After Kamala Harris wins …

The real work begins

Friends,

I’m becoming increasingly confident Kamala Harris will win this election. Three reasons:

First, Trump is becoming less coherent by the day. His behavior this week has been beyond wacky. He swayed on stage to his favorite music for half an hour without answering questions; he threatened to use the U.S. military against his domestic critics; he went ballistic against his political opponents, calling them “evil” and worse.

Meanwhile, Harris is showing extraordinary strength. The interview she did on Fox News with Bret Baier revealed a toughness that frankly amazed me. After Baier played down Trump’s repeated threat to deploy the U.S. military against domestic critics and presented a clip that didn’t include Trump’s reference to “the enemy within,” Harris called him on it:

“Bret, I’m sorry, and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about the ‘enemy within,’ that he has repeated. … That’s not what you just showed. Here’s the bottom line: He has repeated it many times, and you and I both know that. And you and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him.”

She didn’t allow Baier to move on to another topic until she quoted retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, calling Trump a threat to U.S. democracy and national security.

Third, as early voting begins, I’m seeing a remarkable outpouring of enthusiasm for Harris.

Georgia is now experiencing a record turnout of early voters, with over 365,000 ballots cast across the Peach State since early voting opened on Tuesday. That represents a 123 percent increase over the state’s previous record. There’s no guarantee that these are Harris voters, of course, but evidence suggests they are: Focus groups in Georgia show far higher levels of enthusiasm for Harris than for Trump. Also, the gender gap is working in Harris’s favor, with women representing 54.2 percent of these early Georgia voters.

With this positive news, I also want to point up a central dilemma awaiting the nation if and when Harris wins: Trump loyalists will remain a major force in American politics.

Even as Trump loses his faculties, JD Vance is emerging as the real stalking horse for Trump loyalists. Recall that Vance was put into play — made a senator and then pushed into being Trump’s vice presidential candidate — by Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, and other anti-democracy billionaires.

In many respects, Vance is more dangerous than Trump. Not only is he just as devoid of principle and scruple as Trump, but Vance has a brain, is young, and is polished. (If you’ve watched Vance in recent interviews, you’ve seen him turn viciously on interviewers whose questions he doesn’t want to answer.)

Almost exactly 30 years ago, I predicted that widening inequalities of income and wealth would create an American oligarchy powerful enough to rig the economic game against average working people. This would make average working people so angry at the unfairness and arbitrariness of the system that they’d be easy prey for demagogues who’d channel their anger into fury at immigrants, Black people, government officials, gay people, and others. (See my speech, below.)

Sadly, I believe I was correct.

Obviously, an explanation for some phenomenon is not a justification for it. Understanding the roots of Trumpism doesn’t mean accepting Trumpism.

But when Harris wins, we will have to begin the hard work of creating an economy of shared prosperity in which it’s possible to succeed without a college degree and in which large swaths of America that have been virtually abandoned by industry gain new sources of growth and jobs.

Right now, it’s easy to sympathize with Hillary Clinton’s description of Trump voters as “deplorables,” but they are our fellow citizens and will continue to be our fellow citizens. Unless we change the circumstances that have made them fodder for Trumpism, we can expect trouble for many years to come.

Some of you may be saying to yourself: Let’s get Harris elected before we dwell on next steps.

The reason I bring this up now is in the hope we don’t become so infuriated with those who support Trump that, when Harris wins, we forget the bitter wellsprings that Trump exploited to get as far as he did. Because if nothing is done to change the system that got us here, future demagogues like Vance will almost surely exploit the same bitterness for their own selfish ends.

The strongest defense we have against a future of Trumpist fascism is a large and growing middle class comprised of people who, although they may have supported Trump, come to feel they have a stake in America.