We, the people

January 18, 2026 12:34 PM ET society

In the days after the United States presidential election in 2024, news article after news article was published that put forth an opinion of how Kamala lost: what she did wrong, what she didn’t do enough of, how her message was flawed, etc. Those have been replaced by articles about what Democrats don’t understand, also positioned as why they lost. They place the blame wrongly on the Radical Left, the vagueness of policy statements, being “out of touch” with ordinary people, and not having a platform compelling enough to attract voters. These things could all be true, but that’s not why it went the way it did.

Donald Trump was consistently and famously vague on the campaign trail: “We will crush violent crime and give our police the support, protection, resources, and respect that they so dearly deserve. We will strengthen and modernize our military” (from a campaign rally, Michigan, November 4, 2024). You can literally drop into any transcript of his campaign stops to find a marked lack of policy particulars. (I don’t even need to point at the rally where he just swayed to music onstage.) People clearly didn’t care, really, about a candidate having specific policy statements.

Similarly, the onslaught of biased, misleading, and false statements coming out of Fox News, masquerading as news for the better part of the last decade (at least) was used to instill fear and create a bogeyman to rally against. While the Democrats were painted as “radical” (despite not supporting actual radical movements like the Green New Deal), the Republicans pulled their party to the right, normalizing radicals in their ranks, and effectively holding the moderates hostage. One need look no further than the current cabinet to see officials that believe in thoroughly debunked conspiracies, who support a president they previously called dangerous and incompetent, who embrace the demolition of the federal government, and decline to support national alliances that have stood since WWII. If there is a side that is “radical” in its majority, it is clearly not the Left.

It’s easy to see that pundit talking points on the election missteps are attempting to find fault. But they’re looking in the wrong place, because there is only one group to blame for the election of Donald Trump: the American people.

Part 1: We, the people

The American people are a guy who drives a $50,000 pickup truck that gets 14 mpg (but never uses it to haul anything) and complains about the price of gas. The American people are Brent Norwalk from The Good Place: “born on third base, thinks he invented the game.” The American people are second- or third- or fourth-generation immigrants with inherited wealth that claim to be self-made successes. The American people are taught Manifest Destiny without it being identified as the propaganda it was; they take the idea of America as an exception with its roots in the American Revolution and mangle it into a myopic chant of moral superiority: “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”

The American people are now a “your mama’s so fat” joke on the world stage. The American people have internalized the idea of exceptionalism so much that they are offended at any implication that it isn’t true; this mutates into ignorant pride, and Americans lose any objectivity. They point fingers everywhere except at themselves. Unable to accept criticism, they reject even documented facts that would undermine their superlative self-image.

This is the Fox News grind: “I’m an American: you say a bad thing about me, and you say it about America. How dare you!” This is the root of the resistance to the Black Lives Matter movement and the rejection of the concept of systemic racism. (“How dare you call me that terrible thing, you’re that terrible thing!”) It’s the source of the Republican fearmongering that public schools are teaching students to hate America and teaching white males to feel guilty about the past. It’s easy to lay the blame at the feet of Fox News, but even that is a symptom. Fear and insecurity (and even shame) drive people to an outlet that confirms their baseless beliefs and biases. What the American people hate most is being anything but the best, and in order to sustain that belief, they don’t look critically at history or themselves.

When you avoid facing truths, you are susceptible to “alternative facts” that support your self-image. But we don’t get to choose our own facts; choosing your own facts is like arguing about whether the sun is up or not. Facts matter, because they define the reality that we all experience, whether we like it or want to or not. A leader who twists facts is using their power and position to try and control the way that people perceive reality – otherwise known as “gaslighting”. Considering how many people feel like the government is working for itself and not for the average citizen, you would think that integrity would be the primary qualification for future government officials. You would think people would despise gaslighting. But that’s not what happens.

