A New Voice

 At the start of the month, I did a post about the ongoing coup in the USA which listed some of the key articles helpful to an understanding of what is going on in that strange country.

Claire Berlinski is a blogger I need to add to the list. She has just started a series of posts called – Profiles in Cowardice, with this being the second and this, so far, the third. She uses a book produced in 1940 by a French historian Marc Bloch who was a resistance fighter eventually executed by the Nazis

Bloch was a medievalist, but his account of the Battle of France showed him to be 

just as skillful an analyst of contemporary politics. His book Strange Defeat 

(produced posthumously in 1946) is not a personal memoir, although it incorporate 

his perspective as a witness to the events. It’s a work of history, written by a 

participant in the battle, and it is written to the standards Bloch believed history 

should be written, even though he was writing of events, as he described them in a 

letter to Febvre, that “surpass in horror, and in humiliation, all we could dream in 

our worst nightmares.” 

He assesses both the proximate and the deeper causes of the catastrophe 

No segment of French society escapes his scrutiny. All are weighed in the balances, 

and all are found wanting. He carefully describes the failings of military, from the 

high command to the conscripted soldier, and the inadequacies of the French ruling 

class. He describes the shortcomings of the French bourgeoisie, the worldviews of 

rural and the urbanized Frenchman. He details the failures of politicians, of the left 

and the right, and those of the press, academics, teachers, and labor unions. 

All failed to prepare the country to confront the threat it faced. 

What drove the French army to disaster, Bloch concludes, was the accumulation of 

many mistakes. What characterized them all, however, was the inability of the French 

leadership to think in terms of a new war. “In other words,” he writes, “the German 

triumph was, essentially, a triumph of the intellect—and it is that which makes it so 

peculiarly serious.” It’s important to consider what he means in saying that France’s 

defeat was a defeat of the intellect. So is ours, and it is that which makes it not only 

serious, but extremely difficult to fix.

When Bloch writes of the failures of the High Command, it calls to mind two images. 

First, there are the elderly Democrats, who cannot be made to understand that this 

unleashed version of Trump, and the cult he commands, are not like anything in their 

experience. They cannot see that laws of politics with which they grew up no longer 

apply, and the strategies with which they’re familiar no longer work. They are in an 

entirely new fight, shaped by technologies they don’t understand—but their opponents 

do—and they lack the alacrity the circumstances demand.
Her second image is more dubious – its the so-called Russian invasion of our minds….

Other relevant posts are

Adam Przeworski’s February-March posts - 39 pages long!

Rules for Destroying a Liberal

From the Berghof to the Oval Office

The Great Capitulation

Romania is no longer a democracy

Romania has shot into the news this past week with the announcement on 6 December by its Constitutional Court that it was annulling the Presidential Election which had taken place in late November and whose results it had, the previous day, declared valid. To explain this strange turn of events, I turn to 3 analysts -

• Tom Gallagher – who has written 3 books about the country 

  • Romania After Ceausescu: The Politics of Intolerance (1996), 

  • Theft of a Nation: Romania Since Communism (2005), 

  • Romania and the European Union: How the weak vanquished the strong  

  • (2013). 

• Vlad Mitev – a Bulgarian journalist with a strong interest in the country

• Thomas Fazi – a German academic

Tom Gallagher sets the scene -  
Mr. Tom Gallagher, in the 1990s, you wrote a book about nationhood and nationalism in 

Romania. From the perspective of this phenomenon, and considering the significant 

discussions today about the Neo-legionnaires and the Legionary movement in Romania, 

how do you view Călin Georgescu’s qualification for the second round of the presidential 

elections and the success of parties like AUR, SOS, and POT?
I don’t ascribe the shock result for Calin Georgescu to the strength of radical nationalism, 

ongoing or revived anti-Semitism, or nostalgia for pre-war fascists.
Perhaps there is quite a lot of residual sympathy, or nostalgia, for the Ceausescu even 

among some who clearly didn’t live through the late communist era.
Among diaspora voters, I could, instead, point to a sense of rootlessness or anomie.
A lot of ethnic Romanians have ended up sharing the sense of displacement. 

Romania is merely a platform or a lodging house which one enters or leaves without any 

drama. Being Romanian is an easy label to attach without possessing too much meaning. 

I would add a note of caution that this is not the same for emigres who have preserved 

Romanian culture, especially via the Orthodox church. But the loose identity fits those 

who have left the country poorly-educated, and with no grounds for feeling respect for 

the main symbols of the Romanian State either in terms of institutions or individuals.
Not knowing too much history, such voters are unlikely to be impressed by the argument 

that in voting for Calin Georgescu they are endorsing someone backed by Russia, the 

traditional enemy of Romanian nationality. This accusation directed at AUR has completely 

failed to impede its rise. Using the technology of manipulation available in cyberspace, in my 

view it isn’t too hard for adventurers to capture the emotions of alienated Romanians 

(many of whom previously boycotted elections) and turn them into a powerful voting 

resource. The Georgescu voters, in many cases, see him as a distant and enigmatic haiduk 

ready to drive out n rulers unworthy of being taken seriously.

