Who are we anyway?

All day today, people I’ve worked with over the years have been contacting me — some in tears, some in abject panic, most deeply worried. It has been a hard day for so many.

Since 2015, I’ve been saying that America is better than Trump. I’m no longer so sure.

Yet the roots of Trumpism extend many years before 2015. I first came across them in 1994, when the Democrats lost both houses of Congress in what was then termed a “repudiation” of the Democratic Party.

Trumpism is the consequence, not the cause, of a long-term structural change in the American political economy.

Over much of the past 30 years, as the Republican Party embraced bigotry, lies, and hate to stir up working-class fears and resentments, the Democratic Party abandoned the working class and embraced global trade, deregulation of finance, and lower taxes on the wealthy, and has allowed corporate bashing of labor unions and monopolization of industry.

As a result, the median wage of the bottom 90 percent has risen just 15 percent, adjusted for inflation, while the stock market has soared 5000 percent.

To its credit, the Biden administration is the first Democratic administration in more than 30 years to reject additional moves toward globalization and deregulation, propose higher taxes on the wealthy, strengthen labor unions, aggressively utilize antitrust, and adapt a forward-looking industrial policy.

But these measures require years to take effect, and many working-class Americans have not yet benefited from them.

So who are we, and where do we go from here? I will share my thoughts about these questions over the next weeks and months. But today, as we process what’s happened, I want to share with you three short pieces.

The first is the transcript of a radio call-in program I did in the fall of 1994 when, as secretary of labor, I was campaigning for Democrats in the midterm elections that resulted in losses of both chambers of Congress.

***

“You’re on Talk Radio 95, The Charles Walter Show, where you hear the news when it’s news! Joining us this evening, the United States secretary of labor! Here to take y-o-o-o-u-u-u-r calls! … John from Garden Park. You’re on Talk Radio 95!”

“Hello?”

“You’re on the air, John! Do you have a question for the secretary?”

“Yes. Mr. Secretary, have you ever held a real job in your entire life?”

“Well, John, I used to teach.”

“Just what I thought. You don’t know nothing.”

“Thank you, John! Diane from Oak Brook, you’re on the air!”

“Hi, Charlie.”

“Hi, Diane!”

“Love your show, Charlie.”

“Thanks, Diane! A question for the labor secretary?”

“Why does the secretary think government has all the answers?”

“I don’t think government has all the answers, Diane.”

“Yes you do. You and all the other liberals in the Clinton administration. Ever heard of free enterprise? Socialism doesn’t work!”

“Thank you, Diane! Next up, Peter from Lakeview! Pete, you’re on the air!”

“Great show, Charlie.”

“Thanks, Pete! Your question?”

“I don’t understand something.”

“What is it you don’t understand, Pete?”

“I don’t understand where these guys get off.”

“Your question for the labor secretary, Pete?”

“Mr. Secretary, why do you think you have the right to tax honest hard-working people? It’s our money.”

“Pete, your federal taxes pay for national defense, Medicare, highways, environmental protection, air-traffic control, safe workplaces, all sorts of things you rely on.”

“It’s my money. I should decide what I need. You have no right.”

“Thank you, Pete! We’re cooking tonight, folks! The board’s all lit up! Ted from Orleyville, you’re on the air!”

“I really appreciate your show, Charles.”

“Thank you, Ted! Your question for the secretary?”

“Yes. Mr. Secretary, you’re a fucking —”

“Michelle in Garden View! You’re on the air!”

“I’d like to know why we spend billions and billions of dollars on welfare for people who do nothing all day but sit around and watch TV.”

“Michelle, all welfare spending is less than 3 percent of the federal budget, and most people on welfare are off it and into jobs within two years.”

“You’re lying.”

“Tony in Lakeview! You’re on the air!”

“I just lost my job. My company went to Mexico. I want to ask the labor secretary how anybody can get a good job in America if we have to compete with Mexicans who are paid a nickel an hour?”

“Good question, Tony! Mr. Secretary?”

“Tony, I’m sorry you lost your job. But there are millions of good new jobs out there, some of them exporting to Mexico and other countries. You can get —”

“Good new jobs? Where? The new jobs pay nothing. They pay shit. You’re talking out of your asshole.”

“Afraid that’s all the time we have! Mr. Secretary, thanks so very much for being with us this evening!”

***

The second piece is an essay by Carlos Lozada from today’s New York Times.

I remember when Donald Trump was not normal.

I remember when Trump was a fever that would break.

I remember when Trump was running as a joke.

I remember when Trump was best covered in the entertainment section.

I remember when Trump would never become the Republican nominee.

I remember when Trump couldn’t win the general election.

I remember when Trump’s attacks on John McCain were disqualifying.

I remember when Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape would force him out.

I remember when Trump was James Comey’s fault.

I remember when Trump was the news media’s fault.

I remember when Trump won because Hillary Clinton was unlikable.

I remember when 2016 was a fluke.

I remember when the office of the presidency would temper Trump.

