Despite the frenzy of expert analysis, the 2024 US election result is not complicated, or surprising.
The US is a country of immense wealth that could do well for a majority of its citizens, but doesn’t. The minimum wage is unlivable; healthcare, paid family leave and life-saving drugs are luxuries; private equity firms are allowed to bully citizens; schoolchildren are trained to avoid gunshots; and each generation is gaslit about the need to pay for and die in a new war.
Meanwhile, Democratic presidential candidates search their crystal balls for the right combination of identity politics and micro-promises to put a handful of key states just barely over the line, keen to protect their donors’ interests by avoiding more progress than necessary. The Republican party then takes the obvious strategy of misdirecting the resulting frustration.
The bar is so low. Progressive policies already proven in other countries are enormously popular among American voters of all stripes: mandated paid family leave, negotiating all drug prices, single-payer healthcare, raising the minimum wage, etc. Winning political campaigns run on big, popular ideas, and any decent campaign would have beaten Trump, who self-sabotaged continuously. The trouble is the illusion, created by the breaking of ever more modest progressive promises, that moving forward together is impossible.
Should voters have known better, been more rational, tried harder, been less racist, less sexist? It’s just not a useful question when so much political capital has been left on the table to rot. Try running on something actually popular! Yes, of course Wall Street will vilify you. Welcome it; call out their predation! Yes, of course the Republicans will block your legislation. Drag their name through the mud for it! When you’re on the right side of a battle, be loud!
The purpose and measure of democracy is not to fight each other, but to fight elites. The world is increasingly polarized, not truly between right and left, but between the rich and the rest of us. If you don’t take our side, you’ll lose to someone who pretends to.