What are your thoughts on the Constitutional Court’s decision to annul the presidential 

elections and the public reaction to this event?
The conduct of the Constitutional Court reflects how it has been selected on narrow 

political criteria, not (except in a few cases) on the basis of professional integrity.
If the court was filled by people careful to preserve the dignity of the highest authority 

in the state, it would have offered reasons for each of the highly significant decisions it 

took at each stage of this problematic election.
Weighing up each of these decision, I am left in little doubt that safeguarding the political 

interests of the forces that elevated them to the Court were never far from their minds. 

If there is a consistent thread running through the Court’s various interventions, it has been 

to avoid doing further harm to the PSD (and its subsidiary PNL partner) than they have 

done to themselves already.

On 6 December, the court then annulled the entire election, the President announcing that 

there had been a sophisticated attempt – involving a state actor – to rig the result through 

unregulated social media platforms.

Neither the Court nor the President seems to have pondered how much this erratic and 

opaque set of decisions would be received by the population at large.
I remain fascinated to see how the high organs of state justify allowing the parliamentary 

elections to sand when there is no lack of evidence that they were subject to the same 

cyber manipulation which led to the Presidential elections being cancelled. If a party like 

POT, the party of youth dominated by greybeards with a background in the intelligence and 

policing systems when they were both unreformed, becomes a noisy addition to the Parliament, 

it will only confirm how problematic the decision-making in elections has been. 

There has been considerable discussion about the role of intelligence services during 

President Băsescu’s terms, and even more so during Iohannis’s decade. 

Do you believe that, in Romania in 2024, there is still a legacy of the Securitate 

influencing institutional culture and the relationship between intelligence services and 

politics?
The irony is that it is the President who liked to identify as the person who best symbolises 

Romania’s opening to the democratic West who has ensured that the image of the pre-1989 

Securitate, that of a state within a state, still carries some weight one-third of a century 

later. 
The security institutions are bigger, better resourced, and wield more influence in 

politics than in practically any other EU state. While he has weakened its party and 

driven two successive Liberal leaders out, Iohannis has as surrounded himself with figures 

from the military and intelligence world. They have not been figures of particular renown, 

more like bumbling and self-important palace generals. 
There is too much evidence that the sprawling intelligence sector is too absorbed with 

protecting its own caste privileges than by meriting its high salaries in order to keep 

Romania secure from threats from various  state and non-state actors which, arguably, 

have never been greater. The fiasco that has been exposed in recent weeks should prompt 

NATO high command in Brussels to ponder how effective Romania is in guarding a key 

second of the Alliance’s Eastern flank.

How do you view the Romanian media landscape and the role of social networks? 

Has Romania become synchronised with other Western states, where there is a 

conflict between traditional media narratives and political movements that primarily 

develop through social media?
The media has fallen ever more deeply under the sway of powerful political interests. 

The evidence is all too clear, and the rot has gone deepest arguably in the world of 

television. There is no longer an authoritative and respectable television channel that 

shapes public opinion in an informed way and provides reliable coverage of events big 

and small.
There are several online news providers which are excellent despite operating on a slender 

budget and sometimes encountering difficulties from the state.
Undeserved influence is wielded by a channel like Romania TV which broadcasts despite 

its owner being a fugitive from justice.
I think the structure and composition of the media in Romania fully reflects the deeply 

unsatisfactory political evolution the country has usually known during the past 35 years 

and does not reflect any trends in the media landscape elsewhere to any significant 

extent. Its uninspiring and worrying nature makes it difficult for forces committed to 

genuine improvements in state and society to make significant headway.

Vlad Mitev runs the Friendship Bridge blog from which this interview with a 

Romanian academic is taken
 
Mr. Borțun, the first round of the presidential elections took place two weeks 

ago and surprised everyone. Then in the presidential elections the cumulative 

result of the sovereignist parties was over 30%. And a few days ago, Romania’s 

Constitutional Court intervened in the electoral process. It seems that serious 

and systemic mistakes were made.
If we have to summarize and understand what happened, how do you interpret 

all these events? What has happened in Romania in the last two weeks?
It is about the balance between the rule of law and democracy, which very few 

governments or political regimes manage to get right. The rule of law means the 

supremacy of law. And the application of the law, whatever the situation and whatever 

the person. We are all equal before the law. Democracy means respect for the will 

of the majority, made known through the authorized institutions, the main democratic 

institution being Parliament.
The moment one of these two requirements is disregarded, the scales are tipped 

and it is to everyone’s detriment. Not to the detriment of some or others. The 

Romanian Government has been unable to prevent and correct the deviation. The 

Romanian Government was created by a very strange, bizarre coalition, which people 

say would have suited President Iohannis, to ensure a quiet mandate. His second 

mandate was a mandate without political problems, without conflict, without tension. 

