The global left was dealt a potentially fatal blow on November 5th as Donald J. Trump was once again elected president of the United States of America. Unlike in 2016, he also appears to have secured the popular vote which means even the much maligned Electoral College cannot be criticized for undermining the will of the majority. A glance at the results map paints a grim picture for the future of the national Democratic Party: a number of states that voted for Biden/Harris in 2020 turned against Harris/Walz in 2024. The true margin of defeat for Harris will be considerably higher once pinkish states like Michigan and Arizona finalize their counts and add their EC votes to Trump’s lead.

So where does this leave the millions of Harris voters and other Americans looking for a progressive future? In short, in leaves them in a position of weakness and vulnerability. After all, in spite of the inflammatory speeches, the reactionary track record, the muddled policy positions and the overall unpleasantness of the candidate, Donald Trump managed (again) to tap into national insecurities and turn his cult of personality into a presidential victory. This is not an accident. This is not a fluke. This is not the result of an archaic electoral process that might have made sense in the early days of the republic. The fact that lightning struck us twice (albeit after a four year gap) should demonstrate to the Democratic Party and to liberal-leaning people across the planet that there is a serious problem with the global Left.

It’s impossible, to this writer, to interpret this result in any other way. How else do you explain the success of a thrice married, east coast elite real estate mogul/game show personality among people who loudly proclaim their opposition to coastal, big city elites and celebrities telling them how to live their lives? How else can we understand how people bemoaning wealth’s influence in government can enthusiastically support a man whose biggest cheerleader is one of the top five wealthiest humans on Earth? In what other way can we process how opponents of government ‘interference’ in the lives of everyday Americans eagerly voted for the man who appointed three Supreme Court justices to overturn a decision that prevented the very interference they supposedly abhor? A popular slogan during the Harris campaign was “We Won’t Go Back!”, and while that may be true on an individual basis, it seems clear that the country not only wants to go back but is happy, even joyful, at the prospect.

The global Left has been under significant threat for many years now, and its grasp on power is diminishing with every election. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, was once seen as a bright light of Progressive politics during the first Trump administration and a kind of Progressive successor to Barack Obama. While he has managed to remain PM since 2015, each election held has brought the Liberals closer and closer to being ousted to the point where members of the party are actively working to have him no longer head of the party. French President Emmanuel Macron has also enjoyed some prestige among the global Left, but policy positions at home and abroad have made it nearly impossible to fit his administration into any particular slot on the political spectrum. Still, Macron’s grasp on power has been increasingly threatened by unmistakably right-wing parties looking to follow Italy’s recent example. Only the UK’s Labour has seen recent success among major Western democracies, bringing an end to a string of Conservative governments, many of them short-lived or largely disastrous.

What, we might ask, has led to this gradual but unmistakable shift towards the political right? In Europe, the continued fight between nationalism and Europeanism has not helped. The EU seems increasingly weakened and, with the exit of the United Kingdom and the absence of Germany’s Angela Merkel, has lost a great deal of its clout. Other issues, like Russian aggression and how to respond as well as perennial questions surrounding immigration and refugees, has further complicated the liberal message of multiculturalism and strained people’s belief in a unified Europe. Falling birthrates in much of Western Europe has imbued some with a fear that immigrant influxes will ultimately mean becoming minorities in their own countries.

There are similar concerns voiced in the United States: should we remain part of NATO? The United Nations? Are we overregulated or underregulated? What are or should be the limits of free speech? Are the ultra-wealthy overtaxed? Should the Department of Education exist? These and innumerable other questions were, whether explicitly or obliquely, on the ballot in 2024 and there seems to be a worrisome verdict on them. While Democrats presented facts, data and experts to answer these questions, Trumpism (for such has American conservativism become) ignores the subtlety and nuance of statesmanship and unabashedly exploits voters’ most raw and central insecurities. Why are my groceries so much more expensive? Bidenomics. Why can’t I get a good paying job out of high school? Globalization. Why are my views seemingly underrepresented on social media? Suppression of conservative speech. Why is my child autistic? Big Pharma. Everything, from border walls to tariffs, fluoridation to vaccines is stripped of all context and made to be a simple matter of the ‘Deep State’ ruining the country while the only way to fight it is to support Donald Trump.

Consider for a moment the almost pathological disdain Trumpism exhibits towards the Department of Education. ED, with its 20,000 or so employees, has routinely topped the list of government agencies and departments to abolish. This is largely because the department has been, whether rightly or wrongly, criticized by the political right for forcing public education to adhere to regulations and standards that promote a variety of terrible concepts such as critical race theory, multiculturalism and secular humanism that combine to produce self-loathing, unpatriotic and godless students. This sentiment is in spite of the fact that the Department of Education has relatively little direct influence on schools’ curricula. It attempts, where possible, to establish some degree of national standards and guidelines, but states are, despite what many Republicans may claim, responsible for most of the K-12 education in the country. ED does have a hand in making resources available to school systems that comply with its directives, but the department’s biggest job is running the federal programs that issue federal student loans and need-based college grants.

