The Morning After

Win or lose, we still have a democracy that is becoming harder to keep.

Illustration by New Rules Media and DALL-E.

“The power of the people won’t simply disappear overnight just because somebody we didn’t vote for wins the White House. Democracy lives in the people, and as long as people hang onto that, democracy will be hard to kill.”

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NEW YORK— Elections matter. And this one really does. What does it say about our country?

Just before midnight last night, in case you missed it, everything about Kamala Harris’s final campaign rally in Philadelphia was meant to frame today’s election as a historic referendum on American democracy. By staging her final closing argument for the presidency in Philadelphia, the birthplace of our nation—and at the city’s iconic “Rocky Steps” —a visual metaphor to underscore her position as an underdog rising to a great challenge—the Democratic nominee told the crowd of an estimated 20,000 that a vote for her would be about healing versus hate and the opportunity to resist fascism and build a healthier democracy. “We’re in this together,” she said to cheers of “Yes She Can!” Harris continued: “This could be one of the closest races in our history as a nation, so voting matters. … The momentum is on our side! We will win!”

Just after midnight tonight, Harris lost. Both Harris and Trump supporters had said they were convinced their candidates would win—and that if they didn't, the consequences for America would be existential.

Sure, Harris ran a terrific campaign and visionary ground game. [It’s already a case study soon to be published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review about how to build a successful, nation-wide, digital-first awareness campaign in just under 100 days.] But it wasn’t enough; the post mortems will continue for weeks. Trump’s White House win was definitive. Republicans also won a majority in the Senate; the House is still too close to call.

So what happens now? Will democracy also be seen as having lost?

A ‘Movement Moment’

In 2016, when Donald Trump won his election to the White House the first time, the morning-after shock waves also were intense. I remember waiting in my company's conference room for eight people to show up for a long-scheduled strategy meeting on an unrelated topic. Only one person showed up—marketing colleague Arabella Meyer. The rest emailed their multiple regrets—about the election, not just for skipping the meeting. Arabella hung out for a while to share the shockwaves, but mostly we just looked out the window of my office at Bryant Park. It was raining. Nobody was in the park; very few people were out on the street, normally one of the busiest in the heart of Manhattan.

But then, in the weeks and months which followed, Trump's surprise victory was met with a groundswell of small-d democratic energy. There were marches in the streets, record-breaking donations to pro-democracy nonprofits, and waves of grassroots organizing, compelling fellow writer/editor Micah Sifry (Substack editor of The Connector] to declare that "we're in a movement moment."

And for a while, the energy wasn't emerging only from the "liberal" resistance movements. Conservatives launched their own political groups and responses. According to Atlantic writer Franklin Foer, the warnings back then of impending autocracy in America at the time "helped propel a spirit of loud, uncompromising opposition to Trump."  Writes the Atlantic writer McKay Coppins: "That energy contributed to record-high turnout in the 2020 election, when Trump was defeated. To many people outside of the MAGA coalition, Joe Biden's victory had represented a triumphant climax in the narrative of the Trump era. And had the one-term, twice-impeached President simply receded into a Mar-a-Lago exile, the story might have ended with a tidy civic moral: An aspiring authoritarian was vanquished in the most American way possible—at the ballot box. Democracy wins again."

But the story didn't end there, and here we are, four years later - in another reality. The worries about shifting closer toward autocracy have been heightened with Trump's recent, more explicit, un-democratic plans, including talk of weaponizing the Justice Department against his political enemies, banning the journalists he doesn't like from covering him and replacing thousands of civil servants in Washington with loyalists -- people who won't object to whatever he requests of them.

And so the question remains. Will the surge of mass resistance that followed Trump's shocking victory in 2016 be repeated again now, after Donald Trump’s win again tonight?

Insights from our #NR Network

I asked a variety of well-known thought leaders in our New Rules network before the polls closed: Will democracy be seen as being lost if Trump wins, or will it be, as it was in 2016, a catalyst for new forms of resistance, resilience and activism?

And the short answer? "Rain or shine, we're still going to be in a democracy," says Documentary filmmaker and historian Ken Burns.  "It won't go away any time soon—but now if we wish to keep it in the coming year or two or three, we've got to fight back harder—much harder, regardless of who wins. And not with talk, but with widespread action to strengthen the rule of law in our legal system, our election systems, improve the breadth of media coverage to more fairly represent this country's growing multiracial, multigenerational citizenry, and much else."

