The day after Trump’s victory, the Atlantic magazine claimed that the vote for Trump was “a realignment that saw the GOP appear to give birth to a multiracial working-class movement”. Exit polls suggest the movement of working-class black and Hispanic men towards Trump, and the return of a decisive number of white working-class Trump, then Biden voters, back to Trump. The data we currently have suggests that Harris did slightly better with wealthy suburban whites, who might be called “Liz Cheney Democrats”. This group of former Republicans turned out to be a small sliver of the electorate, certainly nothing to rival the numbers of “Reagan Democrats” – the white working-class families that had supported the Democrats consistently from the 1930s until the 1970s. These Reagan Democrats have formed a core part of Trump’s base from 2016 onwards.

Beyond the Sanders’ campaigns of 2016 and 2020, the word class is rarely used by American politicians, but the necessary soul searching by the Democrats after this (second) terrible loss to Trump should focus on how it has lost its working-class policy focus, credentials, and support. It is worth remembering that, between 1931 and 1995, the Republicans were the minority party in the US House of Representatives for all bar four years. This was partly due to the long legacy of the Civil War, which made the South a one-party region, but it was also the result of the Republicans being seen as the party of business interests, held responsible for the tragedy of the Great Depression, which hit the American working class hardest. The GOP’s pro-business response to the 1929 crash and its devastating aftershocks, followed by the party’s resistance to the development of a nascent American welfare system in the 1930s, long made the Republicans a minority party. 

Sanders’ 2020 campaign charted a path for the emergence of Democratic Socialist politics in America. He was a lot more successful than most seasoned followers of US politics would have imagined was possible. Those that had been combing over opinion polling might have been a little less surprised, as it was clear from the early 2000s onwards that younger Americans were much more positively inclined in their views about socialism than older Americans who had been bought up on a diet of anti-communist rhetoric. This is still the case today, with 44% of Americans between the ages of 18-29 having a favourable view of “socialism” as opposed to 40% having a favourable view of “capitalism”. 73% of Americans over 65 years old, by contrast, have a favourable view of capitalism.

An enormous amount of organising and solidarity building is required for the revival of the Sanders movement and to build a truly bottom-up Democratic Socialist party. Thoughtful contributions to debates about where the American Left has gone wrong have always been available via magazines like The Nation and Dissent. John Judis has long been worth reading on the missteps of the Democratic party, and his 2023 book with Ruy Teixeira Where Have All the Democrats Gone? is excellent. Interesting new voices on the American Left emerged during this election campaign; Matt Karp’s writings for Jacobin, for example, and the nascent collective known as The Centre for Working Class Politics, of which he is part of, are worth following. Timothy Shenk’s excellent recent book Left Adrift is the best exploration of how political consultants like Stanley Greenberg and Douglas Schoen, with their focus group based “insights” and micro targeting data, took over the Democratic Party. One recent overview of the rise and rise of the American Right that is also well worth reading is John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke. These contributions all help provide a deeper understanding of why Trump won and Harris lost.

The part of the puzzle of “why Trump won” to which I am particularly drawn is what to make of his criticisms of the “deep state” and public servants in general. Most of this rhetoric from Trump is self-serving and is aimed at avoiding due process and court cases; in some ways it is also about fealty. But there are bigger concerns at stake here, as Trump’s attacks on government resonate with many poorer Americans that do not see federal bureaucracies as serving their needs or interests. The language of the “deep state” draws on Samuel Francis’ notion of an overly powerful and undemocratic “administrative state”. Francis was one of the progenitors of the Paleoconservative movement, which in some ways is the most important intellectual influence on something that might be called, at a stretch, Trumpism. Francis, a white supremacist and author of a 792-page book Leviathan and Its Enemies, is sometimes referred to as a “Right-wing Marxist”. Francis’ critique of bureaucratisation overlaps in some ways with Habermas’ concerns about capitalism and bureaucracy colonising the life world. The Paleoconservative movement engaged in debates on such issues with neo-Marxists in Telos in the 1980s and 1990s and the offspring of these exchanges can be read today in the diagonalist political magazine Compact.

What is interesting about this mirror world of Left and Right concerns, about what Milovan Djilas called the New Class or Barbara Ehrenreich called the Professional-Managerial Class, is the sense that they have hollowed out American politics. David Graeber takes this argument a step further in his brilliant books Bullshit Jobs and The Utopia of Rules, to argue the politics of the Professional-Managerial Class has trumped economics as they have asserted their control across societies like America. In keeping with Graeber’s anarchism, the answer is to promote industrial democracy and activism. A similar vision of where the Left should head in the face of electoral defeats as dispiriting as Trump’s victory is offered in Mark Fisher’s final book Postcapitalist Desire. Fisher advocates for a truly intersectional politics in which class politics is the binding glue and starting point for creating solidarity and meaningful policies. The need to raise the minimum wage federally in the US is the most obvious starting point around which such a movement could cohere.

The challenge ahead for the Democrats is the question of how the best aspects of the Harris campaign, with its multiracial openness and pro-women’s rights agenda, can be incorporated into a more Left-wing Democratic Party. The turf wars that somehow prevented Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Southern Black leaders like Jim Clyburn from being on the same side in the 2020 election campaign need to be examined carefully within the Democratic party. In the wake of Trump’s substantial victory, which was clearly a vote against Biden and his administration’s handling of inflation as much as anything, the Democratic Party must think big and develop social democratic and democratic socialist policies that can be easily explained and can garner wide support. The crushing defeat for Harris is an opportunity for the Democrats to develop policies that offer real solutions to America’s many social and economic problems.

As for the Republicans, are they likely to see this election as their opportunity to become the party of a multiracial working class? This could be a chance to create a deeper coalition than the Reagan coalition, which had a lot of voter defections in Congressional elections in the 1980s and 1990s, and which was overturned in certain regards by Clinton’s 1992 and 1996 victories. Trump and Vance definitely could take the Republicans in a more nationalistic and economically populist direction, with a combination of tariffs, infrastructure spending, draconian immigration policies and mild support for maintaining existing welfare programs. These policies are likely to be popular with working class voters, but they are also likely to be inflationary, which will undermine support for Trump and Vance. Increases in inflation, particularly increases in housing costs, coupled with Trump’s poor governing skills (which were very evident during the COVID crisis), are likely to make his administration unpopular, and put Vance in a similar position to Harris this election, of being closely associated with an unpopular incumbent president.

For all these reasons, 2028 is likely to be a good year to be a Democratic presidential candidate. It will be a challenge for the Left of the party to unite around a standard-bearer, given the centrists’ willingness to cohere around a single candidate and their ability to use the party machinery to their advantage as they did with Biden in 2020 or with Harris in 2024 (in the days after Biden withdrew from the presidential race). As grim as the Trump presidency is likely to be in many ways, one of the fascinating aspects of the resistance will be who can work with the just re-elected eighty-three-year-old Senator Sanders to take over the democratic socialist movement he helped build.