolutism on the left, in which any compromise at all is seen as tantamount to an endorsement of bigotry, genocide, and ecological collapse.

And so the Democratic primary in the 2020 cycle was a race to the left. Joe Biden won because he abstained from that rush to the left, keeping him closer to where the........

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