Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, liberals are consoling themselves today. Maybe, they’re hoping on facebook, we can undermine the very foundation of our democracy to get the electoral college to steal the vote for Clinton! She won the popular vote! Lost in all this rationalizing is the simple fact that all around them, the Democratic Party is falling and failing. Had everything broken perfectly Clinton’s way in a handful of states, she could have won by the narrowest of margins, but that obscures the bigger picture: overwhelmingly, her losses where uniform throughout the country — compared to Obama in 2012 she lost white women and black women, poor Americans and middle class Americans (perhaps unsurprisingly, wealthy Americans swung her way). And despite the fact that our malignant-narcissist-in-chief garnered fewer votes than both Romney and McCain, Clinton was unable to convince enough Obama voters to pull the ballot for her to win, barely picking up the popular vote by running up vote totals in dark blue states viscerally offended by Donald Trump. In the states where it mattered, t0o many Obama voters went for Trump — particularly lower income white voters in the Rust Belt — while many others simply stayed home, or refused to cast a vote at the top of the ballot, like the 100,000-plus in Michigan who left the top of the ballot blank, a state Clinton lost by a little more than 10,000.

Elsewhere, Democrats lost and lost badly in both local and national races, and they’re entering an unprecedented time of powerless for the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy, a party that has won 6 of the last 7 popular votes but the electoral college in only 4 of those, while also losing control of statehouses, governor’s mansions, and congressional seats throughout the country. And yet —everywhere you look, progressive ballot initiatives are passing, even in dark red and purple states like Arkansas, Florida, Arizona, Maine, and North Dakota.

Going foward, there must be (and will be) a place within the Democratic Party for centrist-minded liberals; there are just too damn many of them for it to be any other way. But this election must also serve as a damning repudiation of the mistaken notion that the Democratic Party can survive and thrive by appealing solely to coastal whites with college degrees, and the imperiled minority voters who serve as a foil against which the Republicans stoke dangerous, hideous hatred, racism, and bigotry.

Hillary Clinton did not lose in a landslide, though losing at all to such a disgusting, clumsy, undisciplined, insane figure as Trump is a special kind of defeat. But Hillary Clinton’s party has clearly lost the mandate of the American people who have swung our most recent elections: the poor, the working class, and perhaps especially those struggling so desperately in the middle. Beyond all else, the Democrats must learn to be credible among people outside of New York and Washington D.C. This will not be easy, and cannot happen without a major reshuffling of the people who set the strategic course of the party, and of what they represent.

There will surely be a litany of smart and clever ideas to take the party of misplaced demographic destiny out of this dark age, as leftists in the media like myself see an opening to steer the desiccated corpse of the Democratic Party in a new direction. But it’s most important that we listen first to those voters who’ve come to feel so disaffected, to whom we’re so accustomed to talking at rather than listening to. I’d also suggest that the party strongly consider ways to implement a new economic and educational diversity in its leadership, and in the people it grooms for public office. Where are the people with no money in the bank, the people with no college degrees? A perfect example of the party’s strategic ineptitude — and constitutional unwillingness to be inclusive to nontraditional candidates — was most evident this cycle in the total abandonment by the Democratic leadership of Misty K. Snow, the first transgendered woman running for Congress on a major party ticket and recent grocery store cashier. Obviously, the Democratic Party and everybody else was aware that Snow had a vanishingly small chance of winning a Senate seat in super-conservative Utah. But giving her some publicity and national assistance would have signaled strongly that the party was excited to help working class millennials become agents of change in the party. It could have been a massively good piece of PR for a party that just lost the entire rustbelt, despite a confidence that led the candidate to never even bother setting foot in Wisconsin.

Why aren’t there working class people representing the Democratic Party in Congress? Why doesn’t the party recruit and foreground this kind of candidate? I’m sure I won’t always agree with the values of these individuals, but we should be looking for people who can credibly make the case for economic populism, while also speaking the language of the voters they hope to represent, and who sincerely work to listen to their concerns and defend their values. While there are plenty of obvious reasons most candidates are lawyers, businessmen, ivy league grads, and millionaires, apparently myself and plenty of my fellow Americans agree that mostly it’s just a bunch of bullshit, and these people aren’t really much more qualified than anyone else to determine the course of public policy — they’re just more arrogant, more entitled, and have a bigger vocabulary of fancy bullshit words. (Anecdotally I know a bunch of kids who went to Ivy League schools, and a whole lot of them were idiots.)

In the retrospect of this election it should be obvious that rampant, unchecked income inequality mixed with a faux meritocracy will breed a visceral, deep-seated dissent. Every single person who heard Trump’s plea to “Make America Great Again” and thought smugly “America Is Already Great” probably lives in one of the cities or areas where rampant income inequality has led to a restoration of the pre-crash prosperity. In cases like Boston, NYC, San Francisco and D.C., an even greater level of prosperity has been achieved, a revival not seen in a generation — but only if you can afford it. Elsewhere, residents living in the wreckage of globalization have to tread water twice as hard just to keep their heads above the surface. Obviously I’m not the first to make these points, and lest they be seen as an apologia to Trump or his voters, fuck all that noise. People who vote for racists endorse racism. But while the first instinct is to lash out, to shame and castigate these people, shouldn’t we ask ourselves if this is an effective political strategy? If this behavior will help us accomplish our ambition of a more reasonable, inclusive, compassionate opposition? Remember: Trump got fewer votes than McCain and Romney. Trump didn’t win this election, Clinton and the Democrats lost it.

I don’t have the answer here, but I will note that this election seemed to present the limits of identity politics as a mainstream political platform. Working class white voters felt imperiled, abused, mocked, ignored, and disrespected, and they did what groups who feel themselves to be in the minority have done in this country for generations: they voted as a bloc, for someone who promised explicitly to represent their interests. That working class whites make up 40% of the population, an almost insurmountable bloc if this voting pattern were to hold, should only further serve as an ominous warning to liberals of the shape of things to come if they succumb to the sanctimonious desire to return to the self-satisfying well of academic discourse policing. Trump’s election has shown that the ultimate correctness of these issues is functionally irrelevant if they actively turn voters against their advocates — and to be clear, I believe strongly in racial justice, and I believe that white supremacy is a malignant tumor lurking within the American body politic. The bitter irony here is that this same white supremacy is now in ascent thanks in part to a colossal and eminently avoidable strategic mistake: liberals must stop smugly casting all working class whites as the racist enemies of human progress. It doesn’t matter if it feels good, it doesn’t matter if it’s true, and it doesn’t matter what Trump and his supporters have done. Will it win votes? Will it persuade those who are persuadable but undecided? Or will it alienate, vilify, ostracize? I’d say this election has given us our answer.