On the issue of consumer goods prices, it is, again, a simple matter to point to the Biden administration and say “Sleepy Joe’s out-of-control spending is why your ground beef is $6.99 a pound!”. That is, basically, what Donald Trump has said. What Trump does not say, however, is that the inflationary forces currently at work were established long ago, maybe as far back as the first George W. Bush administration. You cannot expect twenty years of unhinged war-spending to have zero impact on the economy. This is not to say the Biden/Harris administration did not have a hand in it, although one might question whether pandemic stipends and support for Ukraine is truly profligate. What the Trumpists also seem to either misunderstand or ignore is that globalization came about because of capitalism, not in spite of it. The reason clothing manufacturing is done in Bangladesh and Pakistan is because of systems and ideologies established by capitalism. No amount of bellyaching or posturing is going to change that reality.

Additionally, the fundamental nature of ‘work’ is changing and Trumpism doesn’t seem to understand that. The production of goods is becoming increasingly automated, certainly domestically. Learn programming, they say. Alright, but what happens when the AI enabled production lines can edit their own code and create new instructions for themselves? Learn robotics, they say. Okay, but what is to prevent the AI enabled, self-upgrading production lines from repairing themselves or constructing additional units if the need arises? There is little to prevent industry, always several steps ahead of even a regulatory inclined government, from automating vast swaths of the economy, relegating the majority of people to either service-related jobs or redundancy. In either case, even pretending to bring millions of industrial jobs back to the US is laughable and will do nothing for the millions of jobless.

So where does this leave the Democratic Party? In short, it leaves them aground. There was really nothing the party could have done differently to win. Biden was a weak and vulnerable incumbent? Remove him in favor of the younger, more energetic VP before the convention. Facing the same opponent you defeated in 2020? Use the same playbook of highlighting his oafishness, his lack of decorum and his many, many personal shortcomings. Concerned people might complain about higher grocery prices? Bring out graphs and cite reports that show how much better inflation is now than when he was in office. The Democratic Party seemed to everything right, and yet they experienced a significant loss. How?

As alluded to earlier, it is because politics, especially presidential politics in the United States is a game of anecdotes and storytelling, not about statistical trends and data points. Donald Trump could speak to a crowd of 100 people with absolute certainty they would take his words to heart and vote for him. Kamala Harris could speak to 10,000 people and never be sure her message hit home enough to secure all their votes. This isn’t a failure on Harris’s part, it is part and parcel of electioneering in this country. For all the press and conjecture about ‘undecided voters’, this writer remains confident there are few if any truly undecided presidential voters in the United States once the actual candidates have been named. Few if any voters are actively weighing the pros and cons of each candidate once the summer is over. How many people are carefully scrutinizing their demeanors, their rhetoric, their positions on X, Y and Z issues? The advantage enjoyed by Trump was that he already knew he could count on about 40%-45% of the electorate: he had done it twice before. All he had to do was convince a few million people in a few strategic states that their lives were substantially worse in 2024 than they had been in 2020. Harris also could rely on probably 45%-48% of the electorate’s support, but she had the disadvantage of having to convince those same few million voters that their lives were A) substantially better than in 2020 or B) that their lives would be substantially worse under a second Trump administration. Both of these positions were doomed in the trenches of battleground states like North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Calling Trump’s victory in 2024 a setback for the Democratic Party is an understatement and should, although likely won’t, necessitate a sober and deliberate assessment of the United States’s ostensibly left-wing party. While national demographics are changing, the Democrats have been repeating most of the same slogans for years and those slogans are falling on more and more deaf ears. Social issues like reproductive rights, while important to many on the political left, have not proven sufficient to carry the day. While Republicans have made a point of drilling down to micro-concerns like your faith, your tax dollars and your protection, Democrats continue to speak about things in a broad, macro way: our values, our future and our way forward. Americans, as are many of their counterparts in western Europe, appear to be tiring of abstractions and what they perceive as forced tolerance and compliance designed to make things easier for minority groups at the expense of the majority. The promises of social and economic liberalism have, in the minds of many, led the United States into moral and societal decay, stripped rugged American men of their masculinity and made the once god-fearing, upright and honest Middle Class weak and in danger of being snuffed out by the forces of ‘political correctness’. Democrats have often said words to the effect of “That’s not what America is about. We’re not that kind of country.” Sadly, if the results of the 2024 presidential election are any indication, we might actually be that kind of country after all.