Yascha Mounk at his eponymous Substack: Back in 2016, the whiff of aberration hung over Trump’s success. His opponents could claim that his victory was some strange historical fluke. They could put it down to foreign interference or to Russian hackers. Political scientists confidently pronounced that he represented the final, Pyrrhic victory of a declining electorate—the last, desperate stand of the old, white man.
But aberrations tend not to happen twice, and 2024 puts the last nail in the coffin of that distorted interpretation. Though some cable news hosts may be tempted to replay their old hits in months to come, only a few diehards will believe Trump to be the Manchurian Candidate this time around. Perhaps most interestingly, it is now clear that Trump put into action the advice which Reince Priebus gave Republicans after their second consecutive defeat to Barack Obama, to court minority votes the party had traditionally conceded to Democrats. His victory is not due to old white men but rather due to his success in building a deeply multiethnic coalition—as his crushing victory in Florida, a state that long ago became “majority minority,” attests.
How could this possibly have happened?
It is time to take a long, hard look in the mirror.
I have, at this point, been going around warning the world about the danger posed by authoritarian populists like Donald Trump for about a decade. And I continue to believe that these politicians, from Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and from Narendra Modi in India to Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, pose a serious threat to democracy.
American institutions are much stronger than many observers have come to believe. But Trump, much more experienced than he was at the outset of his first term in office and emboldened by a much more resounding victory, will test American democracy in a more serious way. Over the next four years, we will, as I argued in these pages in the week before the election, see a clash between an unstoppable force and an immovable object.
And yet, it is time to admit that, in purely electoral terms, the argument that democracy is on the ballot simply does not seem to work. The reason for that is not just that people care more about pocketbook issues like inflation or that incumbents have in general had a bad run of late. It’s that they don’t trust Democrats on the issue of democracy much more than they do Republicans. According to one exit poll in Pennsylvania, three out of four voters in the state believe that democracy in the United States is threatened; among those who do, it was Trump, not Harris, who had the edge.
This hints at the fundamental fact of the past decade, a fact that elite discourse still has not fully confronted: Citizens’ trust in mainstream institutions has been absolutely shattered. Corporations and the military, universities and the courts, all used to enjoy a certain modicum of residual trust. That trust is now gone. It is unlikely to return anytime soon.
The extent to which most people now mistrust mainstream institutions is in many ways disproportionate. Despite Trump’s apocalyptic description of its current state, America remains one of the most affluent and successful societies in the history of humanity. And while ideological excesses have significantly weakened American institutions over the course of the last years, these institutions do remain capable of impressive work: For every ridiculous article about racism in the knitting community that The New York Times publishes, for example, it also puts out several sober reports about important world events.
And yet, we must admit that the wound is to a significant degree self-inflicted. A small cadre of extreme activists obsessed with an identitarian vision of the world—a vision that pretends to be left-wing but in many ways parallels the tribalist worldview that has historically characterized the far-right—has gained tremendous influence over the last years. And even those institutional insiders who were able to keep this influence at bay through clever rearguard actions were rarely willing to oppose them in explicit terms.
This was one of the most consequential vulnerabilities of Kamala Harris’ campaign. While running for the Democratic primaries in 2019, she wedded herself to a slew of identitarian positions that happened to be deeply unpopular. Sensing that the political winds had shifted, she did not reprise her flirtations with the idea of defunding the police or decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But neither did she have the courage to explicitly call out the ideological foundations for these deeply unpopular positions—or to reassure millions of swing voters that she would be willing to stand up for common sense when doing so might risk inspiring a little pushback within her coalition.
Donald Trump is far outside the American cultural mainstream. (Yes, I believe that to be true even after reckoning with his unexpectedly strong showing tonight.) But the problem is that Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party, and the wider world of establishment institutions with which they are widely associated are also far outside the American cultural mainstream.
More here.
