The Atlantic

In a culture devoid of moral education, generations of Americans are growing up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world, David Brooks wrote in The Atlantic’s September 2023 magazine issue. ⁠ Read more: bit.ly/4ejBtiF

“The vibe shifted sometime around 10:30 p.m. Eastern,” Elaine Godfrey reports, from Kamala Harris’s watch party in Washington, D.C. https://lnkd.in/gwjhKCEP “For several hours beforehand, the scene at the Howard University Yard had been jubilant: all glitter and sequins and billowing American flags. The earrings were big, and the risers were full. Men in fraternity jackets and women in pink tweed suits grooved to a bass-forward playlist of hip-hop and classic rock. The Howard gospel choir, in brilliant-blue robes, performed a gorgeous rendition of ‘Oh Happy Day,’ and people sang along in a way that made you feel as if the university’s alumna of the hour, Kamala Harris, had already won. “But Harris had not won—a fact that, by 10:30, had become very noticeable,” Godfrey continues. “As the evening drew on, the clusters of giddy sorority sisters and VIP alumni stopped dancing, their focus trained on the projector screens, which were delivering a steady flow of at best mediocre and sometimes dire news for Democrats. No encouragement had yet come from those all-important blue-wall states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Somewhere between Georgia turning red and Senator Ted Cruz demolishing Colin Allred in Texas, attendees started trickling out the back. “It was starting to feel pretty obvious, even then, that Donald Trump would be declared the winner of the 2024 presidential election. And soon after 5:30 a.m. Eastern this morning, he was, when the Associated Press called Wisconsin for him, giving him an Electoral College majority even with a number of states yet to declare. An across-the-board rightward shift, from Michigan to Manhattan, had gradually crushed the hopes of Democrats in an election that, for weeks, polling had indicated was virtually tied. But a Trump victory was a reality that nearly everyone at Harris’s watch party seemed to have prepared for only theoretically.” Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gwjhKCEP 📷: OK McCausland

Donald Trump won because he offered a majority of Americans what they wanted: anger and drama, Tom Nichols writes in The Atlantic Daily. But those who expect that Trump will hurt others, and not them, are likely to be unpleasantly surprised.

“Back in 2016, those of us who supported Donald Trump at least had the excuse of not knowing how sociopathy can present itself,” writes George T. Conway III. Now we will see a “degradation in the ability of this nation to govern itself rationally and fairly”:

Dark money, anonymous companies, and secretive elites with hidden wealth aren’t limited to distant dictatorships on palm-fringed islands. They’re in America—and they’re enabling democracy’s decay, Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomeranzev say. (From September)

"In poll after poll, focus group after focus group, Americans said the economy was bad—and the economy was bad because prices were too high," Annie Lowrey writes. "This was always going to be a problem for Kamala Harris."

Four years after Donald Trump attempted to overthrow an election, and months after being convicted of state crimes in New York, he has won a sweeping victory in the Electoral College—and “behind him are Republican Party apparatchiks who see the devotion of Trump’s followers as a vehicle for their most extreme ideological schemes,” Adam Serwer writes. https://lnkd.in/eFSCd6xU Although Trump will claim a popular mandate for everything he does, “Americans cannot vote themselves into a dictatorship any more than you as an individual can sell yourself into slavery. The restraints of the Constitution protect the American people from the unscrupulous designs of whatever lawless people might take the reins of their government, and that does not change simply because Trump believes that those restraints need not be respected by him.” Trump has “a willing partner in an already extreme-right Supreme Court, which will be emboldened to enable [his] agenda of discrimination, deportation, and domination, using a fictionalized historical jurisprudence to justify it,” Serwer writes. “The Trump entourage will return with more detailed plans for authoritarian governance; perhaps the only guardrail they now face is that they prize loyalty over genuine expertise. But fewer people will be willing to stand up to Trump than last time.” “As in previous eras when the authoritarian strain in American politics was ascendant, the time will come when Americans will have to face the question of why democracy was so meaningless to them that they chose a man who tried to overthrow their government to lead it. They’ll have to decide why someone who slandered blameless immigrants as pet-eating savages and vowed to deport them for the crime of working hard and contributing to their community … should lead [the] nation,” Serwer writes. “They’ll have to determine why a country conceived in liberty would hand power to the person most responsible for subjecting women to state control over their bodies.” “But there is no sunset on the right and duty of self-determination; there are no final victories in a democracy,” Serwer continues. “Americans must continue to ensure that they live in one.” 🎨: The Atlantic. Source: Chip Somodevilla / Getty.

Donald Trump "consistently offered a clear message that spoke to Americans’ frustration about the economy and the state of the country and promised to fix it," writes David A. Graham—even if his proposals “were often incoherent and nonsensical.”

Donald Trump has won, and will become president for the second time. Now “we must learn to live in an America where an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens have chosen a president who holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, even our military in contempt,” David Frum writes. https://lnkd.in/eaymykXR “Perhaps the greater and more insidious danger is not political repression or harassment, but corruption,” he continues. As the result of a “massive shift in the country’s bureaucratic culture, Trump-connected companies will prosper, even as America becomes less safe for consumers, for workers, for children, for all of us.” “But the most difficult, most agonizing changes are the ones that will now take place deep inside our society,” Frum writes. Radicalization of a part of the anti-Trump camp is inevitable. “A parallel process will take place on the other side of the political spectrum, as right-wing militias, white supremacists, and QAnon cultists are reenergized by the election of the man whose behavior they have, over eight years, learned to imitate.” “There were many chapters of history in which America did the wrong thing for years or decades. Maybe we are living through such a period now,” Frum continues. “Or maybe the truth is that democracy is always a close-run thing, always in contention. If so, then we too must—as people in other failing democracies have learned to do—find new ways to champion wobbling institutions and threatened ideas. For supporters of the American experiment in liberal democracy, our only hope is education, organization, and the creation of a coalition of people dedicated to defending the spirit of the Constitution, the ideals of the Founders, the dream of freedom. More concretely: public civic-education campaigns to replace the lessons no longer taught in schools; teams of lawyers who can fight for the rule of law in courts; grassroots organizing, especially in rural and small-town America; citizens and journalists working to expose and fight the enormous wave of kleptocracy and corruption that will now engulf our political system.” 🎨: Mike McQuade

Americans appalled by Trump’s win have every reason to fear for our democracy. But they also have work to do, Tom Nichols writes.