THE END OF DEMOCRATIC DELUSIONS

The Trump Reaction and what comes next

- GEORGE PACKER

The Roosevelt Republic-the progressive age that extended social welfare and equal rights to a widening circle of Americans endured from the 1930s to the 1970s. At the end of that decade, it was overthrown by the Reagan Revolution, which expanded individual liberties on the strength of a conservative free-market ideology, until it in turn crashed against the 2008 financial crisis. The era that followed has lacked a convincing name and a clear identity. It's been variously called the post-post-Cold War, post-neoliberalism, the Great Awokening, and the Great Stagnation. But the 2024 election has shown that the dominant political figure of this period is Donald Trump, who, by the end of his second term, will have loomed over American life for as long as Franklin D. Roosevelt's dozen years as president. We are living in the Trump Reaction. By the standard of its predecessors, we're still at the beginning.

This new era is neither progressive nor conservative. The organizing principle in Trump's chaotic campaigns, the animating passion among his supporters, has been a reactionary turn against dizzying change, specifically the economic and cultural transformations of the past half century: the globalization of trade and migration, the transition from an industrial to an information economy, the growing inequality between metropolis and hinterland, the end of the traditional family, the rise of previously disenfranchised groups, the "browning" of the American people.

Trump's basic appeal is a vow to take power away from the elites and invaders who have imposed these changes and return the country to its rightful owners the real Americans. His victory demonstrated the appeal's breadth in blue and red states alike, among all ages ethnicities, and races.

TRUMP VOTERS DON'T THINK HE WILL DESTROY DEMOCRACY; THEY THINK HE'LL RESTORE IT TO THE PEOPLE.