American liberals continue to play out the five stages of grief in response to Donald Trump’s win. Rubbing their eyes the morning after, they were in denial, as Hillary Clinton waited to concede. Once reality began to set in they responded in anger. Now they appear to be in bargaining mode, trying to figure out just how little they might need to evolve – not merely to keep Trump in his box, but also to keep him from winning again.

If the pattern continues to hold, depression will soon follow when American liberals reckon with just how intractable the opposition is across the country. And acceptance, finally, might someday allow for more productive moves, to reinvent themselves beyond their loss.



“Why not secede from the union?” a colleague asked at one funereal Massachusetts gathering I attended, days after the election. Some Californians have proposed “Calexit”; in a liberal daydream, blue states could become social justice utopias were they to sever their ties to their God-fearing and gun-toting fellow citizens in the red ones. It was a classic attempt to pivot from denial and rage to seeking some way to soften the blow. Born in St Louis, Missouri, where I lived half my life, I pointed out that stranding such social justice on the coasts hardly seems, well, just. Not least when much of the revolt against American liberal elites currently under way is traceable to coastal policies, and many of thecountry’s most intractable problems, like de facto segregation in schooling or racialized mass incarceration, cut across all sections of the country.



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The most regular version of bargaining, however, has been changing the liberal brand, with a focus on messaging and optics. If too many Americans in “flyover country” will not support liberalism, this half-measure says, the problem must be a failure to sell them our candidates, if not our values. By this account, our values need not change, provided the rhetoric of politics convinces voters to punch the ballot for the Democratic party rather than the Republican one.



In the most notorious example, Mark Lilla likened trawling for voters to a fishing trip, and indicted “identity politics” as a misbegotten bait for the electoral hook. Liberals, he charged, currently yell at fellow citizens for discriminating against African Americans, gay people, and women, as if an angler at the pond could scold fish into his net. For Lilla, the remedy is to fool them more craftily by deploying a new rhetoric of American nationalism. Waving the American flag is the gist of Lilla’s approach for liberalism, as if a politics of symbolism that presents the country as unified would cover over its actual fissures.



In a similar vein, the politics professor Gerard Alexander recently opined in the New York Times that liberals continue to come off as judgmental scolds, and as a result have been “more effective at causing resentment than in getting people to come their way”. Alienating the very people with whom they need to connect – or at least attract, if liberals are going to win the next presidential election – is a colossal error. Were elites to wield their “cultural prominence” less obtrusively and offensively, this tactician recommends, victory would come to them. “Even if liberals think their opponents are backward, they don’t have to gratuitously drive people away,” Alexander advised.

But policy matters much more than politeness. The trouble with American liberalism is not the rhetoric, the selling or the advertising; it is not even the product to sell, as if politics were marketing. Rather, liberals need to forge policies that allow Americans to identify or imagine common interests. The problem is not the bait chosen to lure voters but the whole idea of politics as fishing – as if voters across the country are suckers to be lured into one camp or another. Perhaps liberals, searching for a path forward into the hearts and minds of voters, need to pay heed to Missouri’s state motto: not “rule me more nicely”, but “show me”.



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Not that it is easy to decide on the right policies, but two that stand out – in part because both have already had obvious traction with voters – are ending the endless war on terror and pushing for less economic inequality. The last two presidents of the United States have each been elected as antiwar candidates, even though each went on to govern militaristically. An antiwar coalition in the making – starting with proposals to drastically reduce America’s counterproductive use of force abroad – is likely to be powerful in future elections too. But liberals will have to give up their concessions to the national security state and their fears of coming off as unpatriotic in order to exploit this opportunity.



And Trump’s otherwise repellent white nationalism has carried with it a fair emphasis on economic stagnation and the travails of a working class left further and further behind a wealthy elite. Liberals can borrow from his playbook – in part because it has already proved successful in the unexpected breakthrough of Bernie Sanders in the last presidential campaign.

Neither of these reforms demand from liberals an abandonment or even soft-pedaling on their traditional emphasis on social justice for the excluded and oppressed. More even than “white male workers” (often cited as the principal reason for Trump’s win), it was the fact that urban African Americans failed to show up to the polls that did liberals in. In the successive elections of Barack Obama, Democrats could depend on charisma and identification to attract record numbers of African American votes. Clinton, by contrast, could run on her party’s recent policies alone, and urban African Americans were clearly not impressed. Not less emphasis on policies to counteract historic discrimination, but more, is what American liberalism needs if it is to return to power durably.