America has made a terrible mistake. Despite everything we’ve seen from the right, voters have nonetheless moved toward it.

Rather than the mandate Trump/Musk/Christo-nationalists are claiming from the election, however, US voters merely reflected the same pattern emerging from around the globe, almost universally: Incumbent leaders and parties world-wide have been defeated, or their majorities reduced, in a global ‘radicalizing effect’ still lingering from the Covid economy. Across the political spectrum, voters have punished incumbent parties in Japan, South Africa, Italy, Austria, the UK, France, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, Belgium, Portugal and the Netherlands. As Matthew Yglesias wrote for the NYT, “everywhere you look in the world of affluent democracies, the exact same thing is happening: The incumbent party is losing and often losing quite badly.”

As a healing balm, this may feel thin. After all, other countries don’t have a Trump equivalent (except perhaps Netanyahu, whose war is keeping him in office, and Putin, whose elections are a joke). Americans have seemingly embraced a known monster, someone who sells political violence and hatred, who tried to overthrow the last election. But it’s more complicated than that. Trump supporters in the US consume right wing propaganda far more than the rest of the country, which means they were either not informed about Trump’s sinister plans, or Fox and Musk succeeded in scaring them with a firehose of Harris disinformation.

While it may feel better to think of Trump supporters as misinformed rather than hateful, the downside is that an........

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