There is a certain reassurance in thundering about the tactical mistakes of a political party. There is vindication in picking out specific flaws, certain quotes that political junkies will laugh at years later. I could turn this post into a tirade about how Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign folded up after amassing decent levels of goodwill through its candidate’s ascension and through a debate with Donald Trump where she easily goaded him into being his worst self. I could grumble about its inability to message on the most pressing issues, and its reliance on old media and a sloppy use of its incredible fundraising haul. There is plenty of ammo.

But Harris’s opponent was a ridiculous figure who also ran a deeply bizarre race, with campaign rallies as performance art and masculinity elevated to a cartoonish extreme. Donald Trump did not win because he ran a brilliant operation, and Kamala Harris did not lose because she ran a terrible one: they ran as fairly predictable candidates in the world of 2024. In basically every functioning democracy, incumbent parties are suffering terribly, left and right. (Congrats on being the sole exception, Mexico.) This is a deeply disappointing explanation to anyone who wants to talk about voter agency and brilliant campaign work and the untold millions of dollars dumped into this race, but, well, we didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree.

That inability to appreciate the context, goofy campaign quotes aside, points to the fundamental struggle of the Democratic Party right now, one that goes deeper than any specific campaign issue. It is run by a bunch of people who have succeeded in the conventional terms of American life and are often blind to pathways outside of it. It is filled with managerial competence, able to get all the right language in a vacuum but blind to the animal forces beyond its narrowed scope. This professionally run machine knows how to cut loose some losing issues (such as basically everything Harris stood for in her ill-fated 2020 cycle campaign) and even candidates (post-debate Biden), but that cutting is almost always in retrospect, when the vague party blob realizes a message or messenger is a loser, instead of building a positive brand from the start. It leaves open the question is what they actually stand for, other than a few broadly popular ideas with everything else stripped away.

More fundamentally, it misses out on the energy of the Trump campaign, the outreach to people who aren’t true believers. It loses itself in policy details and substance-free vibes instead of a deeper attention to trends in American life: how people get their news, what unsettles them most deeply, what it takes to provide hope in a difficult place. On the deeper malaise plaguing American politics, the current Democratic Party has no answers. It had a chance to reach for some this cycle, in a competitive process to choose a successor to Biden, but after the exertion of forcing him aside, everyone just shrugged and jumped on the hype train for a Vice President saddled with his record.

As a Minnesotan I feel obligated to say a few words about Tim Walz, even if some of my state-mates may not love them. I think Walz is basically a replacement level Democratic politician, and his selection was the canary in the coal mine for a risk-averse, vibes-driven campaign. This is not to say he does not have genuine strengths; he can fill a room with charisma and speaks with the throwback down-to-earth style of a politician from a less toxic era. He didn’t do anything to materially cost Harris votes, and the margin of defeat is large enough that no Josh Shapiro fantasy could have swung it, either. But Walz ran as a liberal’s projection of what a moderate conservative voter might like, as if flannel and football could somehow cover for inflation and immigration. His selection was emblematic of the failure to grapple with deeper substance.

Democrats exist within the context they exist. They cannot just say we are not going back and then will it so. Donald Trump tells stories about this context, often kooky and sometimes profoundly harmful for some people, but they also sometimes hint at deeper truths about American life. He has concepts of plans that address these stories, ill-formed but recognizable in their general thrust to the median voter. Liberalism writ large, faced with a populist threat, has little in the way of the coherent story or the platform that is anything more than a laundry list.

I will end with questions, a soup of thoughts that get at this morass, shadows in Plato’s cave. Can economic statistics accurately capture a skyrocketing cost of living and a labor market that demands a lot of people? How does a superpower, its relative power waning but its absolute power still supreme, credibly manage its place in the world? What does it mean to be a young man today, especially a single one? For that matter, what does it mean to be a young woman? What endures in an era of social media ephemera? What gives people their faith in a collective future?

I remain generally optimistic about that American future. The US’s troubles, while real, are small relative to a sclerotic Europe and the demographic time bombs in an East Asia where no one has babies anymore. This country’s vastness, complexity, and dynamism render the red-versus-blue political obsession fairly small, when one cuts out the noise. But someone needs to weave a coherent thread to string through questions like these.