The Brooklyn Rail

It must have been shortly before Pennsylvania was called for Donald Trump, around the same time Joy Reid claimed on MSNBC that Kamala Harris had run a flawless campaign because she’d been endorsed by Queen Latifah, when I suddenly remembered Hillary Clinton had published a memoir titled What Happened. I’d read the book when it was first published in 2017, but hadn’t thought about it since. Primarily an account of her experience as the Democratic candidate during the 2016 presidential election, the book’s title was meant to signal honesty and vulnerability from a woman who had remained guarded throughout her political career. “This is my story of what happened,” the memoir begins. But Clinton’s account of wanting to scream during Trump’s inauguration, or doing yoga and drinking chardonnay in the days after the election, was not what I recalled. It was those two words, What Happened, which in my sleep-deprived state (my son had been born five weeks earlier) struck me as incredibly funny, the punchline to the salient political joke of our time.

It wasn’t just that What Happened beautifully summarizes the endless, blabbering autopsy of post-election coverage, when every mainstream media outlet assembles a panel of handsomely compensated “experts” to offer analysis—although this had already begun to play out on screen, as I flipped to CNN and its table of anchors solemnly recited its talking points. It was that What Happened is, in many ways, the perfect slogan for a Democratic Party that finishes every election with its pants around its ankles, stumbling into bleak, balloon-filled venues to concede dutifully and leave everyone in attendance wondering, “Wait…What happened?” It is the slogan of a party that repeats its failed strategies and hopes everyone conveniently forgets, a party that would rather fundraise on the apocalypse it warns is imminent than do anything serious to combat it.

The 2024 presidential election was no different. A slapstick remake of the 2016 debacle—let’s call it What Happened Too—it was just as surreal and just as stupid. Trump was back and more dangerous than ever, miraculously dodging bullets from a gunman who had once appeared in a BlackRock advertisement, pumping his fist in an admittedly cool gesture of defiance. Wearing a comically large bandage over his ear, he accepted the party’s nomination alongside the guy who had somehow transformed the opioid crisis into a bestselling memoir, a deeply unlikeable and off-putting social climber with the aura of a haunted Care Bear. Many years younger than Mike Pence but no less weird about women, J.D. Vance provided incredible content. He was uninspiring in his speeches, and his lack of charisma was evident in every unscripted interaction that made its way to social media. “Whatever makes sense,” everyone agreed, was an insane way to order donuts from a group of visibly uncomfortable service workers. His eyeliner was sinister, yes, but Vance was at his core an awkward dork, the star of countless couch-fucking jokes that lifted us through the end of summer.

Joe Biden, meanwhile, had finally melted like one of his beloved ice cream cones, his first debate performance so catastrophic that the Democratic Party elders had no choice but to force him out as quickly as they had forced out Bernie Sanders in 2020. In his place emerged an unlikely savior, our always-seemingly-half-zonked prosecutor who, we were told, knew how to deal with criminals like Donald Trump. In the ongoing fever dream of the 2024 sequel, Harris played the goofy surrogate for Hillary, somehow both less likable and way more fun. She certainly wouldn’t have been most people’s choice, had they been given one, but it was a relief to no longer have to listen to Biden struggle to string together words into something resembling a sentence. Besides, Harris had a memeable laugh, and the whole coconut tree thing was the sort of silly vibe we had all lost after years of Trump and COVID and doom scrolling on websites we didn’t really want to be on anymore.

Vibes: that became the answer, at some point—the Democratic Party’s response to Trump’s magnetic je ne sais quoi. And who had better vibes than Tim Walz, the teacher/coach/mechanic whose hit single “Weird” had taken the internet by storm? Certainly, he was an upgrade from Tim Kaine, the vaguely human-shaped Senator tasked to fight with Mike Pence. Perhaps the only relatable person in the entire Democratic Party, Walz had authentic Midwestern Dad energy that stood in stark contrast to Vance’s contrived “Meemaw Appalachia painkillers” schtick. Of course, the economic policies that made Walz popular would take a backseat to a demonic voice chanting, “Vote for us or the world will end,” but that was a minor detail. What mattered is that Trump was unfit to serve, that he was a felon, and that even members of his own cabinet thought he was a Bad Guy Who Admired Bad People. What mattered is that even Liz and Dick Cheney were voting Harris. The only thing left to do was send a rotting Bill Clinton to Michigan with an inspiring message for Arab voters: Israel has no choice but to kill Palestinian kids. You know, because Hamas.

This approach didn’t work. And why would it? Running back the same HR-approved campaign that the Democratic Party has trotted out every few years, spending hundreds of millions in campaign donations to run advertisements that effectively proclaimed, “We are Republicans, too!” is not a serious way to reach undecided working-class voters. But of course, these were not the voters the Harris campaign, or the Democratic Party, wanted to welcome. They wanted the elusive “suburban moderate,” a political fiction as manufactured as the WMDs their new #Resistance team member, Dick Cheney, used as a pretext to slaughter Iraqi civilians. Only in the suburbs, after all, could Americans be swayed by such shrewd messaging as “You’re wrong, actually, the economy is good!” and “Isn’t it hilarious that Trump didn’t build the wall like he said he would?”

And so, as the polls closed on November 5th and it became increasingly clear that the future, buoyed by a billion dollars in campaign donations, would not be unburdened by what has been, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to the pollsters and pundits that Harris was underperforming Biden. Moderate Republicans, curiously, voted for the Republican candidate, unconvinced that he was as big of a threat to democracy as everyone insisted. A majority of working-class voters, many of whom had supported Biden in 2020, also backed Trump this time around. Some of this could be explained by the curse of incumbency, as the anchors on CNN observed—voters typically vote out the party in office during periods of economic crisis—but it was likely much more simple: Trump and Vance were better at speaking to working people’s concerns. While they may not have offered a convincing economic plan to address these concerns, they did offer the next best thing, namely someone to blame. Housing is expensive, they conceded, but only because immigrants have disrupted the law of supply and demand.

