“But viewing Gaza’s political repercussions merely through the lens of identity misses something fundamental. Over the past year, Israel’s slaughter and starvation of Palestinians — funded by U.S. taxpayers and live-streamed on social media — has triggered one of the greatest surges in progressive activism in a generation. Many Americans roused to action by their government’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction have no personal connection to Palestine or Israel. Like many Americans who protested South African apartheid or the Vietnam War, their motive is not ethnic or religious. It is moral.”But viewing Gaza’s political repercussions merely through the lens of identity misses something fundamental. Over the past year, Israel’s slaughter and starvation of Palestinians — funded by U.S. taxpayers and live-streamed on social media — has triggered one of the greatest surges in progressive activism in a generation. Many Americans roused to action by their government’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction have no personal connection to Palestine or Israel. Like many Americans who protested South African apartheid or the Vietnam War, their motive is not ethnic or religious. It is moral.”

“Surely, many young and Black voters were dissatisfied with the economy. Some may have been attracted to Mr. Trump’s message on immigration. Others may have been reluctant to vote for a woman. But these broader dynamics do not fully explain Ms. Harris’s underperformance, because she appears to have lost far less ground among voters who are older and white. Her share of white voters equaled Mr. Biden’s. Among voters over age 65, she actually gained ground.”

“All this provided Mr. Trump an opportunity. According to The Times, his campaign found that undecided voters in swing states were about six times as likely as other swing-state voters to be motivated by the war in Gaza. Mr. Trump wooed them. He pledged to help “the Middle East return to real peace” and lambasted former Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican with whom Ms. Harris had chosen to campaign, as a “radical war hawk.” Like Richard Nixon, who in 1968 appealed to antiwar voters by promising “an honorable end to the war in Vietnam,” Mr. Trump portrayed himself — however insincerely — as the candidate of peace.”

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posted by f.sheikh

“It’s happened. And it’s bad. America has elected as president a man who doesn’t really bother hiding his authoritarianism. Again. It is alarming. And yet to give way to alarmism at a time like this is a mistake. If American democracy is to survive the test of the next four years—and no, that is not a given—it will be because we’ve understood clearly what this moment means.

To those of us raised to revere constitutional democracy, seeing millions of people line up to vote to weaken constitutional democracy will always be upsetting. Yet in voting for a candidate who promised to use the repressive power of the state to persecute and punish his political opponents, who refused to accept a previous election defeat and rails against the notion that anything lies outside the president’s powers, tens of millions of Americans have just done precisely that. It feels inexplicable.

But it isn’t.

Political scientists have thought carefully about the kind of situation we’re in. Back in 2011, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, who just won the Nobel Prize in Economics, wrote a paper together with Ragnar Torvik titled “Why Do Voters Dismantle Checks and Balances?” that doubles as a Rosetta Stone to our political moment.

Acemoglu, Robinson and Torvik built a model to show there are circumstances where it is rational for voters to prefer leaders who reject democratic institutions. This doesn’t normally happen in well-functioning democracies. But where unelected elites have outsized power, checks and balances can function to hem politicians in, preventing them from enacting policies a majority of voters want. In those circumstances, voters can rationally interpret a leader’s disdain for democratic institutions as a feature, not a bug: checks and balances come to be seen as the eggs you have to crack to make the democratic omelet.  “

“If the American polity isn’t going to break apart completely over the next four years, it’s important for everyone to accept Trump voters as rational actors. Acemoglu, Robinson and Torvik theorize that voters can come to see even the corruption that their preferred candidate is sure to engage in as a price worth paying for the enactment of policies that have no chance otherwise. The calculus Trump’s supporters have made may be appalling, it may be reckless—surely it is—and it may spectacularly backfire.

But irrational it is not.”

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Never underestimate the power of anger of being dismissed as irrelevant. That is the grave mistake Democratic leadership, Biden, and Harris made and arrogantly dismissed Arab Americans as irrelevant and refused to give an inch on their genocidal Gaza policy. They thought Arab Americans, like Blacks and Latino, have no place else to go and in the end will come back home. In this election, Blacks and Latino voters also had enough for being taken for granted for decades, and started deserting Democratic party.

Democratic Leadership and Harris moved away from the winning coalition of minorities, championed by Obama, and instead cared for only one constituent-Israeli Lobby, at the expense of everyone else and every other cause-and spent our hard earned tax dollars to fund the genocide in Gaza. Democratic Leadership, Biden, and Harris brought this humiliating defeat upon themselves at the hands of most flawed and profane candidate-Donald Trump.

 Unfortunately, it is not the end of Democratic Party’s problems, as there will be future elections, both at federal and local level, and many constituents who deserted Democratic Party, may never come back.

Excerpts from article; Donald Trump is returning to the White House, and while this will not change what most critics think of him, it should compel them to take a close look in the mirror. They lost this election as much as Mr. Trump won it.

This was no ordinary contest between two candidates from rival parties: The real choice before voters was between Mr. Trump and everyone else — not only the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, and her party, but also Republicans like Liz Cheney, top military officers like Gen. Mark Milley and Gen. John Kelly (also a former chief of staff), outspoken members of the intelligence community and Nobel Prize-winning economists.

Framed this way, the presidential contest became an example of what’s known in economics as “creative destruction.” His opponents certainly fear that Mr. Trump will destroy American democracy itself.

To his supporters, however, a vote for Mr. Trump meant a vote to evict a failed leadership class from power and recreate the nation’s institutions under a new set of standards that would better serve American citizens.

Mr. Trump’s victory amounts to a public vote of no confidence in the leaders and institutions that have shaped American life since the end of the Cold War 35 years ago. The names themselves are symbolic: In 2016 Mr. Trump ran against a Bush in the Republican primaries and a Clinton in the general election. This time, in a looser sense, he beat a coalition that included Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.

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