I spent the years after the financial crisis reporting in parts of the country that were being ravaged by the Great Recession and the long decline that had preceded it, and were growing hostile toward the country’s first Black president. Three things recurred everywhere I went: a conviction that the political and economic game was rigged for the benefit of distant elites; a sense that the middle class had disappeared; and the absence of any institutions that might have provided help, including the Democratic Party. It was hard to miss the broken landscape that lay open for Trump, but the establishments of both parties didn’t see it, and neither did most of the media, which had lost touch with the working class. The morning after Trump’s shocking victory in 2016, a colleague approached me angrily and said, “Those were your people, and you empowered them by making other people feel sorry for them—and it was wrong!”

In some ways, the Biden administration and the Harris campaign tried to reorient the Democratic Party back toward the working class, which was once its backbone. Biden pursued policies and passed legislation to create jobs that don’t require a college degree in communities that have been left behind. Harris studiously avoided campaigning on her identity as a Black and South Asian woman, appealing instead to a vague sense of patriotism and hope. But Biden’s industrial policy didn’t produce results fast enough to offset the damage of inflation—no one I talked with in Maricopa County, Arizona, or Washington County, Pennsylvania, this year seemed to have heard of the Inflation Reduction Act. Harris remained something of a cipher because of Biden’s stubborn refusal to step aside until it was too late for her or anyone else to make their case to Democratic voters. The party’s economic policies turned populist, but its structure—unlike the Republican Party’s mass cult of personality—appeared to be a glittering shell of power brokers and celebrities around a hollow core. Rebuilding will be the work of years, and realignment could take decades. …

The Trump Reaction will test opponents with a difficult balancing act, one that recalls F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line about a first-rate intelligence holding two opposed ideas in mind while still being able to function. The Democratic Party has to undertake the necessary self-scrutiny that starts with the errors of Biden, Harris, and their inner circle, but that extends to the party’s long drift away from the most pressing concerns of ordinary Americans, toward the eccentric obsessions of its donors and activists. But this examination can’t end in paralysis, because at the same time, the opposition will have to act. Much of this action will involve civil society and the private sector along with surviving government institutions—to prevent by legal means the mass internment and deportation of migrants from communities in which they’ve been peacefully living for years; to save women whose lives are threatened by laws that would punish them for trying to save themselves; to protect the public health from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s security from Tulsi Gabbard, and its coffers from Elon Musk. …

On Election Night, in a state carried by Trump, Deluzio outperformed Harris in his district, especially in the reddest areas, and won comfortably. What does this prove? Only that politics is best when it’s face-to-face and based on respect, that most people are complicated and even persuadable, and that—in the next line from the Fitzgerald quote—one can “see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”