Keep the mourning period short, please.

Once again Democrats have failed to learn the real lessons of 2016.

Punditry and commentary about Trump’s victory are flying everywhere, so I will keep my comments very short.

I live in a small and fairly insular Hudson Valley community where about two-thirds of the voters are Democrats. There is a lot of crying going on our village, just as there was in 2016. We even have a coffee house where people can go and do it.

Liberals and “progressives” here have spent the last four years calling Trump supporters—of whom there are quite a few in our village, although they are a minority—racists and other names. In some cases, they probably are. And while not everyone who supports Trump is necessarily a racist, pretty much everyone who is a racist supports Trump. No argument there.

But even if it were true that half of the country is racist, the job of anti-racists is to expose that ideology, which works against the self-interests of most who hold to it (although not the billionaires who profit from divisions in our populace.)

How much time and effort did they put into doing that? Democrats under Joe Biden mostly kept to their own “tribe,” living under the illusion that getting out the vote was the key to keeping the presidency.

But it now turns out that calling Trumpers racists was not the path to victory in 2024. Nor was tacking to the right and going on tour with Liz Cheney. Nor was uncritically supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, or failing to speak out about it.

The result was loss of the presidency, the Senate, and presumably the House.

We have a local newspaper here called The Gazette, which is famous for its letters page. Letters are published uncut and unedited, and sometimes they are pretty long. Anyone can say anything they want to.

We had only three letters from our very “progressive” community critical of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza over the past year, and two of them were by the same person. Otherwise most in this liberal community kept silent, whatever their personal views.

There are many reasons Kamala Harris was not elected; anyone serious will realize that her uncritical support of the Biden administration’s enabling of genocide was one of them. Others include the failure of the Democratic Party to keep its promises to working people in this country.

And yet the progressive Democrats who helped elect Joe Biden in 2020, and whose ideas might have helped transform the party into a movement that could continue to win elections, were shunted aside, and told once again that they were too far left.

Funny thing, they won many of their Congressional elections, while more “moderate” Democrats lost.

How likely is it that their critiques of the Democratic Party will now become mainstream within that organization? I am doubtful, although I could be surprised.

But I think we should assume we are already on track for a Vance presidency in 2028 unless there is a radical change of thinking.

There’s nothing very original in any of these thoughts, although I know that some will disagree with them. You can read longer and more incisive analyses of Trump’s victory elsewhere. I would urge you to do so, and keep the mourning period brief.

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