But the result was what I am telling you.

The current party-state, the Social Democratic Party (PSD), has infiltrated all 

public administration institutions – both central and local. Wherever you go, you find 

the PSD. More recently, after the government alliance with the Liberals (PNL), 

also the PNL, but less so. Everywhere there is this lid put over civil society, which 

is called the PSD-PNL alliance, everywhere you bump into their people, their clients, 

people who depend on them, people who vote with them and who form an oversized 

administrative class. We have an oversized state apparatus because it is in the interest 

of the party-state to increase its electorate.

VLAD MITEV If I understand correctly, there are different types of elites in 

Romania, as in many other countries in the region. There are elites formed more 

in socialist times, when education was better and it was more difficult to complete 

your education. And on the other hand, there are also new elites, who have 

graduated from “the school of transition”, so to speak. Are they better or worse?
Mr. Mitev, let’s not delude ourselves. The new elites are in the image of those who 

select and raise them. There’s not much difference. It’s like a historical curse. 

Unfortunately, we remain in a paradigm of Romanianism in which we are not dealing 

with genuine reactions. Neither in terms of democratic reaction, nor in terms of 

respect for tradition or…
Everything is a fake. That’s why people don’t trust anymore. That’s why 2 million 

people were able to vote against the system. Unfortunately they didn’t choose the 

right flag to march under. They have lined up under the banner of Călin Georgescu, 

who proposes a step back in time. A return to Romanian history.

VLAD MITEV Isn’t this moment when Mr. Trump is coming to the White House 

and when the government will soon change in Germany as well, a good time for 

Romania to renew itself. Maybe politically, maybe in other senses. Maybe even 

in terms of social or economic reforms and so on. Is it not a good time for 

renewal, i.e. change?
No, it is not. The time is right, but I don’t know who to change. Because you see, this 

is Romania’s big problem. That this balance between the elite and the people is not 

always in favor of change. The people don’t want change. The people have this kind 

of ideology, an autochthonist, sovereignist ideology, because the people are educated 

by communist propaganda, by the historical movies made by the famous Sergiu 

Nicolaescu – about Stefan the Great, Mircea the Elder, Mihai Viteazu, about the 

Dacians and Romans, movies that have built a mythology of the genesis of the Romanian 

people, a heroic ethnogenesis, all Romanians, educated or not, have seen with their 

own eyes how the Dacians defeated the Romans, then the Romans conquered Dacia 

and the wonderful Romanian people was born. This mythology is still in the minds of 

many Romanians. 

Finally, the German academic Thomas Fazi who has been a bit of a thorn in 

the flesh of the EU 

In an extraordinary and unprecedented move, Romania’s constitutional court announced 

last week the annulment of the results of the first round of the presidential elections 

held on Nov. 24, in which the independent populist candidate Călin Georgescu came 

out on top. The ruling, which restarted the entire electoral process, came just days 

before the scheduled runoff between Georgescu and the pro-EU candidate Elena 

Lasconi, which Georgescu was tipped to win by a large margin. 
It’s the first time a European court has overturned the result of an election, 

signaling a troubling escalation in the EU-NATO establishment’s increasingly open 

war on democracy. The justification for this brazen act was a report by the Romanian 

intelligence services—“declassified” and published two days before the ruling —

alleging that the country was the target of a “Russian hybrid attack” during the 

electoral campaign, involving a coordinated TikTok campaign to boost Georgescu’s 

candidacy. 
The report was the culmination of a two-week-long campaign aimed at delegitimizing 

Georgescu’s victory, which shocked Romania’s ruling elites and the Western 

establishment at large. It was the first time since the fall of the Soviet-backed 

regime in 1989 that the two parties that have come to dominate Romanian politics 

since—the Social Democratic Party and the center-right National Liberal Party, 

which are united in their commitment to the European Union and NATO—both failed 

to make it past the first round of a presidential election. 
Adding to elites’ dismay was Georgescu’s status as a political outsider. The candidate 

had consistently received negligible scores in polls throughout the campaign and 

avoided televised debates. He doesn’t even belong to a political party. Instead, he 

relied mostly on social media to get his message out, first and foremost TikTok, 

which is very popular in Romania. His campaign’s grassroots strategy starkly contrasted 

with other candidates’ reliance on mainstream media and established political 

machinery. 
The establishment’s response to Georgescu’s first-round victory was swift and 

aggressive. The first step involved launching a media blitz—both in Romania and 

abroad—to paint him as a “pro-Russian far-right extremist,” all-around crackpot, 

and agent of the Kremlin. This has become the standard reaction of liberal 

establishments to electoral outcomes that deviate from the Euro-Atlantic consensus

—especially in post-Soviet countries, as seen recently also in Georgia and Moldova. 

