By WITTAYA ANGMUJCHA @Adobe Stock
Still Unknown: Will Trump Be the Figurehead of a Political Movement
One problem for Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party, and the wider establishment institutions with which they are associated was in not recognizing how far they were outside the American cultural mainstream, argues Yascha Mounk in Spectator.
While running for the Democratic primaries in 2019, Kamala wedded herself to a slew of wildly unpopular identity positions, which turned out to be her most consequential vulnerabilities. With the obvious shifting of the political winds, Harris did not relinquish her dalliance with the idea of defunding the police or decriminalizing illegal border crossings.
Neither did she have the courage to directly call out the ideological foundations of these positions — or to reassure millions of swing voters that she would be willing to stand up for common sense when doing so might risk inspiring a pushback within her coalition.
Harris’s campaign had many opportunities to address this issue.
- She could have asked her supporters not to self-segregate by race and gender the moment she became the nominee.
- She could have defended a woman’s right to choose without condoning late-term abortions and stood up for the value of vaccines while acknowledging pandemic-era overreach by public health authorities.
- She could have chosen to make her case to the millions of swing voters who listen to Joe Rogan’s podcast, the most popular podcaster in the country.
Instead, Harris did none of the above. Was this misstep through fear and indecision or through ideological conviction and a distorted perception of reality?
The Unpredictable Donald Trump
Will he be known as the founder of a political movement that will have a lasting transformation on a US political movement, as well as perhaps on much of the Democratic world? Populists from the Peronists in Argentina to the Fujimoris in Peru, again and again, have proved to be more adept at returning to power than their contemporaries assumed.
This makes it all the more important for citizens of other countries to resist the temptation to judge Americans over the coming days.
Already in the international media, especially in Europe, there’s been a tendency to blame Trump’s re-election on every conceivable stereotype about Americans as racist, sexist and bigoted.
Mr Mounk is correct in advising that the role of the opposition is to stand up to Trump if he attacks some of the constitutional checks on the president’s power over the next four years. After all, the opposition’s priority should be to protect the checks and balances that has allowed America “to weather previous periods of deep partisan polarization …”
Unclear What Trump Does from Here
Democrats will make a big mistake if they simply revert to the “resistance playbook.” Instead, it is hoped that Democrats will build a “political coalition broad enough to win durable and sizable majorities against politicians of Trump’s ilk.”
And that will be impossible without a serious reckoning with the ways in which they, and the wider ecosystem for which they stand, have lost the trust of most Americans.
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