The only real economic policies Harris offered, means-tested tax incentives and a 25,000 dollar down payment for first-time homebuyers, emerged from the same ideological backwash Democrats have been trying, and failing, to get voters to drink for decades. While she ostensibly supported the passing of two existing pieces of legislation, the Preventing the Algorithmic Facilitation of Rental Housing Cartels Act and the Stop Predatory Investing Act, she hardly mentioned them enough to make voters aware they existed. How could she, when she was too busy talking about Project 2025 and hoping enough women would be scared enough to secretly vote for her? It was the same wager Clinton had made, a belief that women would support a woman, especially when that woman was running against a misogynist. Harris could have made the focus of her campaign the material conditions that reliably motivate most voters—exit polls would show, to no one’s surprise, that the economy was the most important issue—but the last thing she wanted was to embrace working-class policies that would brand her as “too liberal.”

This certainly didn’t stop Trump and the Republican Party from running on the “too liberal” accusation. Immigrants are committing crimes, the ominous narrator in every political ad threatened, and liberals like Kamala Harris want to allow biological men to play sports with your daughters. It was all mind-numbingly stupid, a tired culture war attack, and yet it worked, because Harris offered nothing as an alternative beyond “Trump is dangerous for democracy.” As Democrats instinctually do when they’re cornered, she triangulated. She tried her best to remind voters that she, too, thought immigration was a problem, but Trump would always beat her on that issue. She tried her best to bring up the economy, but could not say anything more specific than “we’re going to make things cheaper.” She tried her best to take a reasonable stance on foreign policy, ultimately landing on the principled position, “maybe Israel should take a few days off from targeting Palestinian kids with drones.” But in the end, it was Trump who called Liz Cheney a warhawk, a pointed criticism at a time when a significant number of Americans believe US support for Israel is too strong, and who don’t exactly want billions of their tax dollars going toward foreign conflicts.

Even Bernie Sanders, in one of the more pathetic moments of this election cycle, applauded Dick Cheney for his “defense of democracy,” as though we are expected to forget it was precisely “democracy” that Cheney was proudly defending when he cooked up outlandish stories to carpet-bomb Baghdad. Remarkably, it fell on an aged Jon Stewart, emerging from the dark memory hole of the Bush era to host a weekly episode of The Daily Show, actually to criticize Cheney and the endorsement. What Happened, indeed. The party of endless war and handjobs for the rich had, at least in rhetoric, become the party of isolationism and American manufacturing. But is this really surprising? The Democrats, once the party of the people, had long ago become the party of the PMC, the party of wealthy, educated professionals that would rather lose every election than give anything to the working class and its unenlightened worldview.

Stewart’s presence throughout this election always felt peculiar, like a repressed memory puncturing a hole in the cozy illusion that this time might be different. A few days after the election, Stewart invited historian Heather Cox Richardson onto his podcast to discuss “what’s next.” Richardson, whose political Substack generates north of 1 million dollars annually, began by insisting that Trump had won by “emphasizing things … that were not real.” Our economy, she went on, is objectively good, one of the best we’ve had since the 1960s: “Real wages for 80% of Americans have gone up,” she noted. “Income for the top 20 percent has gone down in that period. Those are generally things that most voters would like. But they don't know that. They think the economy is terrible, it's a failing economy, and that Trump is going to come in with his tariffs and save that.” The voters, in other words, are simply too stupid to know that they aren’t actually struggling.

Stewart, to his credit, pushed back on this. As he noted, we can look objectively at the markers of success—the GDP, wages, infrastructure investment—but what if you happen to still be struggling regardless, as millions of Americans certainly are? “Maybe the system that we're selling to people no longer feels valid to them,” Stewart offered. “Maybe the system itself isn't delivering in a way that we need, so then when you say, ‘This is to protect the system,’ they think, ‘Why would I protect something that's not delivering for me even when it's working properly?’”

And this is, essentially, correct. Despite the predictable litany of factors that analysts have offered to feed their never-satisfied content machine, which read like the categories in a very depressing game of Jeopardy!—racism, sexism, authoritarianism, inflation, Joe Biden, immigration, COVID, Russia, election fraud—the biggest takeaway from Trump’s continued hold on American politics is that liberalism is failing. This is especially clear when looking at the shifting polarization taking place among the electorate. In Missouri, for example, they voted both Trump and Josh Hawley into office, while also voting to protect abortion and raise the minimum wage. Indeed, in virtually every state where abortion rights were on the ballot, Harris underperformed the issue, which suggests a much larger movement of “split tickets.” Twenty years ago, this would have been unthinkable.

Certainly, it’s unthinkable to Richardson, who responded to Stewart with the bizarre claim that, Joe Biden “deconstructed” neoliberalism and “replaced [it] with a system that worked for everyone.” If that were true, which it obviously isn’t, Joe Biden would not have had an approval rating that had remained near forty percent since September 2021. If that were true, Kamala would have easily won. So much for emphasizing things that are real.

Not that it matters, of course. We’re already on to the future. We’re looking ahead to midterms, to the 2028 election, when the least popular people in politics take the stage to say nothing at all. Harris has already sent out an email kindly asking those voters who feel distressed and anxious about the 2024 election results to do one simple thing: donate to the Democratic Party. That is, in the end, what matters. That is how we will forge ahead into the dreary future. That is how we will forget about what happened.