As in other cases, the evidence for such claims tends to be rather scant. 
The first thing that stands out is that Georgescu doesn’t have the résumé of your 

typical populist. For most of his career, Georgescu, an agronomist, has been an 

establishment insider employed in a field not known for being rife with populist 

sentiment: sustainable development. His past positions include special rapporteur 

for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, president of the European 

Research Centre for the Club of Rome, and executive director of the UN Global 

Sustainable Index Institute. His political outlook reflects, it would seem, a 

longstanding focus on the importance of economic and especially agricultural 

self-sufficiency. 
It is true that Georgescu has made some controversial claims in the past, including 

expressing support for the pro-Nazi leaders of the country during World War II, 

referring to the Covid-19 crisis as a “plandemic,” and speaking of the existence of 

a transhumanist pedophiliac cabal. But his campaign largely focused on concrete 

issues like the economy and Romania’s geopolitical position. 

Georgescu emphasizes national sovereignty and reducing Romania’s dependence on 

foreign powers and often critiques the influence of international bodies like the 

European Union and NATO on national affairs. His platform includes reducing 

Romania’s reliance on imports, supporting local farmers, and ramping up domestic 

production of food and energy. 
What really sent the establishment into a frenzy, however, was Georgescu’s stance 

on the war in Ukraine. He has criticized NATO’s role in the conflict and expressed 

a desire for Romania to engage in dialogue, rather than confrontation. He rejects 

the framing of this position as “pro-Russian,” contending that it is simply pro-

Romanian. His argument boils down to the fact that the war isn’t in Romania’s 

interest. As he put it during a talk show: Ukraine “is none of our business. We 

should worry only about Romania.” 
Georgescu has also condemned NATO’s installation of a ballistic-missile shield in 

the south of the country. He has denied claims that he aims to withdraw Romania 

from the Western Alliance or from the European Union, arguing instead that 

membership shouldn’t involve automatically signing up to those organizations’ policies. 

“The establishment’s response to Georgescu’s first-round victory was swift and 

aggressive.” “The ruling sets a terrifying precedent.”
Georgescu’s call for self-determination increasingly resonates across Europe, 

where growing numbers of people are pushing back against the erosion of national 

sovereignty by the EU-NATO establishment. As the Romanian journalist Teodora 

Munteanu observed: “Georgescu focused on the call for peace and people’s fear 

that [the other candidates] would get us into war. He also addressed grassroots 

issues, like people with toilets in their yards, low wages, real problems that everyone 

understands.” 
Astonishingly, the intelligence dossier against him provides no clear evidence of 

foreign interference or even electoral manipulation. It simply points to the existence 

of a social-media campaign supporting Georgescu that involved around 25,000 

TikTok accounts coordinated through a Telegram channel, paid influencers and 

coordinated messaging. 
It goes without saying that there is nothing out of the ordinary in using social-media 

platforms to promote a message. Indeed, this happens everywhere, and is simply the 

modern-day equivalent of old-school political ads. It’s unclear how exposing people 

to one’s message could be considered a form of electoral manipulation—except 

insofar as it obviously rewards the candidates with the greatest financial resources. 

But according to the intelligence report, Georgescu spent around $1.5 million on his 

TikTok campaign—far less than the roughly $17 million received in state subsidies by 

the two main parties. In any case, if spending money on a campaign were a guarantee of 

winning votes, Kamala Harris would have effortlessly clinched the recent US election, 

considering that the Democrats poured twice as much cash as Trump into advertising. 
The intelligence report provides no concrete evidence of foreign state involvement 

or manipulation; it simply suggests that the campaign “correlates with a state actor’s 

operating mode” and draws parallels to alleged Russian operations in Ukraine and 

Moldova. Essentially, when all the layers are peeled back, Romania’s top court 

annulled an entire presidential election based on a TikTok social-media campaign, 

which the intelligence services claimed—without providing concrete evidence—bore 

similarities to Russian tactics allegedly used elsewhere. 

