Power to the person

Governments have a role as molders of collective public opinion as much as representatives of public opinion. But both responding and molding must be measured and prescribed to the sensitivity, capacity, and tolerance of the electorate, the whole electorate—not just to those whose votes mattered more.

Party affiliation isn’t simply an expression of disagreements, it has also become the cause of them. The political divide in the United States is made particularly stark because of its two-party system. The numbers of undecided swing voters have dwindled to so few that elections have been decided by a few hundred votes, and the path to the Electoral College is decided by as few as seven of the 50 states and its 16 territories.

There is no doubt in the 2024 election Donald Trump won the Electoral College and the popular vote. There was no recounting of votes or contested results. It was a clear and convincing win for Donald Trump.

Trump in the final analysis appealed to minorities, women, and young voters alike. Attacks on reproductive rights, insults against Hispanics and minority groups, denigration of transgender rights, denial of climate change, nor affections for dictators like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un or Viktor Orban, made a difference to the waves of red voters across America.

There was nothing the Democrats could have done to sway sufficient supporters to fend off the red onslaught. Donald Trump has overcome profound difference: ideological, geographical, demographic, and temperamental. So where does this leave the Democrats?

Perhaps the one most evident failure of the democratic movement in the United States and beyond has been the inability of democrats to communicate with the human condition past its intelligentsia. Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were quick to claim their humble working-class roots as an expression of their commitment to the working class. But neither conveyed a genuine connection to the working classes.

At best, their claims represented entries on a resume, a check point on their list of qualifications. Yet, qualification does not equal competency, and neither Harris nor Biden demonstrated the competency for connecting with their blue-collar brothers and sisters in rural America. Democrats have been contented to focus on the college educated electorate, restricted mostly to urban America.

Supporting unionised workers, most of whom enjoy pensions and benefits, falls far short of understanding the working woman and man toiling on the land, making ends meet at the discretionary appraisal of her dwindling financial worth by elitist institutions; institutions which enjoy record profits, even as blue class incomes are eroded by inflation, climate change, and trade wars. Political correctness, subtility, and tolerance under these conditions become less important than sustaining self-dignity.

Among the drivers of illiberalism has been the failure of the rules-based international system to supress conflict, manage financial crisis, manage migration, and promote fair trade. The system has itself been ineffective, whether the United Nations Security Council, World Trade Organization, or International Criminal Court. The legitimacy and trust of the common person in the very systems of liberal democracy have atrophied.

There is a shift of trust from systems and institutions to individual practitioners who succeed, people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump; even though there are fewer or no checks and balances on how they may manipulate circumstances for their own personal benefit. The Trump victory is clearly a Trump victory and not a Republican one.

There is a wholesale dismissal of intelligentsia—universities have become centres for leftist indoctrination, economists are mere theorists, and historians are pedlars of woke conspiracies. But this is not founded in either a right or left worldview, but is rather the result of Trump’s success in weaponising the gap the democratic machine has ignored for too long—between the human condition of the rural working class and the college educated lives of the urban class.

Trump has simply empowered the non-intelligentsia against the intelligentsia, while democrats continue to pander to the urban, unionised, women, and young progressive.

The democratic machinery needs to examine its failure in rural America; it requires a hard look at its purposes, its values, and its direction.

Even while it might seem as if Trump’s win marks the death of American progressivism, democratic policy and politics must become more inclusive. Democrats must learn to communicate beyond the intellectual; beyond the general educated public to the so called “less-educated public.”

Democratic practices must become equally and genuinely tolerant and committed to traditional values as much as progressive values. Democrats cannot continue to dismiss every policy and view perceived as intolerable with a barrage of intellectual justification or rationalisation.