The morning after Donald Trump was first elected president, in 2016, the White House was a funereal place. For weeks, Barack Obama and his inner circle had been worried about Hillary Clinton’s campaign: the failure to visit crucial battleground states often enough, the smug joke about “deplorables,” the last-minute letter from James Comey to Congress about his emails. But despite all the worrying signs and missteps, they were optimistic that, in a race closer than expected, the United States would elect its first woman to the presidency. A legacy, a continuity, would prevail.

Trump’s shocking victory shattered those assumptions, and that day, as many young, distraught staffers crowded into the Oval Office, Obama tried to boost their morale and convince them that the election of a would-be autocrat did not mean the end of the long, if profound, US policy. imperfect, experiment in liberal democracy. History does not advance in a straight line, he told them. Sometimes it goes to the side and sometimes backwards. It was a solemn, pastoral performance, and on some level Obama also engaged in a form of self-soothing. Two days later, in an interview with The New YorkerHe tried again to keep despair at bay: “I believe that nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.”

Privately, Obama, the first black man elected to the White House, allowed himself to wonder if he had “arrived too soon.” A generational political talent, he had used the resonant language and narrative of the civil rights movement (“the fierce urgency of now”) to promote broad-based reforms, particularly the Affordable Care Act. Their residence in a house built by enslaved black men and women seemed to suggest, if not an end to American racism, a significant advance for the idea of ​​multiethnic democracy. But now he was being succeeded by a figure of unequivocal reaction: a poisonous demagogue, a bigot, who proposed a very different American history. The system was “rigged,” Trump told his supporters. Foreign leaders “laughed at us.” The country was a hell of sinister “illegal aliens”, “rapists”, gang members and psychotics from distant prisons and asylums. His assessment of the country was “American carnage,” and only he could fix things.

Shortly before the end of Obama’s second term, the President was in Lima, Peru, being taken to an event with some of his aides. Along the way, he confided that he had just read an op-ed that suggested that by electing Trump, tens of millions had rejected liberal identity politics. “What if we were wrong?” Obama said. “Perhaps we went too far,” he continued, according to the memoirs of one of his advisors, Benjamin Rhodes. “Maybe people just want to get back to their tribe.”

In 2016, Trump’s election could be attributed to many things, including a failure of the collective imagination. How had a figure who combined the traits of George Wallace, Hulk Hogan and Father Charles Coughlin managed to win the presidency? Just as Obama struggled to understand the social and political roots of Trumpism, many Americans failed to fully understand his character, the dimensions of his malevolence. They found it impossible to assimilate the threat he posed to international alliances and national institutions, how contemptuous he was of truth, science, the press and so many of their fellow citizens. Surely his most extreme rhetoric was an act. Surely it would “grow until it reached the office.”

Trump’s re-election, his victory over Kamala Harris, can no longer be attributed to a failure of the collective imagination. He is the least mysterious living public figure; He has been announcing each of his disturbing tendencies, relentlessly, publicly, for decades. Who is left, supporter or detractor, who does not recognize, at least to some extent, their cynicism and division, their lack of respect for selfless sacrifice? To him, fallen American soldiers are “stupid.” Many of his former closest advisers: Vice President Mike Pence; his chief of staff, John Kelly; Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been described as unfit, unstable and, in the case of Kelly and Milley, fascist. In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump did his best to dismiss his advisers’ flattery to moderate his tone. Instead, he pretended to perform fellatio on a microphone and threatened to lead the army against the “enemy within.” He emphasized every unpleasant aspect of himself, as if to say, Forget the teleprompter script. Listen to me when I get careless. Conspiracy theories. The fury. Revenge Racial harassment. The embrace of Putin and Orbán and Xi. The wild stories. This is me, the real me. I’m a genius. I’m knitting!

In the end, there was nothing Trump didn’t say, no invective or insult he didn’t hurl. At Madison Square Garden, he gave the platform to his followers who spoke grotesquely about Puerto Rico, Jews and trans people: no indecency was inadmissible. His most characteristic television advertisement was pure cruelty: “Kamala is for them. President Trump is for you.” His disdain for women, which has been evident throughout his adult life, was only amplified in the final weeks of the campaign, when, in Michigan, he said of Nancy Pelosi: “She’s an evil, sick, crazy bi. It starts with a ‘B’, but I won’t say it. “I want to say it.”