It’s hard to conclude that this was anything but an “institutional coup d’état,” as 

Georgescu put it. Even the pro-EU candidate who lost to Georgescu said the 

decision “crushes the very essence of democracy, voting.” 
The ruling sets a terrifying precedent. If vague accusations of foreign interference 

can nullify election results, any future electoral outcome that threatens entrenched 

elites could similarly be overturned. 

Unfortunately, what happened in Romania isn’t an outlier. It is an escalation 

in an all-too-familiar trend now afflicting Western societies, whereby 

unpopular and delegitimized elites resort to increasingly brazen methods —

such as media manipulation, cognitive warfare, censorship, lawfare, economic 

pressure, and surveillance and intelligence operations—to influence electoral 

outcomes and suppress challenges to the status quo. 

Consider that in the United States, the security apparatus and its media allies 

spent almost the entirety of Donald Trump’s first term attempting to undo the 

outcome of the 2016 election via the #Russiagate hoax.
In other words, actual disinformation and electoral interference tactics are deployed 

by the establishment to counter alleged (and often fabricated) disinformation and 

foreign interference campaigns, usually claimed to be coming from Russia to the 

benefit of domestic populist politicians and parties. However, such tactics are 

proving powerless to manufacture consensus and are, in fact, beginning to backfire, 

which is why even the formal elements of democracy—including elections—are now 

being called into question. 
It is no coincidence that these measures are employed most aggressively in those 

countries with particular strategic value for NATO. Romania is a case in point. 

The country has been instrumental in providing military aid to Ukraine. 

Additionally, it is at Romania’s 86th Air Base where Ukrainian pilots receive training 

on F-16 fighter jets. This facility serves as a regional hub for NATO allies and 

partners. Moreover, the Mihail Kogălniceanu Air Base, on the Black Sea coast, is 

undergoing significant development to become the largest NATO base in Europe. 

This expansion aims to support NATO operations and strengthen the alliance’s 

presence in the Black Sea region and its control of Russia’s “near abroad.” 

The Western Alliance clearly can’t afford to allow mere popular sovereignty to 

jeopardize Romania’s role as a NATO garrison. 
No wonder, then, that the US State Department supported the court decision on 

the grounds that “Romanians must have confidence that their elections reflect the 

democratic will of the Romanian people.” It’s also highly unlikely that the EU-NATO 

establishment wasn’t involved in some way or another in the judicial coup against 

Georgescu. The measures employed to undermine Georgescu are indicative of a 

broader willingness to erode democratic norms in pursuit of geopolitical objectives. 

For the same reason, the same powers are attempting to foment a Ukraine-style 

violent overthrow of the government in Georgia, where the pro-peace ruling party 

recently won the elections. 
NATO’s aggressive military posture isn’t just destabilizing its official adversaries, 

but also its members, as well as those countries the alliance intends to draw into 

its sphere of influence. It’s only a matter of time before the tactics deployed 

against front-line states are turned against any core NATO country in Western 

Europe that stray from the alliance’s prescribed path. That scenario is likely just 

one “wrong” election away from becoming a reality. 

update https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/12/democracy-dies-in-the-eu

-romania-edition.html

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/fractured-romania

Evil Returns

I don’t like giving the orangutan any coverage but can’t ignore Trump’s reelection in the US – how on earth did a felon and rapist manage to convince so many Americans?? Michael Roberts is one of my favourite bloggers and has a good account here

As the FT put it: “In the end, it wasn’t even close. A presidential 

election long forecast to dance on a knife’s edge very quickly turned 

out to be a rout for Donald Trump.” Trump polled 73.4m votes or 50% 

of the those who voted, while Harris polled 60m or 47.7% of the vote. 

Third party candidates mustered just 1.6%. Trump’s 4.3m lead was more 

than Biden had in 2020, or Hillary Clinton had over Trump in 2016 (in fact - 

as of 13 Nov - Trump had 3.2 million more votes than Harris).
Trump’s vote did not rest on small margins in a handful of swing states, as was the 

case when he won in 2016. Instead, he gained support across the electoral map in 

states both red (Republican) and blue (Democrat). Even in his birthplace of 

New York state, one of the bluest strongholds in the country, Trump winnowed a 

23-point gap down to 11.

The biggest caveat to Trump’s voting victory is that contrary to the usual hype of a 

‘massive voter turnout’, fewer Americans eligible to vote bothered to do so compared 

to 2020. Then over 158m voted, this time the vote was down to 143m. The 

voter turnout of those eligible fell to 58.2% from the high of 65.9% in 2020. 

Around 40% of Americans registered to vote did not do so. And the number of 

Americans who failed to register rose to 19m from 12m in 2020. So, although 

Trump got 51% of those who voted, he actually got only 28% support of Americans 

of voting age. Three out of four Americans did not vote for Trump. The real 

winner of the election was (yet again) the ‘no vote’ party. Indeed, Trump polled 

fewer votes in 2024 than he did in 2020. But Harris lost around 11m votes compared 

to Biden in 2020.