I remember when the adults in the room would contain him.

I remember when the Ukraine phone call went too far.

I remember when Trump learned his lesson after the first impeachment.

I remember when Jan. 6 would be the end of Trump’s political career.

I remember when the 2022 midterms meant the country was moving on.

I remember when Trump’s indictments would give voters pause.

I remember when Trump’s felony convictions would give voters pause.

I remember when Trump would win because Joe Biden was old.

I remember when Kamala Harris’s joy would overpower Trump’s fearmongering.

I remember when Trump was weird.

I remember when Trump was not who we are.

There have been so many attempts to explain away Trump’s hold on the nation’s politics and cultural imagination, to reinterpret him as aberrant and temporary. “Normalizing” Trump became an affront to good taste, to norms, to the American experiment.

We can now let go of such illusions. Trump is very much part of who we are. Nearly 63 million Americans voted for him in 2016. Seventy-four million did in 2020. And now, once again, enough voters in enough places have cast their lot with him to return him to the White House. Trump is no fluke, and Trumpism is no fad.

After all, what is more normal than a thing that keeps happening?

In recent years, I’ve often wondered if Trump has changed America or revealed it. I decided that it was both — that he changed the country by revealing it. After Election Day 2024, I’m considering an addendum: Trump has changed us by revealing how normal, how truly American, he is.

Throughout Trump’s life, he has embodied every national fascination: money and greed in the 1980s, sex scandals in the 1990s, reality television in the 2000s, social media in the 2010s. Why wouldn’t we deserve him now?

At first, it seemed hard to grasp that we’d really done it. Not even Trump seemed to believe his victory that November night in 2016. We had plenty of excuses, some exculpatory, some damning. The hangover of the Great Recession. Exhaustion with forever wars. A racist backlash against the first Black president. A populist surge in America and beyond. Deaths of despair. If not for this potent mix, surely no one like Trump would ever have come to power.

If only the Clinton campaign had focused more on Wisconsin. If only African American turnout had been stronger in Michigan. If only WikiLeaks and private servers and “deplorables” and so much more. If only.

Now we’ll come up with more, no matter how contradictory or consistent they may be. If only Harris had been more attuned to the suffering in Gaza, or more supportive of Israel. If only she’d picked Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, as her running mate. If only the lingering fury over Covid had landed at Trump’s feet. If only Harris hadn’t been so centrist, or if only she weren’t such a California progressive, hiding all those positions she’d let slip in her 2019 campaign. If only Biden hadn’t waited so long to withdraw from the race, or if only he hadn’t mumbled stuff about garbage.

Harris decried Trump as a fascist, a petty tyrant. She called him divisive, angry, aggrieved. And that was a smart case to make if, deep down, most voters held democracy dear (except maybe they didn’t) and if so many of them weren’t already angry (except they were). If all America needed was an articulate case for why Trump was bad, then Harris was the right candidate with the right message at the right moment. The prosecutor who would defeat the felon.

But the voters heard her case, and they still found for the defendant. A politician who admires dictators and says he’ll be one for a day, whose former top aides regard as a threat to the Constitution — a document he believes can be “terminated” when it doesn’t suit him — has won power not for one day but for nearly 1,500 more. What was considered abnormal, even un-American, has been redefined as acceptable and reaffirmed as preferable.

The Harris campaign, as the Biden campaign before it, labored under the misapprehension that more exposure to Trump would repel voters. They must simply have forgotten the mayhem of his presidency, the distaste that the former president surely inspired. “I know Donald Trump’s type,” Harris reminded us, likening him to the crooks and predators she’d battled as a California prosecutor. She even urged voters to watch Trump’s rallies — to witness his line-crossing, norm-obliterating moments — as if doing so would inoculate the electorate against him.

It didn’t. America knew his type, too, and it liked it. Trump’s disinhibition spoke to and for his voters. He won because of it, not despite it. His critics have long argued that he is just conning his voters — making them feel that he’s fighting for them when he’s just in it for himself and his wealthy allies — but part of Trump’s appeal is that his supporters recognize the con, that they feel that they’re in on it.

Trump has long conflated himself with America, with the ambitions of its people. “When you mess with the American dream, you’re on the fighting side of Trump,” he wrote in “The America We Deserve,” published in 2000.

The Democrats tried hard to puncture those fantasies in this latest campaign. They raised absurd amounts of cash. They pushed the incumbent president, the standard-bearer of their party, out of the race, once it became clear he would not win. They replaced him with a younger, more dynamic candidate who proceeded to trounce Trump in their lone presidential debate.

None of it was enough. America had voted early, long before any mail-in ballots were available, and it has given Trump the “powerful mandate” he claimed in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

This time, that choice came with full knowledge of who Trump is, how he behaves in office and what he’ll do to stay there. He hasn’t just shifted the political consensus on a set of policy positions, though by moving both parties on trade and immigration, he certainly has done that. The rationalization of 2016 — that Trump was a protest vote by desperate Americans trying to send a message to the establishment of both parties — is no longer operative. The grotesque rally at Madison Square Garden, that carnival of insults against everyone that the speakers do not want in their America, was not an anomaly but a summation. It was Trumpism’s closing argument, and it landed.

