How Could This Happen?

Imagine that Kamala Harris had won the presidential election. In the days following, there would be two dominant sorts of commentary. The first would focus on what the victory would say about the American people and the Democratic Party: that the good people of this land had repudiated authoritarianism, had expressed our commitment to continuing to play our role in the current international order, that progressives had succeeded in building a broad coalition of people of goodwill, and that they’d cast a compelling vision for the nation’s future. The second sort of commentary would focus on the sorry state of the Republican Party: that the stewards of the party had proven too weak or too cowardly to exorcise the demon that is Donald Trump, but now that the public had refused four more years of MAGA, Republicans could at long last reorganize themselves as a respectable party again.