An interesting article has a sceptical look at some of the conventional 

explanations 

Donald Trump has won, and most shockingly, he won the popular vote. Unlike in 

2016, which could be explained as a rejection of Hillary Clinton concentrated in 

the crucial mid-western states, this year he won convincingly. He has increased 

his share of the vote, as a percentage of the overall national popular vote, in each 

of the three elections he has run.
One explanation for Trump’s victory is an across-the-board collapse in turnout 

and increased apathy caused by an unpopular presidency, an uninspiring president 

and an ideologically spent brand of liberalism. There is some merit to this, but 

on closer inspection, it’s not why Kamala Harris lost.
First, it’s important to note that counting votes in the United States takes a 

very long time. By the time it’s all said and done, it’s quite likely Trump received 

more votes in 2024 than he did in the record turnout 2020 election, probably 

millions more votes.

The second flaw in this idea is that the turnout change wasn’t uniform, nor was the 

change in voting behavior. In most swing states, turnout was actually up from 2020, 

setting records. In the states that decided the election, Democrats got their base 

voters to the polls and had the electorate they needed to win (and even did win in 

many cases in the Senate and down the rest of the ballot). The problem was she 

lost on persuasion: many voters who chose Joe Biden four years ago and even voted 

for other Democrats this year chose Donald Trump.
However, problems with persuasion weren’t the only issue: Democratic turnout did, 

in fact, collapse in the less competitive states, especially in blue states. 

This is a unique shift in voting behavior nationally and can’t be explained obviously 

by most existing theories of the electorate.
Another explanation is that Democrats have become the party of college-educated 

voters exclusively, and shed working-class voters, especially working-class voters 

of color. There is some truth to this, especially over the long term. But this 

explanation is also flawed. Trump did better consistently with every demographic 

almost everywhere in the country, including college-educated white people and 

women. While these numbers were more pronounced with young voters, Latinos 

and men, it was only slight. Most highly-educated areas that had swung consistently 

against Republicans in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 moved back toward Trump this 

year. His victory was not with any one demographic. It was total.
As with any massive election loss, recriminations have been swift, and factions 

inside the Democratic party are jockeying to make their narrative about the 

election the conventional wisdom that shapes the future of the party, while 

Republicans are claiming a sweeping mandate for reshaping society in a darker, 

more authoritarian way. However, conventional ideological explanations also don’t 

stand up to scrutiny.
One of the most common centrist takes has been: Democrats have become too 

progressive and “woke” on social issues and obsessed with identity politics, and 

Democratic staffers and consultants live in a bubble and speak in alienating ways 

that have made them seem radical and off-putting to the median voter. 

The solution is a relentless focus on bread-and-butter issues and moderating, 

mostly ignoring culture war issues, besides abortion, and aggressively playing up 

moderate and bipartisan bona fides.
It seems quite likely this narrative will win out among Democrats. It has already 

been expressed by elected officials and influential Democratic pundits. The key 

problem with this narrative is that while it may have had merit in 2020 or 2022, 

the Democratic party has, over the last few years, aggressively purged “woke”

-sounding language from their messaging and policies from their agenda. 

The Harris campaign was almost monomaniacally focused on projecting moderation 

and bipartisanship and on basic, kitchen-table economic issues. 

They relentlessly hunted the median voter with targeted messaging. 

They ran the campaign the popularists wanted, and lost.
This theory is also belied by the fact that the most well-known progressive and 

radical politicians mostly did better than Harris. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also 

won more votes than Harris. Understanding why thousands of people might vote 

for Trump and an avowed democratic socialist and vocal supporter of “woke” 

causes like trans rights is a key to understanding the election.
Progressives see the flaws with the centrist analysis and also have an explanation, 

typified by Bernie Sanders: Democrats lost by abandoning the working class and 

unions. Like the centrist narrative, it is an outdated explanation that was once 

true and may be true on a generational scale but is inadequate to capture what 

happened in this specific election fully. While Democrats have, over the last 

50 years, shifted away from unions and redistributive politics, allowing inequality 

to grow, and this is the correct explanation for Clinton’s loss in 2016, it doesn’t 

quite fit here. Joe Biden actually did shift to the left on economic issues after 

winning the primary in 2020, largely due to the mass movement that formed around 

the Sanders campaign. And while, in the past, this may have been lip service, the 

Biden administration, for all its shortcomings, did follow through in real, measurable

 ways. Income inequality, the central theme of the progressive movement in the 

2010s, decreased under Biden. The poorest workers were better off. 

