Why We Lost November 7, 2024 David Brooks, I think, nails it: Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now? Every Democrat should read this. Bret Stephens nails it as well: . . . The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. Concerned about gender transitions for children or about biological males playing on girls’ sports teams? You’re a transphobe. Dismayed by tedious, mandatory and frequently counterproductive D.E.I. seminars that treat white skin as almost inherently problematic? You’re racist. Irritated by new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive but feels as if it’s borrowing a page from “1984”? That’s doubleplusungood. The Democratic Party at its best stands for fairness and freedom. But the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity. It also, increasingly, stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms on hundreds of millions of Americans who want to live and let live but don’t like being told how to speak or what to think. Too many liberals forgot this, which explains how a figure like Trump, with his boisterous and transgressive disdain for liberal pieties, could be re-elected to the presidency. BONUSES Trump has already remade America in his own image. “His overwhelming, toxic influence makes him one of the most successful presidents of the last century. And the country may never fully recover.” And if you have time this Veterans Day weekend . . . . . . don’t miss Sam Harris and Mark Cuban in discussion a few days before the election. Cuban is a practical, honorable, highly successful celebrity billionaire (you may have seen him on Shark Tank or cheering for his Dallas Mavericks). If only it had been he who’d come down that escalator nine years ago.