Hello, you're listening to the London Review of Books podcast, and I'm your host, Adam Shatz.

On Tuesday, November 5th, Donald Trump became the first

Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote and the electrical college. It was a

crushing defeat for Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, one that has unleashed a ferocious

blame game among Democrats. In one of the sharpest rebukes,

Bernie Sanders said that the American working class had abandoned the Democratic Party because

the Democratic Party had abandoned them. That's the view of a left economic populace. The view

Sanders has articulated eloquently throughout his career, but there are other diagnoses of what went

wrong for the Democrats, other explanations behind Donald Trump's victory, his return to power

for a second term, and the future of Democratic Party politics will in large part depend

on how the party interprets its defeat in the coming years.

A wave of sorrow, anxiety, and near desperation has gripped Blue America, terrified at the prospect

of an unabashedly authoritarian, demagogic president coming to power this time with hardly

any restraints, a man who is impervious to inhibition and whose followers

have cheered on his most destructive impulses. A man who, let us recall, is a convicted felon,

an abuser of women, and the instigator of an attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021.

In conceding defeat, Kamala Harris did something we can be sure Trump would not have done if he had lost to her. To make sense of these developments, I'll be speaking with two experts on the American political scene, Jamel Bowie, a columnist for the New York Times and Deborah Friedel, who frequently comments on U.S. politics for the London Review of Books.

Thanks for joining me. Thank you for having us. Let's start with the blame game. What happened

on November 5th, and who's to blame? Was this a victory for Trump or a defeat for Kamala Harris

and the Democratic Party, or both? A lot of explanations have been advanced for Trump's win.

Some have emphasized anger over inflation, immigration, wokeism, others a deep-seated racism

and sexism that worked against Kamala Harris.

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