What happens is that people give up on government, citing (in both cases) its failure to solve the One Big Problem they care about. They embrace media outlets that support their unchallenged beliefs. For example: on both the far left and the far right, the opinion is the same: the government is a Big Business, a revolving door for politicians and lobbyists, a millionaire’s game for millionaires, where the rest of us are effectively locked out. Instead of finding common ground in this belief, these groups are diametrically opposed. They bind more tightly to their extreme views in this oppositional stance, and blind themselves to evidence to the contrary.

We end up with two kinds of people: those who think the system can be fixed, and those who don’t. Those who don’t think the system can be fixed refrain from voting, exacerbating the problem. Those who think the system can be fixed hold their nose and vote for their least worst option. And now, having raised and spent millions of dollars on campaigns to promote this millionaire versus that one, we have a government by the extremely wealthy, claiming to be populist, while the lower classes (which is most of the American people) fight each other over which flavor of oppression to govern them. One side gives up and abstains, ceding the decision to the other side. One side claims that there is greed and corruption at the core of politics, and the only acceptable solution is replacing it with greed and corruption from outside of politics.

Whether the system is broken or not, the system relies on the people. The less people are inclined or able to access information and think critically, the easier they are to gaslight. The American people have short memories and are increasingly unwilling or unable to peer into complex systems and examine root causes or to “follow the money” (in our slight defense, the upper classes have ways to make it very hard to follow the money). They will hear that prices are high and the reason is inflation, but not try to understand what inflation is, or what causes it, or who benefits from it. They will hear that crime is up, but will not compare that statement to published data. They will hear that tariffs will be an “external tax” but not research what tariffs are, who pays them, and how they have functioned in history. They will hear that “the mainstream media doesn’t want you to know” something, but won’t ask who owns the other media or why they should listen to them instead. They experience frustration with a service so they embrace “disruption,” without thinking about the consequence of that disruption or the qualifications of the disruptor. The American people want what they want now, they don’t want to wait for anything. Our desire to be entertained has pushed intellectualism out of favor. Culturally, we don’t value truth or research; we value winning and action. And the war on intellectualism has evolved into a general information war; no longer solely about higher education, it now includes objective reality.

There is no better example of all of this than Donald Trump. Born to and raised by a wealthy real-estate developer, he believes that he is successful and smart because of his wealth. He learned the way business is done from his father, how to make money to make more businesses to make more money. Because of this success and wealth, his conclusion is that he is smarter than anyone else, which expands to his believing that he is right about anything and everything simply because it’s his thought. (As an example: to this day, he believes he was and is right about the Central Park Five, calling for their execution – as a private citizen, taking out a full-page ad in New York City newspapers – even though their convictions were vacated and the courts have ruled accordingly; the rule of law is also wrong in his eyes.) So convinced of his intellectual superiority, proven by his wealth, he believes that he should be in charge of everything – and so being President is the natural job for him. He bristles at any criticism and defends any decision, right or wrong, provably false or not. He is the culture we have made: his ignorant self-importance is supported by his wealth and publicity, with no consideration for intelligence, integrity, or even truth.

Donald Trump is the quintessential American person. What better indictment of the American people than their selection of their own reflection as president when there are hard truths to face, difficult decisions to make, and people to hold accountable. This explains people voluntarily choosing the man whose first administration featured the following (and these are just a tiny sample from this list of over one thousand things from Trump’s (first) stint as president):

No one in their right mind would cite any of those things as acceptable from a government. Yet these things all happened, and people forgot, disregarded, downplayed, excused, and whatever verb you want – they rationalized this as a success, confirming this warped revisionism by electing Trump a second time.

History has not – and will not – be so kind. The American people almost get a pass for 2016, because Trump was still largely unknown outside of his native New York buffoonery; but in 2024, Trump was well known. It’s ridiculous that Trump ran for president (again) – but the only thing that could have stopped him was a party not nominating him. And in our current political environment, no party is going to turn down the chance at power for something as unvalued by the Amercian people as morality or integrity.