Here are some other insights from our network about what happened, early lessons—and what’s now and next:

• American historian Heather Cox Richardson: “We all had hope that Americans had heard how bad things would be under Donald Trump and would decide, even it they didn’t like the policies of Harris-Walz, to vote for them, instead. But they did not, and there are many lessons. The biggest one, to me, is that we’re in a swirl of disinformation. The right wing emphasized to ordinary Americans that they had things to fear that were not real, and erased the things are are real—so that those who voted for Trump really, truly voted for things that were the opposite of what they said their wanted, and this will be a real problem going forward. I mean, objectively, our economy is fabulous, the best economy we have seen since the 1960s. Real wages for 80% of Americans have gone up; income for the top 20% have gone down in that period. That is generally what most voters would like, but they don’t know that. They think the economy is terrible, a failing economy, and that Trump is going to come in with his tariffs and save that, but every economist will say that’s exactly backward. I think we have to grapple with the fact that many Americans have been put into a position of something that a lot of political theorists, especially those coming out of Russia, call political technology— which is that you can get people to vote away their democracy and to vote for the people they are told to vote for, so long as you can create a false world for them to believe in. And to a large extent, that’s one of the things that happened here.”

• NYU professor and expert on disinformation, Ruth Ben-Ghiat. "We have been operating from a dated playbook that does not reflect the realities of our times and has led to overly cautious and inconsistent responses to flagrant violations of international law and foreign, national and transnational influence operations. If we are going to realize the promise of democracy as a political system based on the values of accountability, transparency, equitable justice and solidarity and reign in bad actors out to destroy a democratic international order based on humanitarianism and the rule of law, U.S. foreign and national security and defense policies will need a revision. Harris-Walz have been for this as a democratic value.”

• Civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund:  “We are here now, in this kind of election, because our democracy is not healthy. What are the non-negotiables that we share about our democracy? We’re a multi-racial democracy now, and it’s not an easy thing. We’re going to disagree with each other about a lot of stuff but if we’re going to be a country and a democracy, we will need to have fundamental values on which we all agree. For example, a peaceful transfer of power is not negotiable. That is not a partisan issue. Democracy and our country thrives when all people have a voice. So I think on the other side of this election, we will need to do a real forensic examination of our systems to understand how we got here so we don’t get here again. Democratic institutions, our political system, media, academia, the legal profession— we all have shortcomings in all of our institutions that undergird our democracy. There are cracks now in democracy’s foundations. Do we paint over those cracks or do we commit now to doing some deeper work? I think in this election year, especially, there’s been a wake-up call and that’s exactly what we need is this kind of accounting to make our democracy work better and be stronger.”

• American historian Michael Beschloss:  “I think Donald Trump meets most of the parts of the definition of what constitutes a fascist. You go through American history and you cannot find another major party nominee and candidate who promised to be a dictator for a day, to suspend the rule of law, possibly terminate the Constitution, and pit the U.S. Army against domestic political enemies. We’ve never had anything like this, so anyone who tries to normalize this election, this is one of the kind we’ve never seen before in American history. …This is as much a turning point in my view as the elections held in 1860 (Civil War) and 1940, when we were deciding not just whether to fight fascists in Europe, but whether to adopt fascism at home. There were those voices who said back then that democracy was outmoded. Charles Lindbergh’s wife, Anne, wrote a book that said democracy does not work anymore. But neither of these voices were a major party’s presidential nominee who just won the presidency, and did it again.”

• Evan Osnos, writer for The New Yorker.  "What if we were wrong about our country's appetite or its readiness for a multiethnic democracy? Part of what had been hanging in the balance with this election is the conviction that if Kamala Harris were to win, then it would be Donald Trump who would be the strange parenthesis in American history rather than Barack Obama."

Tomorrow

For now, regardless, don't lose sight of where we’ve been and the possibilities still ahead.

We've been a rough-and-tumble experiment for nearly 250 years, we're in a vastly different media ecosystem today and it's not the same world many of us lived in just a few decades ago. But so far, our democracy has held. For many of us, this experiment in democracy now faces another critical test. For many others of us, this experiment is still just getting started.

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Got some thoughts before the polls close? We'll be writing more about what's next in the coming days, weeks and months, and with your input about what's next. Vote today but also share your thoughts. Regardless of who you vote(d) for, we're in this together.

NOTE: This piece was updated to reflect some new and updated responses from some in our network to Donald Trump’s win, the morning after.