Who are we? Here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, the despondency is overwhelming. The results of Tuesday’s election are dispiriting, to say the least, for many of us. The realization that half of our fellow citizens voted for someone with so many disqualifying features and a disqualifying character is even more distressing.

Last December Mark Leibovich wrote in the Atlantic that if Trump won again, we needed to dispense with the affirmation that “this is not who we are”. “You can dismiss Trump voters all you want,” he wrote, “but give them this: They’re every bit as American as any idealized vision of the place. If Trump wins in 2024, his detractors will have to reckon once again with the voters who got us here—to reconcile what it means to share a country with so many citizens who keep watching Trump spiral deeper into his moral void and still conclude, ‘Yes, that’s our guy.’”

Among other things we need to stop confusing our aspirations with our accomplishments. We need to come to terms with who we are rather than who we’d like to be. We should get to know ourselves better. If we were properly taught, we’d be learning about Japanese internment camps, suppression of civil liberties officially and informally at various times in our history, the wholesale genocide of Indians, the abrogation of treaties with those same Indians when it suited our interests, the end of the protection of African Americans known as Reconstruction after the Civil War, Vietnam, Iraq, etc., etc.

Then we might be able to address the more important subject which remains, “Why”. Why does half the voting population of America find Donald Trump, with all his faults and vulgar behavior, his crimes and misdemeanors, his flawed character, his anti-democratic utterances, his disdain for traditional norms and traditions, his autocratic leanings, his lies, his two-facedness contradicting in private what he says in public—why in the face of all of that is he the choice of those voters?

A corollary question: What has changed? A generation ago any one of those flaws would have been enough to rule out any hope of his being president. Now, despite all of them, he is months away from re-entering the White House. How have they changed; and just as important, how have we?

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Any number of reasonably conservative writers, David Brooks and Bret Stephens to name two, have warned about the disaffection of millions of Americans. Mark Shields, no conservative, observed in 2015 that a visit to the Democratic National Committee website found no mention of working Americans and their problems. Focusing on peripheral issues, like gender transition to the detriment of bread-and-butter issues ignores the principle of focusing on the greatest good for the greatest number. Gender issues shouldn’t be ignored, but neither should they be at the top of the agenda.

The question we should be asking is not “How could they?” but again, “Why?”

We are undergoing a period of profound social change. Change is traumatic, especially when it causes displacement. Technology has opened possibilities that didn’t exist a generation ago. Our moral views are evolving. One segment of our population—white males apparently—feels threatened by the changes’ diminishing their lives. The post pandemic economy has been good to many, and less than good to others. The Democratic Party has failed to acknowledge that trauma in a way that resonated with the experience of the disaffected among us. Insisting that things are fine, that people just don’t see the reality, when millions of Americans are feeling pinched is a failure not only of communication but of policy.

“Let them eat cake” is not a sound response to the grievances millions of Americans are feeling.

So, what is to be done? Programmatically, I have no idea. Listening might be a good start, which is to say reaching out to disaffected voters. The Democrats—the Republicans obviously aren’t bothered by the question—have the ways and means to identify the voters who failed to support them– in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and other areas of the country they may have carried, but by smaller numbers than in the past. Political parties have any number of ways of sounding out the electorate. They should use them.

For those of us who believe in democracy, we need to recognize that we had a reasonably free and fair election. We lost, and this time losing will undoubtedly have consequences for all of us. H.L. Mencken gets the last word:

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”