November 6, 2024 7:11 AM
The 2024 election will be discussed from a million angles. In the days and weeks ahead, the knives will come out in the ranks of the losers. Post-mortems will be written, and the arguments will be fought out over what could have been different or which strategies should have been tried. The data will be analyzed and over-analyzed.
All that will be necessary and very interesting because the very foundations of the two major-party coalitions have been shaken and the tectonic plates of American politics have shifted. However, we shouldn’t forget the singular fact of the 2024 election: Donald Trump has just completed the most remarkable political comeback in American history.
He arrived on the partisan political scene not more than 15 years ago. But in that short time, Trump has decisively closed the Obama era in American politics, which began with what many on the left thought was a permanent realignment in 2008. With his reelection in 2024, Trump has defeated Barack Obama’s successor’s successor and his ideological heir, Kamala Harris. I think it’s fair to say that Trump has also, in a second try, defeated Joe Biden by forcing him out of the race last summer. Trump has now — twice! — climbed the Blue Wall and dismantled the Obama coalition in the crucible of a general election.
Neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party will be the same going forward — even if, no, there is nothing permanent about any of the so-called “permanent” realignments in our politics.
In Shift From 2020, Identity Politics Loses Its Grip on the Country
There are signs that society is moving away from the progressive left’s often strict expectations about how to discuss culture and politics. —NYT
This election, many Democrats and progressive U.S. institutions have backed away from some of the identity politics rhetoric and far-left policies they embraced in the last election because of backlash to these ideologies, leaving the country a “starkly different place from four years ago,” reporter Jeremy Peters wrote in his new analysis published Saturday.
The report highlighted how Democratic candidates who’ve pushed progressive policies have “fared poorly in many high-profile races, even in deep blue bastions” like Seattle and Portland… More
How Leftists Reacted to Trump Win
As it looked increasingly likely that Donald Trump would once again become president, liberals once again had trouble grappling with that possibility.
Here’s some of the most telling reactions.
David Corn, Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones, suggested that Russia had intervened. (Yes, Russia collusion is already back. Which side is the one about conspiracy theories, again?)….
MSNBC’s Joy Reid joined in racism speculation…
And on his so-called “Fascism”
“We talked ABOUT MAGA. We didn’t talk TO them“
“So much for Kamala Harris’s vibes, joy, optimism and Hollywood smile. America has rejected the sale.
Four years ago, a victorious Joe Biden wrote off Donald Trump as an “aberrant moment”. Given that Trump has a fair chance of winning the popular vote, in addition to the US’s electoral college, history will surely now award that designation to Biden. Trump, after all, is among the most-known and highly investigated nominees in US history. To elect him once may have been an accident; to do so twice came with eyes wide open. Trump is legitimately the next president of the United States. Trump’s re-election is an existential disaster for Democrats. It is also a historic game-changer for the US’s allies. Democratic recriminations will come thick and fast. Any postmortem will surely highlight the fact that a visibly ailing Biden waited far too long to relinquish his party’s nomination. Had Biden bowed out six months earlier, Democrats would have had time to find a better prospect than Harris. Perhaps having a real primary contest would have made no difference.
— Irish Times
Irish Times on Trump’s Extraordinary Mandate
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Feser continues on IVF: “IVF need not involve the discarding of “spare” embryos, but it commonly does. Morally speaking, the discarding of such embryos is no less a violation of the right to life than late-term abortion. And it’s far more common than late-term abortion.”
+ See More on the Immorality of IVF
Catholic Critique 