What will liberalism do in the new, terrifying world the 2016 election has inaugurated? More than any other presidential election in a century, its outcome turned not on issues but on resentment and alienation. It was a vote in which anger overrode optimism, a corrosive sense of failure overrode hope and in which the very impracticality of a Donald Trump presidency proved one of his strongest drawing cards. He would not improve politics, his core supporters told interviewers. He would blow it up.

Liberals have urgent work to do to block the most reckless, punitive efforts of a Trump presidency. But liberalism must also come to terms with the fact that the base on which it has rested since the 1940s in this election fell almost completely apart. The effectiveness of the Republican party’s Southern Strategy of the late 1960s in peeling off southern white Americans was the beginning of the New Deal coalition’s breakup.



The desertion of the northern, white working class in the 2016 election, should it persist, would leave liberalism without a viable electoral base. Unless the Trump victory literally splits apart the Republican party, liberalism threatens to become a permanent minority of the educated, the bi-coastal, the urban, the nonwhite, and the poor. Despite changing demographics, national elections cannot be won on that basis alone.

Where will liberals turn? A tempting possibility will be to retrench to their territorial homelands and build there the kind of society and politics they imagine. Perhaps it is time to abandon the idea that all of America will respond to the ideas of equality, decency, inclusivity, respect, justice and care for one another to which liberals are committed. Or perhaps an awful blow-up, economic or global, will precipitate yet another momentous realignment in which liberalism, this time, emerges with the better hand.

More realistically, liberals must find ways to win back some of those who swung to Donald Trump’s camp. Populists, the press routinely calls them. But aside from their distrust of distant experts and cosmopolitan elites, Trump’s core voters have little in common politically with the People’s party of the American 1890s.

The 1890s Populists, like today’s Trump supporters, sometimes fell for terribly oversimplified answers. But the Populists hurled their political fury at the forces of organized money: the bankers, the monopolists, the railroad magnates, and the politicians who wrote the back-room deals of the money-men into law. The conviction that powers Trump voters’ imaginations is just the reverse.

Theirs is a world in which not capitalist institutions but the political establishment hogs the seats of power. In their minds, government rigs the game for its own advantages, tying up the potential expansive force of business with rules that only serve to keep the regulators in jobs and the poor as their clients. Only through this story is it possible to redirect anger at plant closings from the corporations who order them to the liberal establishment that is said to be covertly responsible.

To bring back this election’s swing voters, liberals will need to dramatically change the narrative line in these voters’ heads. They need to find new means of talking truth to the American people – sources of information that can breach the communication silos of our fractured age and return political debates to some recognizable terrain of facts. The newspaper age is virtually over. More blogposts alone will not bring its assets back.

Liberalism also needs a clearer a storyline about itself that can more effectively counter the government-is-about-to-swallow-us-all story that conservatives began honing long before Trump. That liberal narrative needs a much more vigorous sense of power. It needs a much clearer explanation of how organized money acts in modern law and politics, and how, under the cover of releasing excessive restrictions or emancipating “speech”, organized money so often prevails.

The sharp rise in inequality needs to become a permanent fixture of liberals’ program and rhetoric. But talk of inequality alone will not bring those who feel themselves outsiders in modern America back to the Democratic party. If higher taxes on the rich had been Trump voters’ core concern, Hillary Clinton would have won in a landslide. The liberal story must also be about power. It must promise change: the asset that Trump’s admirers came back to so insistently.

Above all, it must not only promise to make life better for those whom a slow-growth, globally uncertain economy has treated poorly. It must promise to hear them: to give them voice in the rooms where the experts and the college-educated now use up so much of the airspace.

Finally, with Congress in disarray and the presidency gone amok, liberals will need to turn still more of their attention to the local, the regional, and the state levels of politics. This is where the legislation and policies that affect most people’s lives originate: property taxation, police procedures, school outcomes, the fates of neighborhoods, the administration of health and social services, the meting out of criminal justice, sane gun control measures, the apportionment of legislatures, and the defense of voting rights. This is where the racism re-enabled by the Trump campaign will rear its head and must be confronted. This is where toleration and rights must be secured. This is where everyday justice is done.

Conservatives ran up a string of spectacular statehouse victories during the Obama years. If liberalism is to hold more than intermittent possession of the presidency, this is a contest it cannot concede. There is more room for democratic debate and deliberation outside Washington DC than in it, as James Fallows has recently emphasized. The fury of the national rightwing media cannot be as powerfully focused at the local level.

Counter-forces can be more effectively organized: stronger parent-teaching associations and forums, much more active dialogue between police and neighbors, strengthened socially conscious religious groups and charitable organizations, new roles for town and civic coalitions, more intensive recruitment of public-spirited candidates for state legislative office. Some of these are venues where angry Donald Trump supporters might find a more constructive voice and a less one-dimensional political message than what streams into their lives now.

Not coincidentally, it is the place where progressive politics began in the United States a little over a century ago. Cities were the seedbeds of democracy, progressives preached in the early years of the 20th century. States were heralded as laboratories of public policy. Liberal policies in the progressive era filtered up, as they still do. But presidential primary elections – costly, noisy, spectator-riveting, and emotionally wrenching – soak up almost unlimited amounts of energy.

If liberalism is to survive the kind of challenges that Trump’s voters threw at it, it will have to come back, with energy, imagination, and still greater investment, to its origin points. It will have to think and act locally as well.

This essay was first published on Democracy. This is an abridged version