Reaction to last Tuesday’s election has been just as revealing as the result. In particular, the Democratic Party is conducting a messy post-mortem focusing on an issue it studiously tried to avoid before November 5th – the working class.

Trump winning was always a possibility, but few predicted its scale. Before Tuesday, New Jersey seemed one of the worst places to observe “the most consequential election in a generation”. Today, it feels like a vivid example of how badly the Democrats failed – again.

Trump gained support across the US, including New Jersey, which has not voted for a Republican President since 1988. In 2020, 57% of Garden State residents voted for Joe Biden, 41% for Trump. Now, New Jersey is being referred to as a possible swing state. Trump narrowed the New Jersey gap to 5%, gaining support in some unexpected places like Passaic County, which includes the former industrial city of Patterson, one of many areas where a large Latino population abandoned the Democrats. But as some in the party are belatedly recognising, this was a rejection based less on ethnicity, than class.

Several leading Democrats (not just Bernie Sanders) are acknowledging that the Harris campaign’s vacuous appeal to “middle class values” was a disastrous political miscalculation. Once again, it has allowed the racist, billionaire, slumlord to masquerade as a man of the people. Trump is even proclaiming himself as a unifying force, transcending race in the name of class and national solidarity. It’s the greatest political fraud of modern times – and it’s worked twice!

The result has been deeply shocking and distressing for my Rutgers students, most of them young, working class people of colour from New Jersey. We’ve spent a lot of time discussing and trying to understand what happened. The first scholar I saw on Wednesday morning said “I already knew we were screwed. Now I know we’re really screwed!” There has been some anger. Sadly, this is sometimes taking the form of African Americas blaming Latinos, probably something that extends beyond our classroom. There is also a strong sense, especially for some black students, that Harris lost because she’s a black woman. Very few, so far, have related the outcome to myopic, bifocal US party politics. These young, gifted and mostly black people seem to find it hard to imagine a political future outside the duopoly.

But there’s a saying that “the third party is the future of US politics – and always will be”. Overall, small, left parties (there were at least five on offer) performed at their usual barely visible level on Tuesday. However, without clutching at straws, Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, gained 22% of the vote in Dearborn, Michigan, demonstrating, as Sanders did in 2016, that another US politics is possible.

Of course, Stein’s Dearborn vote was propelled by opposition to the slaughter in Gaza. Harris’ complicity in genocide has not featured heavily in the Democrats’ autopsy report. But given the student occupation movement earlier this year, it is difficult to believe it wasn’t reflected in the fact that voter turnout for under 30s was lower than in 2020 and the vote for the Democrats amongst this group was significantly reduced.

But along with the working class, Gaza was something the Democrats tried to ignore. Even Trump’s ridiculous claim that he would bring immediate peace to the Middle East was probably enough to win some votes.

The so-called “Squad” and their sometime endorsees, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), were virtually silent in the election campaign. Their remaining Congrespeople all won by big majorities on Tuesday. But two others were defeated in earlier primaries and as the energy of the Black Lives Matter movement ebbs, it is hard to see where their strategy of critical engagement within and without the Democratic Party goes from here. That said, I was astonished to see the following poster appear in my Newark street the day after the election. Perhaps a new approach is pending, but maybe it would have been good to start saying this before the election?

With all the navel-gazing and soul searching, the aftermath of Tuesday’s election bears uncomfortable comparisons with Brexit. Far too many people, particularly among the commentariat, are inclined to interpret the result as the act of 75 million idiots. hardly an approach likely to change hearts and minds. As ever, no single factor explains such a massive and complex expression of opinion. But all the analysis points to dissatisfaction with how the economy was run by the Democrats. There’s many an attempt to varnish what’s happened since 2020 and again, there are many issues to consider, not least the lasting impact of COVID and how it triggered profiteering corporations to push up prices and inflation.

But my mind goes back to late September 2021, when I was living in the Bronx and observing Biden’s domestic economic plan being strangled at birth. “Build Back Better” was the most ambitious reform package since the 1930s New Deal, not least $300 billion investment in housing. It would have shifted the US government’s priorities away from serving the interests of big business. I don’t want to be an “I told you so” person, but I wrote at the time that failing to fight for it had the potential to resurrect Trumpism.

However, as the dust settles, it’s very important to remember that most Americans did not vote for Trump, because 35% of them didn’t vote at all (turnout appears to be down from 2020). Although he is on his way to getting control of all the key levers of legislative power, Trump is a blaggard who always oversells himself, so time will tell what he actually does with this mandate. But it’s undoubtedly a dangerous moment, particularly for immigrants, women’s reproductive rights and LGBT+ and trans people. His talk of “the enemy within” also sounds a warning that the US could be about to enter another McCarthyite period, when any expression of “Un-Americanism” brings sanction. The global implications are also serious, especially if the US relapses further into its chronic addiction to fossil fuel. But there will be resistance. The American working class has entered a Trumpian Pact. Unless the second Trump administration delivers on its promise to improve living standards, the backlash could be as dramatic as what happened last week.

“Liberal” and “Working Class” are often loosely defined terms in this country. But to the extent that Biden, Harris and the Democrats represent electoral liberalism, it is in possibly terminal decline. The death of centrist social democracy has been prematurely predicted before. But the Democrats’ defeat can be seen as part of a wider decline of similar parties in other countries, albeit that this pattern is not uniform.

The working class has faced many defeats, but it is not in decline, although in some ways, it is reconfiguring. This is something the Republicans seemed to understand more than the Democrats. I heard a New Yorker on the radio, who is part of the 70% of Latinos who make up the construction industry, say: “We don’t want to be thought of as part of the Latino community. We want to be part of the American working class.” This, of course, was the plea of successive immigrant waves to this country and in a perverted form, Trump seemed to be offering it.

Nonetheless, there should be no denying that last week, the US took a deeply reactionary turn that was permeated with racism and misogyny. It’s too early to say how bad the next four years will be here. But I’m sure that, if the UK Labour government repeats the errors of the US Democrats, Britain will be facing a very similar threat at the next general election.

I am inclined to see the best side of this strange nation. It’s hard at times like this. But I still believe in its working class and its potential to make a better future. So did Langston Hughes:

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

(Let America Be America Again, 1936)