Thread by @NormOrnstein

There will be a lot of soul-searching among Democrats, as there should be. Those who criticize Joe Biden for not dropping out earlier, or Kamala Harris for her campaign, are looking in the wrong place. This was a broader rejection ofe ruling elites. 1

Including military leaders like Milley& Kelly, exemplary scientists, more broadly all connected to the federal government. I continue to believe a core is Covid, the disruptions in life caused by it and the response to it, ironically driven by the failures of Trump. 2

What Biden inherited was a broader set of problems, supply chain and others, driven by Covid, including inflation that beset every industrial democracy. That we emerged from it better and stronger than anyone else was not evident to a large swath of Americans. 3

There is no doubt that a solid percentage of our country. Men and women are perfectly happy to promote the toxic stew of authoritarian racism, misogyny & nativism. But if that were all, Harris would have won handily. 4

Plenty more understood who Trump is, and what he represents, but still voted for him, in a much broader willingness to blow up the status quo &roll the dice. I have little doubt that most of them will deeply regret this. They will have blown up their own well-being along the way. 4

We have to do everything we can both to limit the damage and to use whatever guard rails remain, however flimsy, to keep this from descending even more deeply into the abyss of autocracy. But we also have to find ways to restore public trust in responsible governing & expertise.5

If RFK Junior eviscerates the CDC and FDA, and we get another horrific pandemic, along with outbreaks of measles and polio, we have to be able to respond to limit human damage, but to make sure people understand that it is our scientist and experts doing just that. 6

If Trump and Stephen Miller proceed with the sadistic and inhuman deportation of millions sent first to detention camps, we have to do what we can to make people understand the value, economic and morally, of immigrants, the difficulty of dealing with the border in a humane fashion. 7

If tariffs and huge tax cuts for the rich create an inflationary surge and a global trade war leading to recession, we need to do more than just say we told you so, but point to policies of Biden and Obama designed to protect working class and middle class Americans. 8

If we abandon our allies as Trump creates a new alliance of the most vicious dictators on the planet, and global mayhem ensues, we need to point to the values of the modern global structure that expanded freedom and gave us many decades of peace and prosperity. 9

And we need to find ways to educate Americans in our fundamental civics, and why a genuinely democratic republic, whatever its limitations and warts, is still the best way to go. But also why, if we don’t completely lose it, we need to reform it. 10

If we end up with Trump politicizing the Justice Department , going after his enemies with show trials based on phony charges, aided and abetted by pliant judges like Aileen Cannon, we have to be able powerfully to explain why this is an abandonment of the rule of law, not anywhere close to the same as the trials in involving Trump. 11

None of this will be easy, and if it isn’t done in the right fashion, it could backfire and be seen as the same condescension to middle America by elites that got us into this awful place. It might not work, and we might be in for a long, long nightmare. 12
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But we need to start by understanding why Trump actually got a majority of popular votes. And what we can do both to preserve decency and democracy, find ways to convince voters that for all its flaws, a reliance on expertise and normal politics, remains our best path to a better country and world. 13