Donald Trump has once more won the presidency. It's as shocking as it was the first time and even more terrifying. We should have seen this coming from all the polling which showed that the race was tied nationally and in the swing states. Of course it was possible. But I think a lot of us, myself included, once again fell for the illusion that America is too fundamentally decent to elect someone like Trump. We were wrong.

In 2016 that starry-eyed naivete led to the deep despair that we all felt when Trump eked out a win over Hillary Clinton. And in 2020 we believed that dream was vindicated when Joe Biden turned the tables and eked out a win over Trump. And here we are again, caught in a swirling vortex from which we can't seem to escape.

This anti-democratic coalition has a deep, entrenched grievance with the modern world and they use politics to express it.

The funny thing is that until recently I had assumed that the contest was going to be political trench warfare again and the result would be very close. It has seemed to me for a while that we're in an ongoing war between two coalitions that can be defined as pro-democracy and anti-democracy and they have roughly equal political strength. The razor-thin margins in Congress and these incredibly tight presidential races bear that out.

Yes, Donald Trump is the leading figure in this fight as the man who best articulates the anti-democratic coalition's impulses but he also hinders them with his crudeness and lack of discipline. Meanwhile, the pro-democracy coalition is diffuse and leaderless but is helped by the fact that it's less crazy. Joe Biden managed to pull it out in 2020 in the middle of a global pandemic when there were just enough people in the right states to recognize that Trump wasn't up to dealing with it. He was also a white man, which clearly makes that choice easier for some people. (It cannot be a coincidence that the rank misogynist brute,........

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