Democratic campaign merch, like Kamala Harris’s election bid, is now in the clearance bin – in the airport gift shop in Washington DC, I spotted a rail of Kamala “I’m talking now!” T shirts going for a knockdown $9 (£7). Markets adjust more quickly to realities than many humans.
For America’s Democrats as well as their allies in the UK, the bitter reckoning of the extraordinary defeat by Donald Trump has been quickly matched by the desire to chin-jut. Mournful podcasters on both sides of the pond who were roundly convinced of a Harris victory tell us they were wrong, but not so wrong that they have much to learn from the rout.
A plainly traumatised Harris fuelled this “sorry-but-not-sorry” narrative as I watched her give a concession speech which sounded as if she was still in campaign mode on the evils of her opponent, Donald Trump.
As I write, Republicans look on the brink of taking the House as well as the Senate, the popular vote and the electoral college. This is not just “any” defeat – it is a historic rout and will need a redress that meets the huge impact of the moment if the Democratic Party is to recover in the foreseeable future.
The first lesson is that liberal presumption is punished – hard. Trump drives intellectuals and political centrists on both sides of the Atlantic into such a frenzy that they often oblige his caricature of them being out of touch or simply deluded about the limits of their own appeal.
Rebecca Solnit, a prominent American author, blames US voters for just not getting it: “Our mistake was to see the joy, the extraordinary balance between idealism and pragmatism,........