“It is happening again.” This morning, with Donald Trump in command of another crushing presidential victory, the dreadful words from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks sit like lead inside many stomachs. As the climax of a frenzied campaign and the triumph of so much that is vicious and corrosive in American society, Trump’s second election comes as a shock. And yet, as an event in contemporary history, it can hardly be seen as a surprise.
First and most prosaic, there is inflation. Did America really elect a dictator because Frosted Flakes hit $7.99 at the grocery store? Read that sentence again and it doesn’t sound so absurd.
At a deeper level, 2024 has taught us a hard lesson: in a global society defined by consumption rather than production, voters loathe price increases and are ready to punish rulers who preside over them. Across the biggest election year in modern history, with billions voting worldwide, incumbents have taken a beating, left, right, and center: the Tories in Britain, Emmanuel Macron in France, the African National Congress in South Africa, Narendra Modi’s BJP in India, Kirchnerism in Argentina last fall. Today post-pandemic inflation, aggravated by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, has claimed the scalp of yet another incumbent government.
In America, the Democrats’ position was doubly dire. Across the last decade, the defining pattern of national politics has been class dealignment: a vast migration of working-class voters away from the Democratic Party, matched by a flood of professional-class voters away from the Republicans. This was the decisive factor in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was toppled by the same Rust Belt proletarians who had elected Barack Obama. And it continued, more quietly but with unchecked motion, in the years when Democrats made up for their losses by winning more suburban professionals, in 2018, 2020, and 2022.
Kamala Harris’s campaign was an embodiment of this shift. She herself ran…
Auteur: Matt Karp
