Like millions of other people, I am currently digesting the news tonight that Donald Trump has won a sweeping victory in the US election.   

I can honestly say that while I didn’t know what the outcome of this election would be, this one is not at all a surprise.

As someone who has studied authoritarian populism and experimented with how to fight it for the past several years, I want to share why I think Trump won. I tell my kids: “you lose, you learn”. My biggest fear in this moment is not actually of a Trump presidency, but of a democratic opposition that does not learn the most valuable lessons of this loss. Because those who do not learn from their history, are doomed to repeat it, and if democratic forces do not learn, they will not just lose elections, but lose their country, and perhaps their democracy.

Even if Trump had lost, I think the following lessons would hold true to explain why the contest was so close:

1 - “It’s the issues stupid” - in many ways, Trump was a liability as a candidate with 52% of voters viewing him unfavourably, a net favourability that was 8 points worse than Harris. He was competitive because he won on the issues that are most important to Americans. Majorities clearly thought Harris was better on abortion and healthcare, but those issues are near the middle or bottom of the list of priorities, particularly for independents and swing voters, in some polls. The huge level of anti-incumbency in the US stems from real grievances people have with the Biden administration (which I personally think was a phenomenally successful one because I care so much about issues like climate change). Yes, inflation was chief among them and that’s a worldwide phenomenon right now. But in pre-election polling the economy, immigration, crime, and foreign policy/national security, even in some polls freedom of speech are equal or higher priorities, and Trump won all of them strongly, in the sense that majorities of voters trust him to do a better job on them. Nearly 60% of voters said either the economy or immigration was the most important issue to them. And the “economy” issue contains a lot - what many observers missed in this battle of substance was that Trump/Vance’s “new right” is actually seeking to appropriate many formerly progressive issues and positions, championing the working class with protectionism, benefit policies and things like no tax on tips. They’re successfully seeking a “realignment” of politics where they become the party of the working class. Their strategy has been to play a “left/right” game while the left is stuck in a “left/left” game. It’s a formula that has worked magic for authoritarian populism in other countries, from India to the Philippines to Poland.

2 - Stop demonizing voters, and listen to them - I know that some Trump supporters come across as downright deplorable, but elections are decided by swing voters. In this election the swing voters opting for Trump were mainly minorities (both men and women), young people, young men who were liberal 5 years ago, former progressives, and non college educated folks who live in urban areas. From what I’ve seen there’s virtually no evidence that racism, misogyny or homophobia etc have played a role in their thinking - quite the opposite. A New York Times analysis showed that newcomers to the republican coalition were overwhelmingly young people who were liberal to progressive in their values. Thats why reflexively calling them bigots doesn’t work. In fact it’s precisely that kind of demonizing wokism that is the top issue that the NYT says is cited by the newcomers for their defection to the republican side. Wokism (hard to define but let’s call it “far left illiberalism” or “critical theory identitarianism”) is largely the ideology of elite white progressives - it’s highly off putting to a large majority of Americans and even larger majorities of minorities. Coercion of speech is one example - polling by Harvard in 2021 showed that 88% of Americans felt that cancel culture was a problem and 64% personally feared being punished for exercising their freedom to speak. That’s a kitchen table issue. I think these factors play a massive role in the steady stream of minorities and young people that have left Democrats and kept Trump competitive. In 2020 Biden won only because of a massive swing of white men to his side as minorities, women and minority women increasingly broke for Trump! In this election Trump seems to have increased his vote share with women a little more while significantly increasing it with minorities and young people.

3 - Practice a genuinely inclusive, humanist politics - as Van Jones says, “if you say that all white people are racist, all men are toxic, and all billionaires are evil, you can’t be surprised when they start leaving your party”. To her credit, Kamala Harris repeated the “more in common” mantra constantly and avoided identitarian politics. But given the country’s experience of the identitarian left, Kamala’s own 2020 statements, and Biden’s ongoing outrages (“if you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black”) I agree with many others that she was a flawed messenger for this message, and she needed a “Sister Souljah” moment where she actively distanced herself from a cultural radicalism that most of the country despises, in order to build trust that she would protect voters from it. She didn’t go that far. The argument for identitarian politics is that it somehow appeals to various constituencies to get onside. That women and minorities will vote for you. But we’ve seen enormous evidence that large portions of minorities are turned off by these kinds of appeals, which also tend to really alienate good portions of majority groups. It may go down well on a liberal campus, but it’s awful democratic politics. An inclusive “lift all boats” approach allows for a more inspiring, inclusive and patriotic vision that can also disproportionately benefit disadvantaged groups. Everybody wins.

4 - Get our heads out of our echochambered asses - I think perhaps the most damaging weakness of Democratic forces, particularly in the US, is that they’re hopelessly echochambered. Activists, parties, media, elites, grass roots groups all circulate the most hysterically false or deceitfully partial information, all with a deeply self righteous dismissal of those who disagree because they’re actually better informed. I cannot tell you how many core beliefs of the left in the US are just factually incorrect. “The Perception Gap” is an excellent study of this that shows that the most delusional group in American politics are strong progressives, and the delusion increases the more educated you are and the more media you consume. I will refrain from mentioning any of these delusions because I have found it’s like talking to someone who is against all vaccines, or a conspiracy theorist - the ‘motivated reasoning’ is fiercely difficult to overcome. ( Not being haughty here - I’m passionate about this point partly because I regularly find myself guilty of it!) I will only say that the Orwellianism was on full display in the final week of the election, when Democrats and legions of media suggested Trump was calling for the execution of Liz Cheney (he said she was a chickenhawk who wouldn’t be able to fight in a war herself) or declared Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally somehow tied to a NAZI rally, with absolutely no basis for the claim.

