Since the election, I’ve been waiting for insight, hoping for an explanation. None has arrived. And at this point, almost a month after election day, none is likely to.

The unanswered question, the question whose answer has eluded not only me, but every pundit I’ve read, is how so many Americans – very nearly half of all voters – could cast their vote for someone so blatantly unfit to be president. Unfit not because of this or that wayward policy goal, but in the very specific sense that he lacks to this day the patriotism and honor to acknowledge defeat as readily as he claims victory and seeks petty retribution.

In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, I wrote a reaction the very next day. The result was no less painful then than now, but it was somehow more explicable. It was the result of a structural glitch in our system, I told myself, a result of the anachronistic, anti-democratic Electoral College, which allows the winner of the popular vote to nonetheless lose the presidency. It was the unintended consequence of millions of votes that weren’t actually for Trump as a person or a politician, because he was known only as TV personality and had no record in public office, but were a collective raised middle finger to the establishment narrative, and to the bland, presumptuous elitism represented by Hillary Clinton. No one expected Trump to win, because the mainstream media darling always won, so why not cast a vote for him just for the sheer hell of it? That election, we could tell ourselves, was just an accident.

We have no such excuses this time. Everyone was operating on an abundance of information, biased or not, about Trump. The electorate had lived through four years of Trump as president, and as many more of him as a constant media presence.

I didn’t expect Harris to win, but at worst I expected Trump to again thread the needle of the electoral college map and win there, narrowly, but lose, again, the popular vote. Wrong on all counts. Harris got 6.8 million fewer votes than Biden got four years ago, and Trump got 2.7 million more than he got then, beating Harris by 2.5 million votes. And this wasn’t just a big red state phenomenon: Harris received fewer votes than Biden did in 45 out of the 50 states.[1]

How to explain it? The prevailing theories are all plausible, all somehow unsatisfying: that there’s been a galvanic shift rightwards in our aging electorate, echoing a global trend; that everyone was pissed off about inflation; that everyone was pissed off about the border; that, contrary to elitist presumptions, making a country more ethnically diverse and racially polymorphous doesn’t necessarily make it more liberal; that men felt threatened by yet another female overachiever and leaned into what one conservative pundit called “virile autism”; that the bait-and-switch of Harris’s sudden ascendancy struck too many Democrats as too clever by half, and too may Republicans as the usual leftist chicanery; that Harris herself was an inadequate campaigner, too easily caricatured as a creature of box-checking identity politics, too hard to know as a person or imagine as a president.

All of the above. None of the above.

Maistre’s old bromide “every nation gets the government it deserves” springs to mind. So does the expression “buyer’s remorse.” If we’re no better than this, that a plurality of our voters believe another Donald Trump presidency is the solution to anything, then bring it on, and let us stew in it for the next four (plus) years. We picked a venal narcissist over a merely competent bureaucrat. We can now sit back and watch what most of us voted for, and they will surely get the government they deserve. As will, unfortunately, the rest of us.

But that’s both too easy and too mean-spirited.

One can try to convince oneself that there is less to this election than meets the eye, that any election is nothing but an aggregation of infinitesimal data points, a mass of often uninformed and deeply irrational choices that add up to very little in terms of content, that the vaunted “will of the people” is a myth, an illusion of the blind and dumb arithmetic of majority rule. Such is the paradox of democracy on the scale we attempt to practice it, and the occasional Trump is the penalty we pay for it.

But that too seems too easy.

Post-election analyses are almost always wrong, and talk of “mandates” is almost always self-serving claptrap. In sports we call it Monday morning overreaction. It’s wrong to conclude that Trump’s win means that the majority of the electorate wanted the inane, vindictive appointments he’s now trotting out, wanted the tariffs he’ll now impose on their groceries and clothing, wanted to sell Ukraine down the river to Putin, wanted Netanyahu to continue his Palestinian pogrom, wanted climate change to be ignored, wanted a federal judiciary and a Supreme Court composed entirely of doctrinaire originalists, wanted the federal bureaucracy to be dismantled.

The two-party system has been in long decline, and this election may have been its final death knell. Trump has already made the former GOP obsolete. Democrats couldn’t manage a timely Biden withdrawal or the democratic, orderly choice of his successor. Talk of “autopsies” implies there is a competent, objective coroner to conduct it — and there isn’t one, in either party.

Perhaps there is no role for political parties per se anymore, as their former functions have been usurped by super-PACs and social media. They had a purpose in the post-war years, when the New Deal and a war against fascism unified the nation and were enough to rally large segments of the electorate around relatively minor policy distinctions, and “the media” were confined to three broadcast networks and the Associated Press that told essentially the same story to nearly all the American people. Now our splintering into a thousand micro-factions listening to a million sources of unvetted quasi-information has rotted out the very foundations of the two-party system, not to mention electoral politics in general.

Both parties are increasingly unmoored from coherent policy agendas. Republicans are the party of fiscal conservatism and international engagement, right? Not anymore. Democrats represent the working person, marginalized ethnic groups, and identity-blind pluralism, right? Maybe once, but no more. We can be grateful there are no more smoke-filled rooms where the direction and representation of a party was determined by a few white men, but we can regret that there are no rooms at all where coherent strategies and platforms are being formulated. Instead we have a scramble of ever-shifting, short-term, media-driven tactics to retain legislative and executive power. The right is winning that battle, but it can no longer be said to constitute a “party” in the old institutional sense, and neither can the left. Perhaps we need either a brand new independent party, or to begin to think beyond parties, beyond left and right, altogether.

In the end, I believe, we’ll muddle through. Trump’s essential incompetence at the job he’s again been elected to will limit his impact more than any institutional “guardrails.” His cabinet picks and DOGE advisors will annoy and frighten his supporters almost as much as the rest of us. The vindictive pleasure of deporting immigrants will sour when labor costs rise and essential jobs go unfilled by the unambitious citizens who remain. The dismantlement of the federal bureaucracy will not sit well when social security deposits don’t arrive on time, formerly eradicated diseases spring back into virulence, public education and public radio are defunded, and the next hurricane, earthquake, pandemic, or international crisis calls for a coherent, top-down response that never comes.

But the point now, the hardest thing, is not to hope for the worst as justification of our biases, not to long for “I told you so.” The point now, the hardest thing, is to work with what we have, resist ardently and honorably where we must, applaud where worthwhile achievement happens. To watch carefully, and hope deeply, as we always have.

Sound naïve? Of course it does. We’re a stubbornly naïve people, as this election proved too well. But hopeful naïveté may serve us better than our well-earned cynicism in the fraught years to come.

[1] Source: CNN.