Tuesday afternoon and into the early evening I was expecting a Harris win. Then, when CNN declared a victory in Iowa for Trump, I started to think that the polls showing Harris ahead or tied with Trump in most battleground states could be wrong, as, indeed, they were. As dawn broke, the scale of Trump’s victory was becoming evident … and the predictable bloviating from anti-Trump quarters had begun to make the rounds on social media.

Whether the second Trump presidency will prove to be the fascist take-down of “American democracy” his critics are warning about remains to be seen. I am not inclined towards catastrophising in politics: capitalist political institutions are system-preserving. Liberal democratic institutions have served American capitalism very well. They enjoy broad support- as we will see, Trump was not elected because his supporters want to destroy “democracy.” Most, I will argue, want it to work for them and not just wealthy urban professionals and bankers. They have, as they did in 2016, made a very bad choice, but one should remember that they did choose, by the rules of the democratic game as it is played in America. The “power” the people exercise in actually existing democracy is meagre: the economic power by which the ruling class shapes public life and policy is regulated by the state but never fundamentally compromised no matter who assumes office. That does not mean that it does not matter who gets elected; party policy can make a difference in peoples’ lives. But it remains true that the machine rolls on no matter who is at the helm. My suspicion is that just as in his first term Trump will produce more smoke than heat. More importantly, the damage that he threatens to do to targeted groups can be resisted– if people organise, rather than mourn.

Two broad explanations have been offered for Trump’s victory. Each expresses one side of a more complex truth and say at least as much about the politics of those who authored the explanation as the dynamics of the election itself. The first is the most predictable and the least supported by the available polling evidence: the Trump victory is a victory for racism, misogyny, and xenophobia. For example, Moustafa Bayoumi writing in The Guardian argued that “The very idea of another Trump presidency is devastating. His entire campaign consisted of unbridled race-baiting, woman-hating and fascist-in-waiting messaging, yet still he prevails. This is what succeeds in this country? The answer, it’s now clear, is a resounding yes.” If true, then it must be the case that everyone who voted for him is racist, misogynist, and xenophobic. Some Trump voters undoubtedly are racist, misogynist, and xenophobic, but the scale of his victory and his performance with a wide variety of voter groups suggests that overall, his voters were not motivated primarily by hatred.

Trump’s improved standing amongst women, Latino’s and (to a much lesser extent) Black men, and Harris’ corresponding underperformance suggests strongly that what fueled Trump’s victory was a repudiation of the Democratic party’s campaign as much as it was an intrinsically pro-Trump vote. While inflation has slowed, it dogged the last years of the Biden administration and its consequences for living standards pushed voters towards Trump. The the actual results as expressed in a series of exit polls reported by CNN paints a picture that is not easily explained by the argument that Trump rode a racist wave of poor and religious whites to victory: 46% of Latinos voted for Trump, 65% of Native Americans voted for him and, in the crucial Michigan battleground, only a quarter of Arab-Americans voted for Harris. Those groups were not motivated by racism. While it is true that about 8 in 10 Blacks voted for Harris, that was down from 9 in 10 that voted for Biden. But 3 in 10 young Black men under 45 chose Trump- a small but noticeable statistical increase over the general pattern. The results prove that people do not simply mechanically vote their identity but think about the available options. Many Latino’s voted for Trump despite the bad joke about Puerto Rico at the convention because they too are concerned about immigration levels and many are opposed to anything that smacks of “socialism,” given their experiences in Cuba and Venezuela. One might disagree– strongly– with their choice, but to simply dismiss Trump voters as racists and misogynists risks displaying the “contempt for the masses”‘ that Ernesto Laclau argued underwrites elite criticisms of populism (On Populist Reason).

The competing explanation, better evidenced than the first, argues that the reasons that Trump won were primarily economic. Thus Bernie Sanders argued that “it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them … While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.” Sanders echoes concerns that have been expressed in a number of quarters, none more carefully argued than Thomas Piketty’s critique in Capital and Ideology, that social democratic parties in Europe and the Democratic party in the United States (which functions symbolically as a centre-left party even though it is not) have indeed abandoned the working class: in terms of policy, in terms of culture and ideology, and in terms of their mass base. Social democrats and the Democrats are becoming the party of urban professionals and highly educated youth. This group is not a class, as critics of the “professional managerial” class argue, but are better understood as class fraction– the educated and cultured upper tier of the petite bourgeoisie. While many (professors, for example) have material interests in government spending, they are united less by objective economic concerns and more by a general cultural outlook- the “diversity and inclusion agenda” pilloried by critics of ‘woke” politics and the target of Trump’s and the right’s generally satirical rhetorical attacks. Whereas “inclusion” used to be thought of in material terms: furnishing historically oppressed groups and exploited classes with the resources that they required to satisfy the full range of their needs and freely develop their life-capacities– the basic political economic goal of socialism, broadly construed– today it has become– or, what amounts to the same thing, successfully portrayed as becoming– an out of control ideology adrift from both material rationality and the culture of large sections of the population. The economic explanation of Trump’s victory argues that people flocked to Trump because they are tired of having their material interests ignored, that they believe in fairness but reject the interpretation of fairness that involves downplaying the interest of one section of the working class (whites) against other sections of the working class (minority groups), and they believe Trump when he says that he will work for all Americans. Polls and interviews support this interpretation, but also abstract from some important splits noticeable in the working class vote.

