2016 and 2024

Eight years ago on Election Night, as the returns came in from North Carolina, where I was reporting, I made a panicked phone call to a friend. I told him that I feared the country was sliding into the hands of a demi-fascist, and that it might even be time to start considering an exit plan. My life, like those of many Black people of my generation, was shaped not by the brutality of segregation, as my parents’ lives had been, but by the success of the battles of the nineteen-fifties and sixties to uproot it. The prospect that a Presidential candidate could be embraced not only by white supremacists but also by one of the two major political parties and almost half the electorate triggered an enduring dread that the progress we had made was fragile and impermanent—and that, with the right incentives, the old order could resurrect itself in the present.

By the end of that late-night phone call, though, we had sorted through the “guardrails” theory of the various checks and precedents that would constrain Donald Trump. The advantage of the sprawling bureaucracy of the federal government is that it takes a brilliant level of orchestra-conducting to achieve anything significant—a skill set that a mercurial, chronically uninformed career real-estate developer did not likely possess. It was to be presumed that the Republican establishment, craven and increasingly reactionary but on the whole more sound than its presumptive leader, would curb Trump’s impulses, or at least dangle enough distractions in front of him to keep him from focussing for too long on any truly destructive goal. The press and the courts would be the redoubt of democracy; they were designed precisely for such a moment.

Conversations like ours took place across the country in the shocked first days and weeks after the 2016 election. The difference between those conversations and the ones that began on Tuesday night is that we can no longer rely on the guardrails theory. Unlike Trump’s first election, this one cannot be rationalized as the product of an overconfident Democratic campaign and the nihilistic pivot of around a hundred thousand voters in a handful of swing states. This time, voters in state after state decisively chose Trump, who has become more autocratic and belligerent, building a popular-vote advantage for a man now wholly unfit to hold office. He has grown more maniacal over the years, and now he is a maniac with a mandate. It is chilling to observe the landscape of possibilities before him—and us.

Journalism is as eager as it ever was to perform its essential accountability function, but it is also impaired by financial struggles, declining trust, and disruptive new technologies. More ominously, the decisions of the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to cancel their papers’ planned Presidential endorsements suggest that journalists may face complicated impediments even within these news organizations. The courts represent a more consequential and compromised situation: unlike in 2016, the federal judiciary is now stocked with more than two hundred Trump appointees, whom he selected in overtly politicized ways. And any semblance of restraint within the ranks of the G.O.P. establishment vanished long ago. In the coming Administration, the executive branch will likely be staffed by acolytes who will co-sign Trump’s worst and most random pursuits. The decision of Kamala Harris’s campaign to invest heavily in appealing to anti-Trump Republicans and to showcase Liz Cheney’s support was a product of bright-side thinking—of an optimistic belief that the ranks of the G.O.P. were not entirely lost and that at least a meaningful minority of the Party sees and understands the danger that Trump represents. That thinking was wrong.

There are other equally challenging concerns. In the years since Trump lost the last election, he launched a coup attempt, became a defendant in four criminal cases, and was convicted (so far) of thirty-four felonies. In the past few months, he has spread increasingly unhinged misinformation and racist lies, made lewd comments and gestures, and spewed offensive and obscene language. None of these actions prevented his popularity from expanding in multiple electorates across the country; they may even have facilitated it. Stunningly, Trump fared better in New York City this year than he did in 2020. The questions that confront the Democratic Party are gigantic and existential. Following the election of Barack Obama in 2008, strategists hypothesized that a new electorate was emerging, one that was forward-looking and egalitarian, comfortable with people from backgrounds different than their own. The catastrophic losses in 2016 and 2024 call this idealism into question and also highlight how wildly unlikely Obama’s success actually was. Both Hillary Clinton and Harris were eminently qualified for the Presidency, and neither ran flawless campaigns—no one does. But it is also inescapable that some portion of the blame for those losses is tied to the identities of the candidates.

The outcome of the election has also turned a new spotlight on crucial moments in the past. At the conclusion of the last election, Trump incited an attack on Congress to prevent the certification of the results, which led to him being impeached for the second time. The cowardice of Senate Republicans—who, having been evacuated from the Capitol building as a Trumpist mob advanced, nonetheless refused to convict Trump—was a catastrophic abdication that directly enabled this moment. It never should have come to this.

We will be a fundamentally different country by the end of the next Administration; indeed, we already are. Vice-President Harris, in her concession speech at Howard University on Wednesday, said, “I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time, but, for the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case.” Given what we already know about Donald Trump, it is all but certain that it will be. I awoke the morning after the election thinking not of the battles that supplanted segregation but of what people must have felt at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that enshrined it. The difficult lesson in that history is that, although further progress is possible, we should not underestimate how arduous it will be to achieve, or how long it will take. We believed that we had broken with history, but it is apparent that history has, in fact, broken some part of us. ♦