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Guest Essay

By Timothy Shenk

Mr. Shenk is an assistant professor of history at George Washington University.

What do Democrats stand for? Over the last eight years, the answer has been simple: whatever Donald Trump is against. They have been the party of the so-called Resistance, defending institutions against a dangerous and fundamentally undemocratic movement. Two impeachments, four criminal investigations and 34 felony convictions, along with countless warnings that democracy was in peril: All of it flowed out of the conviction that Mr. Trump was a menace who couldn’t be addressed by politics as usual. It has defined what it means to be a Democrat. And it failed spectacularly this week, helping clear a path for Mr. Trump to return to the White House with a clean victory in the popular vote. This time, there’s no James Comey to scapegoat or Electoral College to blame. It’s a painful defeat — but it could also be a moment of rebirth for the party as it sets out to find a lasting Democratic majority.

The first step for Democrats is reckoning with how they got here. The origins of Resistance politics go back over a decade, even before Mr. Trump entered politics. In 2011, with Mr. Trump making headlines as the leading spokesman for birtherism, Barack Obama’s team seized the opportunity to cast him as the face of the entire Republican opposition. Years later, David Plouffe, an Obama campaign manager turned presidential adviser, explained the strategy. “Let’s really lean into Trump here,” Mr. Plouffe remembered thinking. “That’ll be good for us.”

And it was, for a while — so good that when Mr. Plouffe joined Kamala Harris’s campaign over the summer, it still seemed like the basis for a winning coalition. Democrats had reinvented themselves on policy several times over since Mr. Plouffe was in the White House, trading Hillary Clinton’s technocratic........

© The New York Times