Biden also pursued aggressive pro-labor and pro-consumer policy through the 

executive branch. Biden was the first president to walk a picket line, and put 

political capital on the line to bail out union pension funds.
For many years, it was easy to explain why workers would leave the Democrats: 

they were making less money and losing rights. But, while the Biden administration 

should have been far more assertive in redistribution and class-war policy on 

ideological and moral grounds, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny that workers moved 

right because of an ideologically neoliberal or austerity-focused policy. 

Though Democrats have mostly abandoned class as a mode of communication, 

and struggled to name an enemy and construct a compelling economic narrative, 

the material explanation for Harris losing votes among the working class and union 

members doesn’t hold as it may have in the past.
The right has its own explanation, seeing a sweeping mandate for the culture war. 

But Republican candidates who made their campaigns into referenda on culture war 

issues have uniformly lost or underperformed, in the past, and also this year. 

Trump is the only candidate who ran aggressively on the persecution of trans 

people, for example, and also did better than the partisan baseline.
And the idea that this is why voters flocked to Trump is just not compelling. 

Fifty-four percent of voters thought Trump was “too extreme”, 65% were 

pro-choice, and, even on immigration, 56% of voters supported a pathway to 

citizenship rather than mass deportations. Millions of voters voted for Trump 

at the top of the ticket and Democrats down-ballot to check his unpopular agenda. 

It would be a mistake to think Trump has a mandate to remake society in a 

hard-right, socially conservative image.
So why did people vote for Trump? Most voters still actively dislike him personally 

(53% of voters had an unfavorable opinion of him) and most of his policies. 

The obvious explanation is that people trust him more to handle the economy. 

Although voters didn’t like his presidency, they felt like they were better off four 

years ago. This is true, but also so obviously true as to be facile. 

More interesting is why, materially, voters trust him more to handle the economy.

I propose a different explanation than inflation qua inflation: the Covid welfare 

state and its collapse. The massive, almost overnight expansion of the social safety 

net and its rapid, almost overnight rollback are materially one of the biggest policy 

changes in American history. For a brief period, and for the first time in history, 

Americans had a robust safety net: strong protections for workers and tenants, 

extremely generous unemployment benefits, rent control and direct cash transfers 

from the American government.
Despite the trauma and death of Covid and the isolation of lockdowns, from late 

2020 to early 2021, Americans briefly experienced the freedom of social democracy. 

They had enough liquid money to plan long term and make spending decisions for 

their own pleasure rather than just to survive. They had the labor protections to 

look for the jobs they wanted rather than feel stuck in the jobs they had. 

At the end of Trump’s term, the American standard of living and the amount of 

economic security and freedom Americans had was higher than when it started, 

and, with the loss of this expanded welfare state, it was worse when Biden left 

office, despite his real policy wins for workers and unions. 

This is why voters view Trump as a better shepherd of the economy.

The American journalist/historian, Thomas Frank, (also the editor of the 
Baffler) is perhaps the best person to consult about all this. He anticipated 
the first Trump victory in 2016 – not least in an early book What’s the Matter 
with Kansas? How Conservatives won the heart of America (2004) and had just 
written this piece -
Twenty years ago I published a book about politics in my home state of Kansas 
where white, working-class voters seemed to be drifting into the arms of right-wing 
movements. I attributed this, in large part, to the culture wars, which the right 
framed in terms of working-class agony. Look at how these powerful people insult 
our values!, went the plaint, whether they were talking about the theory of evolution 
or the war on Christmas.
This was worth pointing out because working people were once the heart and soul 
of left-wing parties all over the world. It may seem like a distant memory, but not 
long ago, the left was not a movement of college professors, bankers or high-ranking 
officers at Uber or Amazon. Working people: That’s what parties of the left were 
very largely about. The same folks who just expressed such remarkable support for 
Donald Trump.
My Kansas story was mainly about Republicans, but I also wrote about the way the 
Democrats were gradually turning away from working people and their concerns. 
Just think of all those ebullient Democratic proclamations in the ’90s about trade 
and tech and globalization and financial innovation. What a vision they had: All those 
manifestoes about futurific “wired workers” or the “learning class” … all those speeches 
about how Democrats had to leave the worker-centric populism of the 1930s behind 
them … all those brilliant triangulations and reaching out to the right. 
When I was young, it felt like every rising leader in the Democratic Party was 
making those points. That was the way to win voters in what they called “the center,
” the well-educated suburbanites and computer-literate professionals whom 
everybody admired.
Well, those tech-minded Democrats got exactly what they set out to get, and now 
here we are. At the Republican convention in July, JD Vance described the ruination 
visited on his working-class town in Ohio by NAFTA and trade with China, both of 
which he blamed at least in part on Mr. Biden, and also the human toll taken by the 
Iraq War, which he also contrived to blame on Mr. Biden. Today Mr. Vance is the 
vice president-elect, and what I hope you will understand, what I want you to mull 
over and take to heart and remember for the rest of your life, is that he got there 
by mimicking the language that Americans used to associate with labor, with liberals, 
with Democrats.
By comparison, here is Barack Obama in 2016, describing to Bloomberg Businessweek 
his affinity for the private sector: “Just to bring things full circle about innovation 
— the conversations I have with Silicon Valley and with venture capital pull together 
my interests in science and organization in a way I find really satisfying.”
I hope Mr. Obama finds his silicon satisfaction. I hope the men of capital whose 
banks he bailed out during the financial crisis show a little gratitude and build him 
the biggest, most expensive, most innovative presidential library of them all. 
But his party is in ruins today, without a leader and without a purpose.
It would have been nice if the Democrats could have triangulated their way into 
the hearts of enough educated and affluent suburbanites to make up for the 
working class voters they’ve lost over the years, but somehow that strategy rarely 
works out. They could have gone from boasting about Dick Cheney’s endorsement 
to becoming a version of Mr. Cheney themselves, and it still wouldn’t have been 
enough. A party of the left that identifies with people like Mr. Cheney is a 
contradiction in terms, a walking corpse.