Trump was equally brash on policy. There is no longer an excuse not to see what a second Trump administration can bring: the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. A federal government full of mediocrities whose highest qualification is loyalty to the Great Leader. A disregard for climate policy, human rights and gun control. A weakening of NATO. An even more reactionary Supreme Court and federal judiciary. An assault on the press. These are not the imaginations of a paranoid. These are campaign promises announced from the podium.

The news of Trump’s re-election did not cause the same shock as his first victory. Joe Biden, for all his virtues and legislative achievements, was a notoriously unpopular president. At least fifty-five percent of voters in key swing states disapproved of his performance in office. And, when Biden accepted age and finally stepped aside, Harris, for all her energy and attractive intelligence, had very little time to run a campaign that could reasonably overcome both that dissatisfaction and her opponent. Caught between her loyalty to Biden and the need to separate herself from him, she played it safe and depended on the electorate’s ability to distinguish between her manifest decency and the dark chaos that Trump represented.

Despite her drubbing of Trump in their only debate, and her campaigning at times like a disturbed man wandering from rally to rally, Harris’ prospects of winning were never more than episodically encouraging. When his assistants were asked how they felt about the race, they responded, “Nauseously optimistic.” In the end, Trump appears not only to have won the popular vote and all seven battleground states, but to have made gains among Latino and black men large enough to shatter the Democratic Party’s long-standing and highly complacent understanding of its advantages. demographics.

How the cascade of reasons for Trump’s re-election is interpreted and prioritized is a kind of Rorschach test. It will take a long analysis before anyone can conclude which of the main factors (economic anxiety, cultural politics, racism, misogyny, Biden’s decline, Harris’ late start) was decisive. In no way did Trump win a mandate as imposing as, say, Ronald Reagan’s victories over Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Walter Mondale in 1984, but, according to an initial analysis of the Timesmore than ninety percent of the country’s counties appear to have shifted toward him since the last election. The two main political parties are bankrupt. Republicans, having given themselves over to sectarian obedience to an authoritarian, are morally destroyed. Democrats, having failed to respond convincingly to workers’ economic problems, are politically bankrupt.

Anyone who realizes with due alarm that this is a deeply dangerous moment in American life should think carefully about where we are. Sad reflections like those of Obama in 2016 (What if we were wrong?) were barely useful then and will not be enough now. With self-critical rigor and modesty, Democrats must evaluate how to recover the kind of inclusive coalition that FDR built in the midst of the Depression or that Robert Kennedy (the father, not the unfortunate son) sought in 1968.

That is an imperative. There is another. After the tens of millions of Americans who feared Trump’s return rise from the couch of sadness, it will be time to consider what should be done, assuming Trump delivers on his most draconian promises. One of the dangers of life under an authoritarian government is that the leader seeks to drain the strength of the people. Defeatism takes hold. There is a need to distance oneself from civic life.

An American retreat from liberal democracy – a precious but vulnerable heritage – would be a calamity. Indifference is a form of surrender. Indifference to mass deportations would be a sign of abnegation of one of the nation’s guiding promises. Vladimir Putin welcomes Trump’s return not only because it makes his life much easier in his determination to subjugate a free and sovereign Ukraine, but because it validates his claim that American democracy is a sham, that there is no democracy. The only thing that matters is power and self-interest. The rest is prudery and hypocrisy. Putin reminds us that liberal democracy is not a permanence; It can become an episode.

One of the great spirits of modern times, the Czech playwright and dissident Václav Havel, wrote in “Summer Meditations”: “There is only one thing I will not admit: that there may be no point in trying hard for a good cause.” During the long Soviet domination of his country, Havel fought bravely for liberal democracy, inspiring other acts of resilience and protest. He was jailed for that. Then came a time when things changed, when Havel was elected president and, in a reverse Kafka tale, inhabited Prague Castle. Together with a people challenged by years of autocracy, he helped lead his country out of a long, dark time. Our time is dark now, but that too can change. It happened somewhere else. It can happen here.