The first real lesson of the election is that whales don’t get cancer because the cancers get cancer before they get big enough to kill the whale1.
Put another way, the ideals of the modern left are very bad for society, because they obstruct effective organisation by encouraging disruptive behaviour, allow corruption by removing personal responsibility, and assign people to functions based on identity rather than ability.
However, a political movement also is a society, and those ideals are not only destructive to society, they are destructive to the political movement that advances them.
Trump could easily have been beaten by a good candidate. A below-average career democrat like Biden was able to beat him (OK, maybe that was fraud. I don’t know. The fact that there was a somewhat even national swing towards Trump compared with 2020 suggests possibly not, to me)
Trump talked about running for president for decades, but he didn’t do it until 2016 because he couldn’t win. He beat Clinton in 2016 and Harris now, because they were bad candidates who got the nomination through a combination of corruption and diversity ideology.
If you can’t say that a bad candidate is bad, if she is a woman or a minority or both, then you will necessarily get bad candidates. If you are corrupt, then you will get bad candidates through corruption rather than good candidates on their merits. If you do not hold people responsible, your staff will spend campaign money on meeting their favourite pop stars rather than on getting votes.
The Democratic Party has poisoned itself with the same poisons that it poisons the country with.
The catch, of course, is that the Republican Party is not much better. It wasn’t only the Democratic opposition that was so unusually weak in 2016 that Trump could beat it. Perhaps the Republican party is less captured by its own bureaucracy, and their third-rate candidates were not so vulnerable to maverick outsiders appealing to the primary electorate against the party machine? Sanders had his own popularity, but he was more effectively nobbled than Trump was, although at least as much effort was devoted to nobbling Trump. On top of their corruption and diversity ideology, the Democratic Party’s bureaucracy and authoritarinism undermined its ability to select an electable candidate.
I think this is also a big part of the mechanism of one of the big questions of our age, “Why did politics go insane?”
As mass media became more appealing — newspapers to radio to television to social media — what Americans call the “ground game” of politics became less important. The parties of the 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries were really serious organisations, with millions of members, regular meetings, publications, social events, and fully organised and directed for campaigning. People who were heavily into politics lived and breathed this organisation. Today you can be important in politics by making memes on social media, and have no idea of what goes into creating and maintaining an organisation the size of a 1950s political party. Thousands of people can evolve ideologies on Twitter or Tumblr and never notice that those ideologies are a complete barrier to getting anything done in the outside world.
However, the organisations are still important to the process of selecting candidates, even with America’s primary system. And what just happened was that an organisation made disfunctional by anti-organisation ideology picked a terrible candidate.