It is possible to get too down about this. Things have to happen for things to get better, but this may lead to a better outcome in the end.
Firstly this has to be seen as the final failure of centrist, triangulated, “West Wing” style cosplay politics that has dominated Western politics for the past thirty years. In every aspect of governance - economic, foreign policy, human rights, technological progress - they’ve been shown up as failures and now with this defeat they can’t even claim to be good at politics.
Their time should have ended after 2016 but now it has to see the Democrats remove from power the people responsible for this - and by that I don’t mean Harris (who I think aside from a couple of errors ran as a good a campaign as she could have), I mean the strategists and the leaders in the House and Senate who decided to fight this election by using court cases timed to go off around this campaign and raised the spectre of a risk to democracy rather than develop candidates and policies that would actually appeal to people. There is no better example of this than the talk over the economy, which is at a macro level much better than it was under Trump but which never acknowledges that for most people they can see how bad things are in terms of medical costs, job terms and conditions and so on.
Secondly this result looks like it will force the EU, and us, into a position where it’s abundantly clear that we have to look after our own interests and actually deal with the remaining issues that are harming our democracies. That means actually dealing with the dark money - and far more of it came from the US than it did Russia or anywhere else, dealing with the social media firms and disinformation, getting a credible independent military / military industrial base, accelerating the spread of renewables and independent energy generation and an independent foreign policy. This doesn’t and shouldn’t mean the end of NATO but it does mean we shouldn’t be in a position to be blackmailed with threats of the US leaving. FWIW I think this also ramps up massively the likelihood of the UK rejoining the EU in the next five years.
Most of all though this should really be an opportunity for the US to look at the outrageous liberties that have been run with their country for decades, which have been unchallenged by both parties. Musk claims there are two trillion dollars that could be cut from the federal government’s budget and whilst I have no faith he’d do that in any way that didn’t benefit himself, he is not wrong; Medicare / Medicaid alone is a system that has been looted by the drug and medical insurance industries for years for example.
Trump is almost certainly going to obviously fail to do anything about these but highlighting them should give someone down the line the opportunity to raise them as an issue finally, which if it comes from a reformed and much more capable Democrats is going to deliver an actual success next time around.