Part 2: The myth of vision, the reality of rejecting intelligence

At the start of Trump’s <sigh> second term, Jon Stewart said that “[Democrats need to] tell people what you would do with the power Trump is wielding and then convince us to give that power to you.” He is correct that everything Trump is doing is lawful – though despicable, spiteful, vengeful, and childish – and we can’t cry Chicken Little “fascist” at those things. But there is no way that Democrats can win just by providing a more compelling vision, because they’re not playing the same game as their opponents.

Take billionaires, for example. Both the left and the right will agree that it should be against the law for a billionaire to influence legislation (you can call it lobbying, but it’s effectively bribing that goes unpenalized). One side will say “we must change this system so that the bad people can’t take advantage of it, and we can only do it once our good people are in office, and provided it passes the checks and balances, so that we do not commit the same procedural sins as the bad people do;” the other side will say “get our people in place, and then we just do what we want.” One side is concerned about the rules of law, the other side is concerned about the outcome.

At a high level, most of America agrees that we have problems: immigration is problematic, rising prices are problematic, systemic racism is problematic, etc. But these are all very hard problems to solve, and we are divided on how we should solve them. There is no fast and cheap and moral answer. But there are fast and cheap answers. If your problem is that your car is broken, you can solve that by diagnosing and subsequently fixing the car, which will take time and money; you can also solve that by junking your car, which takes less time and no money. In the face of complex problems, Democrats are looking for the more moral solution, which means it will not be fast and it will not be cheap. Republicans are looking for the faster solution, which only might be moral and only might be cheap.

In the face of an electorate with a short attention span and a desire for instant fixes, a complicated policy is a losing proposition. This is why Trump won, because he (and Republicans) are promising fast and cheap fixes. That’s what the American people want to hear, because they don’t care – and increasingly can’t determine – if it’s a lie. The American people are lazy in their assessment of problems. Most of these problems are ones you can’t just throw money at. They require time and compromise, patience and understanding. This is not to say that Americans won’t throw themselves behind a “vision” – they will line up in team colors behind talking points, but they won’t think through the implications of those talking points. We will vote for something that ultimately goes against our own self interests. It’s the lack of critical thinking that allows this, but it’s our cultural rejection of increasing knowledge (not intelligence) that ensures it.

Part 3: Tribal colors must die

The venerated founding founders designed a system of representative democracy that grants power to the government via election by an engaged and informed populace. If you remove (either or both of) those requirements – engaged and informed – then you can twist the system into a legal coup d’tat, effectively using the system to undermine the Constitution upon which it is based. That lack of engagement allows those with power – which in the United States, means the wealthy – to bend the system to benefit themselves, with the only possible checks on that power are an opposing equal/greater wealth or the built-in judicial system.

In a society where the judicial system is the referee, the people are left to be spectators. It’s impossible now to amend the Constitution, and it’s questionable to what degree the government will respect it. The inaction of people – both as citizens and as congresspeople – is what allows these modern day robber barons to squeeze society for their own benefit. Our acceptance of greed, our idolization of what money can get us – these are the things that subjugate the 99%. That our culture has no concept of “enough” money is why we are never satisfied. A golden toilet need not exist in our world. We end up in a spiderman meme, wondering which begets which: is our culture a reflection of the people, or are people a reflection of the culture?

Ultimately, people have the power. We can choose to call bullshit on something or not. We can choose to vote for something or not. At some point, we will choose to accept an unjust law or not. We have to decide whether the system can police itself or whether the system is acceptable as it is – capable of being manipulated by those in power for their benefit and at our cost. The more we sit and wait for one side to find the perfect solution, the longer the other side will have to destroy the system from within. People give the power to elected officials, and people are to blame for both the Donald Trumps of the world and what they do with the power we have ceded to them.

We must be an engaged and informed electorate, and we must be able to identify disingenuous voices. There is no United States – as framed in its Constitution – that can exist without a moral imperative for equality under the law. The only thing that will stop the chaos in the United States is a shift in our culture to valuing knowledge, discourse, and equity; learning about the past, whether it be positive or negative; thinking about the future consequences of our actions and what kind of world we want to live in. While the American public is not a monolith, we are all responsible for its reflection. The only way to stop electing Trumps is to stop that machine that’s making them.