The irony of one of the more common critiques of Harris — that her “word salad” moments and default platitudes in extended interviews made it hard to know what she believed — is that Trump manages to seem real even when his positions shift and his words weave. Authenticity does not require consistency or clarity when it is grounded in pitch-perfect cynicism.

We don’t call this period “the Trump era” just because the once and future president won lots of votes and has now prevailed in two presidential contests. It remained the Trump era even when Biden exiled him to Mar-a-Lago for four years. It is the Trump era because Trump has captured not just a national party but also a national mood, or at least enough of it. And when Democrats presented the choice this year as a referendum on Trumpism more than an affirmative case for Harris, they kept their rival at the center of American politics.

Harris gave it away whenever she called on voters to “turn the page” from Trump. Didn’t we do that in 2020 when we chose Biden and Harris? Not really. Trump was still waiting in the epilogue.

For those who have long insisted that Trump is “not who we are,” that he does not represent American values, there are now two possibilities: Either America is not what they thought it was, or Trump is not as threatening as they think he is. I lean to the first conclusion, but I understand that, over time, the second will become easier to accept. A state of permanent emergency is not tenable; weariness and resignation eventually win out. As we live through a second Trump term, more of us will make our accommodations. We’ll call it illiberal democracy, or maybe self-care.

“We’re not going back,” Harris told us. The tragedy is not that this election has taken us back, but that it shows how there are parts of America’s history that we’ve never fully gotten past.

In her book “America for Americans,” Erika Lee argues that Trump’s immigration policies and statements are part of a long tradition of xenophobia — against Southern Europeans, against newcomers from Asia, Latin America and the Middle East — a tradition that has lived alongside our self-perception as a nation of immigrants. In his book “The End of the Myth,” Greg Grandin warned of the “nationalization of border brutalism” under Trump, whereby harsh policies at the U.S.-Mexico border would spread elsewhere, an “extremism turned inward, all-consuming and self-devouring.”

When Trump first began his ascent into presidential politics, some readers turned to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, “It Can’t Happen Here,” about homegrown authoritarianism in the United States. In the story, Doremus Jessup, a liberal-minded newspaper editor, marvels at the power of Buzz Windrip, a crudely charismatic demagogue who captivates the country and imposes totalitarian rule. The stylistic similarities between Trump and Windrip are evident, but Lewis’s real protagonists are the well-meaning, liberal-minded citizens, like Jessup, who couldn’t quite bring themselves to grasp what was happening.

Jessup tells his readers that the insanity won’t last, that they can wait it out. “He simply did not believe that this comic tyranny could endure,” Lewis wrote. When it does endure, Jessup blames himself and his class for their obliviousness. “If it hadn’t been one Windrip, it’d been another. … We had it coming, we Respectables,” he laments.

For too long, today’s Respectables have insisted on Trump’s abnormality. It is a reflex, a defense mechanism, as though accepting his ordinariness is too much to bear. Because if Trump is normal, then America must be, too, and who wants to be roused from dreams of exceptionalism? It’s more comforting to think of Trumpism as a temporary ailment than a pre-existing condition.

When Hillary Clinton described half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” in September of 2016, she did more than dismiss a massive voting bloc and confirm her status as a Respectable in good standing. What she said about those voters moments later was even more telling: “Some of those folks, they are irredeemable. But, thankfully, they are not American.”

It’s a neat move: Rather than accept what America was becoming and who Americans could become, just write them out of the story.

Are we what we say, or what we do — are we our actions or our aspirations? From America’s earliest moments, we have lived this tension between ideals and reality. It may seem more honest to dismiss our words and focus on our deeds. But our words also matter; they reveal what we hope to do and who we want to be. That yearning remains vital, no matter in what direction our national reality points.

The way to render Trump abnormal is not to insist that he is, or to find more excuses, or to indulge in the great and inevitable second-guessing of Democratic campaign strategy. It begins by recognizing that who we are is decided not only on Election Day — whether 2024 or 2016, or 2028 for that matter — but every day. Every day that we strive to be something other than what we’ve become.

I remember when I thought Trump wasn’t normal. But now he is, no matter how fiercely I cling to that memory.

***

The third is a short essay by one of my favorite authors, Rebecca Solnit:

They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love.

The Wobblies used to say don't mourn, organize, but you can do both at once and you don't have to organize right away in this moment of furious mourning. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots and call someone who's upset and check your equipment for going onward. A lot of us are going to come under direct attack, and a lot of us are going to resist by building solidarity and sanctuary. Gather up your resources, the metaphysical ones that are heart and soul and care, as well as the practical ones.

People kept the faith in the dictatorships of South America in the 1970s and 1980s, in the East Bloc countries and the USSR, women are protesting right now in Iran and people there are writing poetry. There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it's sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.