The Democratic Party, the mainstream news media, and the political class are conducting a political autopsy of the 2024 Election and how Trump and the MAGA movement were able to easily triumph when the “conventional wisdom” suggested a historically close election. This political autopsy is even more urgent given that Donald Trump and his MAGAfied Republicans will rule the country as authoritarians with control over all three branches of government and a Supreme Court that has decided that Donald Trump is a de facto king who is above the law. Based on the people he is choosing for his Cabinet and for other senior roles in his administration, Trump is following the autocrat’s playbook of surrounding himself with “yes men” and “yes women” whose loyalty is personally to him and not the Constitution, the American people, democracy, the rule of law and the common good. Almost all of Trump’s choices are manifestly under-qualified if not incompetent for the vast amounts of power and responsibility they will be given to impact the lives, safety, and future of the American people and the country.
The Democratic Party’s autopsy of its defeat in the 2024 election is important, but they need to quickly move forward if they and the country’s democracy and civil society are to have any chance of surviving the Trump MAGA autocracy and authoritarian regime.
Writing on X/Twitter, Tom Nichols counseled:
Uncharacteristically, I'll say that Dems should stop beating up on themselves and firing volleys back and forth. (They can get back to that later.) American voters - as I've been warning for years - are changing, and becoming more like Trump. That's hard to counteract…But no Dem can change the fact that millions of ungettable GOP votes are set in stone not because of economic conditions - which were the best any candidate could have hoped for - but because even relatively affluent voters have spent years marinating in complete craziness.
At The American Prospect, Thomas Nelson advises the Democratic Party to embrace an economic agenda that uplifts the American worker and fully embraces the labor movement:
A couple of years getting started with class-based policies can’t compensate for 40 years of the opposite.
Pound for pound, dollar for dollar, no Democratic president measured up to the Biden-Harris administration’s progressive street cred since LBJ’s Great Society. But it’s too early in the life cycle to expect a payoff. Sanders intimates a more important point. The beating heart of the Democratic Party is an economic, class-based coalition first and foremost….
The solution is not recriminations, finger-pointing, and hand-wringing but structural change. And it goes well beyond message. The tried-and-true way to close yawning gaps in income inequality, health care access, and worker satisfaction is with labor unions. Is it any wonder that as labor union membership plummeted, wealth inequality expanded, health care access dwindled, and paychecks stagnated?
The solution to rebuild the Democratic Party in the image of the worker is simple: Rebuild the labor movement.
While the Democratic Party is trying to make sense of how Kamala Harris’ campaign can spend more than 1 billion dollars, suffer a decrease in voter turnout of 13 million people as compared to Biden in 2020, and lose key parts of its base to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, the American people are going to have to do a deep reassessment of their behavior as well.
With Trump’s takeover and the country succumbing even faster to some form of fascism and autocracy, the American people are going to have their values, morals, character, and personal relationships tested. Will they defend democracy or instead surrender and be collaborators and quislings? How will they respond when they see the rights and freedoms of their family members, friends, neighbors, and other members of the community being taken away? Will they disengage from politics and sink into a state of learned helplessness (and self-medication and a culture of distraction and the attention economy) or instead become more engaged and active who have agency in their society and politics?
In an attempt to make sense of Trump’s victory, our collective emotions in this time of trouble and dread, what this election reveals about American values and character, and what comes next when Trump takes power in January, I recently spoke with a range of experts.
Robert P. Jones is the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller "The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future," as well as "White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity."
It’s been a heavy week. Looking at all the dead heat numbers down the home stretch of the election, I was never optimistic that the country would unite to block the second coming of Trump. But like most, I was surprised at the sweep of the swing states, the likely outright win of the popular vote, and the decisive losses in the Senate. I’ve been down and distracted, not because a particular party won but because a majority of Americans have handed power back to someone who not only fails the basic test of human decency but who has openly tried to overturn an election he lost in 2020 and subvert democratic norms. On the professional front, I’ve been doing my own analysis of the election, writing to a........