There are lots of ways of defining the liberal elite — assistant deans, network anchors, public health officials and, yes, legacy newspaper journalists — but there can be no question that Tuesday night saw a wholesale rejection of their dominant value system. America didn’t just elect a craven candidate whom the highly educated had deemed unacceptably dictatorial, fascistic even, but the nation did so in such a way that President-elect Donald J. Trump’s agenda now will largely be unfettered, thanks to Republican majorities in the Senate and, quite possibly as we write, the House.

And, adding insult to injury for Democrats, it’s likely that the result of the election also will deliver Trump from his myriad legal challenges.

The party that had been saying democracy was on the ballot found that democracy had risen like an orange tiger to bite it in the neck.

Democratic Party nominee Vice President Kamala Harris failed to outperform President Joe Biden in a single state. On CNN very late Tuesday night, they even were struggling to find a single county where that was true.

“Donald Trump is going to be our president,” Hillary Clinton thus found herself saying Wednesday, no doubt though gritted teeth. “We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead.”

For some on the left, that kind of largesse toward a convicted felon will be impossible. That we can understand. But the results are the results.

As a bleary America awoke Wednesday to a new political reality, armchair quarterbacking as to why Harris and Tim Walz lost was already underway. We have our theories, too.

Harris, as we noted here many times, failed to answer, in a clear and direct way, questions about what she would do as president, an essential thing to do if you want voters to be able see you in the job. The problem to our minds was not just that her handlers kept her removed from tough questions, but also that her answers were inadequately coherent when she finally emerged from the shadows.

Trump, palpable flaws and all, was known; Harris remained unknown. The gauzy biographical movies from the Democratic National Convention were not enough.

A majority of voters clearly were uncomfortable with the Democrats’ switcheroo after the party belatedly discovered that Biden was unfit for another term as president. In essence, the party bosses then told voters to fall in line, quiet down, ask no questions and demand no further choices. Americans, it has now been confirmed, did not care for that. (We never did.)

Not having an open contest for the nomination was a foundational mistake, and those of us who attended both Republican and Democratic Party conventions could see that the former was more open and friendly than the far tenser and more controlled latter, notwithstanding the eloquence of many DNC speakers and the bloviating candidate rambling in Milwaukee. Democrats tried to push Harris onto the nation because they sincerely believed she deserved to be the party’s nominee and they wanted to make history, but that is just not how democracy works. As the party now knows.

Then there’s the matter of whether Democrats should have treated Trump as if he were a Nazi dictator. Harris explicitly told CNN host Anderson Cooper she was running against a fascist, thus inevitably implying that his supporters either were sheep-like fools or fascists themselves. That meant left-leaning commentators had to turn themselves into pretzels Wednesday trying to explain the logic of how Harris should now quietly concede to a man she had called, and presumably believed, was a fascist. Whenever Democrats used terms like “normalizing” and “sane-washing,” evidence suggests they mostly served to embolden the opposition because Trump supporters saw the terms as being applied to themselves. And they hardly were wrong. Half of America sees the other half as fools.

We’ll point to a couple of other factors. One requires a global perspective. Incumbents on the right and the left have been tossed out of power in settled democracies all over the globe this year as societies recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, with no coherent political explanation except for one ubiquitous truth: widespread economic insecurity flowing from prices rising far more quickly than wages.

The other is simpler yet.

The Republican Party has become a party not of business and nonprofit leaders, now mostly Democratic Party members, but of the working class and the lower middle class. Elites throughout history have found to their cost that there are very many of those folks, even if we don’t hear from them all that much. By effectively abandoning the working class, especially men, by deeming so much of what they felt unacceptable, Democrats got themselves on the wrong side of the numbers game.

A plethora of Americans saw Trump, who survived two assassination attempts during the campaign, as their protector and not as the disruptor the elites saw. And regular folks tend to vote what they perceive to be in their economic or cultural interest, regardless of race.

This is a tough lesson for Democrats to learn because they tend to have been taught otherwise, but it explains, especially, the pivotal defection of some Black men to Trump just as it makes the point that many U.S. citizens of Latino origin or descent don’t necessarily approve of a border it is easy to cross without authorization. And they voted accordingly.

Take, for example, the decision by many voters of Puerto Rican descent to ignore the insults hurled their way by the appalling comedian at Trump’s New York rally. Democrats had pushed the narrative that those aggrieved voters would move the needle, especially in crucial Allentown, Pennsylvania, because they thought racial identity would trump all. But they failed to see the condescension inherent in the belief that those voters would care more about a comic than their own economic worries when it came to paying their bills and helping their children find jobs.

Now, thanks to the toughest of nights, Democrats better understand.

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