5 - See the corrupt machine and understand why people oppose it - once you come to understand how certain important truths have been viciously suppressed, and certain baseless smears upheld, by virtually the entire US legacy media as well as social media companies and ‘establishment’ political figures and institutions, and how dissenters are punished by all manner of social and legal sanction, you are “red pilled” into seeing professed democratic forces as oppressive and subversive forces. You really have to read Substack writers like Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss or listen to podcasts like Joe Rogan’s (by far the most popular in the world) to understand this perspective, but while it delves into unsupported conspiracy theory sometimes (or often on the far right), its popularity is grounded in the times it gets it right. And it does. The Democratic “machine”  really did pursue unconscionable lawfare against Trump, and really did suppress the largest story of the 2020 election a week before the vote, etc etc.  Democracy was actually the top voting issue in CNN’s exit poll, but more voters saw the Democrats as the biggest threat to democracy, with some good reasons.

The Through-line: Blame Wokism/Left Wing Illiberalism

I could keep going, but 5 is enough. And there’s one contributing factor through all of these: illiberal wokism.

Some progressives will want to tell one story about this election: it was an economy election. That inflation has slayed incumbents worldwide and it slayed Harris. There’s much truth that that’s a factor. But it doesn’t explain the massive demographic shifts that have occurred in the electorate, or all the mistakes I’ve discussed here. It wasn’t what the right and independents were overwhelmingly talking about, why powerful and influential and formerly center left figures like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk endorsed Trump, why RFK Jr., a Democrat until last year with all his crucial swing state support, joined his side. It also conveniently offers fairly little learning - it chalks the loss up to bad luck. The folks adopting this explanation may also be more likely to double down on wokism, to falsely declare Americans to be hopelessly racist and misogynist, continuing the death spiral of personally exhausting and politically disqualifying delusion.

There were of course several factors in play in this election. But wokism is why Democrats governed poorly on key issues - why Biden couldn’t or didn’t want to fix the border as millions of illegal immigrants poured across it, or why democrats flirted with “defund the police” and contributed to a large upsurge in crime that hurt minority communities most of all. It’s why the left has flipped from being the traditional champion of freedom of speech to being the party of repressive corporate censorship. It’s also why you saw an obsession with arcane language and micro aggressions alongside a failure to recognize the deep plight of many working people in America, in some ways men in particular. Until recently media and progressive circles derided the concerns of men, who are more likely to die young, die sooner, die at work, die of suicide, vastly more likely to die violently or be violently assaulted, for whom coronavirus was twice as severe, who are now 35% less likely than women to get a college education despite it being increasingly essential, etc etc. Trump seemed like the only politician who cared at all.

Woke illiberalism is why so many Americans saw the ugly face of social authoritarianism in cancel culture, and why the “machine” is incapable of publicizing certain facts, which undermines faith in established media and institutions. The excesses of wokism is what’s driving legions of young people, minorities, and women into the Republican coalition. Perhaps most damagingly, it has provided the knee jerk demonization of disagreement (as being grounded in racism, sexism or bigotry) that has driven the sickness of affective polarization in American politics, a sickness that is at the heart of the authoritarian playbook. It’s also why democrats have come to be perceived as such an unwelcoming party by whole groups of people. How, infuriatingly, the party of Donald Trump was able in the minds of many voters to claim the mantle of being more inclusive and welcoming, by being more inclusive and welcoming!

I am 1 million% for the inclusion revolution, for everyone to be free to just be themselves. To vanquish the ignorance and hatred that has divided and brutalized us for so long. But I see the champions of that revolution in the civil rights movement or the marriage equality movement, which were epically successful because they practiced the universal and inclusive politics of humanism - that’s how you include moderates and conservatives and achieve real, lasting change. Hardwiring the cause of human dignity to an extreme left wing ideology does not help the oppressed in places like Gaza, it exploits and betrays them. Wokism, for me, corrupted the soul of the left, betrayed nearly all of our and its own principles with its Orwellian promotion of the opposites of “diversity, equity, inclusion”, and drove many genuine anti-racists like me out of progressive circles.

This brand of illiberalism was like the left’s Trumpism, but it was fantastically incompetent and far less popular. If there’s one thing that I think could help Democratic forces learn all 5 lessons above, it’s to make wokism history, as a cautionary tale along with the likes of McCarthyism, Stalinism and the Salem witch hunt, to always remember the shadow of the authoritarian and tribalist left.

If we can do that, and get outside our echo chambers, we’ll not only get our soul back, we’ll be free to listen to voters, tell them the truth, articulate vision and solutions to hard problems, and win back their trust. We’ll be able to articulate a new “Democratic Populism” to answer the realignment that the “New Right” is achieving. Then we’ll not only win elections, we’ll inspire our country, the whole country, and win the future.

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PS Nov 15th - the first large scale study I’ve seen after the election (by a pro Dem group) strongly confirms my take here, with inflation, immigration and culture issues being the top 3 reasons voters chose Trump, and: “For swing voters who eventually chose Trump, cultural issues ranked slightly higher than inflation (+28 and +23, respectively).”

And this follow up survey of swing voters who chose Trump (many in the final days and weeks) shows their beliefs about the dems - eg 91% believe they’re too focused on identity politics and 84% say they want to promote critical race theory.