For a short time in the last few years, it looked as if the Democrats might actually 
have understood all this. What the Biden administration did on antitrust and 
manufacturing and union organizing was never really completed but it was inspiring. 
Framed the right way, it might have formed the nucleus of a strong appeal to the 
voters Mr. Trump has stolen away. Kamala Harris had the skills: She spoke powerfully 
at the Democratic convention about a woman’s right to choose and Mr. Trump’s 
unfitness for high office. Speaker after speaker at the gathering in Chicago blasted 
the Republicans for their hostility to working people. There was even a presentation 
about the meaning of the word “populism.” At times it felt like they were speaking 
to me personally.
At the same time, the convention featured lots of saber-rattling speeches hailing 
America’s awesome war-making abilities. The administration’s achievements on 
antitrust were barely mentioned. There was even a presentation by the governor 
of Illinois, an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune, in which he boasted of being a real 
billionaire, not a fake one like Donald Trump supposedly is, and the assembled 
Democrats cheered their heads off for this fortunate son. Then, once Ms. Harris’s 
campaign got rolling, it largely dropped economic populism, wheeled out another 
billionaire and embraced Liz Cheney.
Mr. Trump, meanwhile, put together a remarkable coalition of the disgruntled. 
He reached out to everyone with a beef, from Robert Kennedy Jr. to Elon Musk. 
From free-speech guys to book-banners. From Muslims in Michigan to anti-
immigration zealots everywhere. “Trump Will Fix It,” declared the signs they waved 
at his rallies, regardless of which “It” you had in mind.
Republicans spoke of Mr. Trump’s persecution by liberal prosecutors, of how he was 
censored by Twitter, of the incredible strength he showed after being shot. 
He was an “American Bad Ass,” in the words of Kid Rock. And clucking liberal pundits 
would sometimes respond to all this by mocking the very concept of “grievance,” as 
though discontent itself was the product of a diseased mind.
Liberals had nine years to decipher Mr. Trump’s appeal — and they failed. The 
Democrats are a party of college graduates, as the whole world understands by 
now, of Ph.D.s and genius-grant winners and the best consultants money can buy. 
Mr. Trump is a con man straight out of Mark Twain; he will say anything, promise 
anything, do nothing. But his movement baffled the party of education and innovation. 
Their most brilliant minds couldn’t figure him out.
I have been writing about these things for 20 years, and I have begun to doubt 
that any combination of financial disaster or electoral chastisement will ever 
turn on the lightbulb for the liberals. I fear that ’90s-style centrism will march 
on, by a sociological force of its own, until the parties have entirely switched their 
social positions and the world is given over to Trumpism.
Can anything reverse it? Only a resolute determination by the Democratic Party to 
rededicate itself to the majoritarian vision of old: a Great Society of broad, 
inclusive prosperity. This means universal health care and a higher minimum wage. 
It means robust financial regulation and antitrust enforcement. 
It means unions and a welfare state and higher taxes on billionaires, even the 
cool ones. It means, above all, liberalism as a social movement, as a coming
-together of ordinary people — not a series of top-down reforms by well
-meaning professionals.
That seems a long way away today. But the alternative is — what? To blame the 
voters? To scold the world for failing to see how noble we are? No. It will take 
the opposite sentiment — solidarity — to turn the world right-side up again.
Further Reading
Listen, Liberal – or whatever happened to the party of the people? Thomas Frank (2016)