Michael A. McCarthy in Sidecar:
Trump’s crushing victory over Harris casts serious doubt on one of the darling concepts of American political science: ‘polarization’. As of the latest count, Trump won the popular vote by over 3.5 million, capturing most swing states and flipping those that went for Biden in 2020: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. Voters thought to be entrenched in separate camps defied psephologists’ predictions by crossing from one to the other. Dominated by the Democrats for two election cycles, urban counties swung to Trump by 5.8 points, while suburban counties that went blue for Biden shifted red by 4.4 points. Both less-educated and more-educated counties also trended towards Trump (by 5.2 and 4.6 points respectively), as did most non-white groups: Hispanic-majority counties (13.3 points), indigenous counties (10 points) and black-majority counties (2.7 points). Trump even did better among women, who shifted 5 points to the right relative to 2020.
The president-elect now enters the White House enraged by his court battles and emboldened by a significant mandate. His party, having purged most of the Never Trumpers and replaced them with loyalists, is on the verge of controlling all the branches of government: a supermajority on the Supreme Court, a 3-seat majority in the Senate and likely a slim one in the House. The Democrats may still storm back in a few years’ time, as they have done after previous routs. But their fortunes will depend on how they adapt politically. What is the outlook for their particular brand of liberalism in the wake of this defeat?
An unlikely theoretical resource for understanding the American political scene can be found in Tosaka Jun’s The Japanese Ideology: A Marxist Critique of Liberalism and Fascism, first published in 1935 and now available in English thanks to Robert Stolz’s recent translation.
More here.
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