It turns out it’s a bad idea to pitch a Democratic campaign to neoconservatives such as Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol. Especially while a seismic realignment has pushed workers away from centre-left parties across much of the developed world. Yet that’s just the sort of campaign Kamala Harris ran: one premised on the “defend democracy” sentiments of affluent suburbanites, instead of the promise of social and economic democracy.
The gambit didn’t pay off. As I write, Donald Trump appears poised to clinch the popular vote – a first for a Republican presidential nominee since 2004, and the second since 1988 – and to sweep the battleground states. It’s safe to say that Trumpism in American politics is an era, in the same way we think of the “Reagan era”. The long-term trend of US politics, in other words, is right-wing populism; the Joe Biden interlude was just that.
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