The most important split is between unionized and non-unionized workers. Exit polls showed that 55 % of unionized workers voted for Harris and only 43% for Trump. Now, 43 % is not nothing, but what we should pay attention to is the per centage gap: 9 per cent is a huge difference in politics, and it suggests that unions remain spaces for political argument. That is, where leaders can engage members and members can engage each other, a majority of workers can be brought round to seeing what might seem obvious but, politically, is not: a billionaire blow hard property developed is not going to work in the interests of the working class. What this fact further suggests is that Sanders and other left critics of the existing Democratic agenda might indeed have a point: if Democrats concentrate on those economic concerns that link and unite the experience of different members of the working class they will be able to undercut the apparently unifying but actually divisive arguments of Trump. (The same argument holds in Europe, where the far right has gained at the expense of social democratic parties who, like the Democrats, have been abandoned by working class voters).

But I think that not only do the policies need to change, so too does the rhetoric. What I called in my book The Troubles With Democracy “the politics of commas” (a political claim is asserted and is then followed by an endless list of every particular group and sub group to ensure that no one’s “story” is left unacknowledged) needs to give way to a politics of concrete universality. The term is technical but the meaning is simple: humanity is a self-determining species; unlike rocks, we are capable of shaping our social and individual reality. Those self-determining capacities are expressed in distinct ways: different languages, different philosophies, different cultural traditions, different cuisines, different modes of making art, different family patterns. Patterns are good or bad not according to their content (secular versus atheist, English versus Spanish, heterosexual versus gay marriage, etc), but according to whether their organization and practice depends upon the domination and oppression of other groups. So long as some citizens’ worship of the god they believe in does not impede others from living as atheists, so long as one person loving the person they love does not impede another from loving the person they love, then both are good. Everything good in human life is a living expression of our human capacities to make sense of our place in the universe and forge mutualistic bonds across differences. The principle that the best society ensures the satisfaction of everyone’s natural and social needs so that they can live the lives they find meaningful and valuable, so that everyone can make contributions to the common (social, cultural, and economic) wealth– has to become again the organizing centre of left politics. That was the principle that early animated the socialist movement and it has to become the animating centre again.

However, it is also important to register concern with the degree to which a culture of conservatism has taken hold amongst those sections of the working class that voted for Trump. The problem with this culture is not necessarily its content– there is nothing inherently wrong with the nuclear family, or heterosexuality, or being white. Clinging to any or all as the bedrock of civilization and attacking other forms of social relationship and ways of life is the problem: every bit as much the problem as the identity politics and the woke agenda that conservatives attack. The political problem with both form of identity politics is that every group silos itself in defensive reaction to the mere existence of other groups, no one can talk to one another, and arch-opportunists like Trump– who, if you ask me, believes in nothing except his own power– are able to exploit the divisions.

In one of the more perceptive analyses of the election that I have read, Ben Davis drew an analogous conclusion. He argued that “while the new right has made great hay of returning to a communitarian model of politics, economically populist, socially conservative, and focused on family and society, the truth is that the Trumpist movement is the opposite. It is hostile to the very concept of society and community. To combat this, we need an unabashedly pro-society left. The way to win back power for a solidaristic and humanist politics is to rebuild working-class democratic institutions. In 2020, Sanders asked the question: “Are you willing to fight for someone you don’t know?” This is the question we must ask over and over again and the work we must do is making sure the answer becomes yes.” A pro-society left, I would argue, goes deeper than just working class institutions to the foundations of social life in need-satisfaction. The problem with identity politics is that it starts from difference and has no way other than (often cloying) pleas for solidarity based on the unique vulnerabilities of the group doing the pleading. I am reminded of Nietzsche’s attack on the “wretched and pinched style” of his socialist contemporaries (The Will to Power, 77). Today’s style– platitudinous, preachy, and above all self-righteous– annoys, but the bigger problem is that moralistic pleading does not work (and when poorly articulated because too easy a target for sarcastic critiques from the right).

Solidarity must be built up from common interests and those interests are grounded in shared natural and social needs. Properly nourished, everyone’s body can dance in its own way. Coherent valorization of differences must start from their roots in shared human needs and capacities for self-making and self-expression. Only once differences are understood as the expression of underlying, universal human needs and capacities can people learn that they enrich themselves by appreciating other people’s dances, even if they would not dance that way themselves. Once a common basis of understanding has been established, hard cases of conflict can be resolved through good will, honest but sharp debate, and compromise.