We have a President-Elect who is an unqualified, unscrupulous, unbalanced, and unashamedly corrupt authoritarian.  News articles assigning blame for this circumstance are coming at us faster than Trump’s lies, and there is no shortage of targets.

• The Republican Party that leveraged racism and hate for 40 years before doubling down with eight years of slander and subversion against our first African American President.
• Trump’s campaign professionals who broke records for frequency, range, intensity, and velocity of lying – following the lead did Trump himself. 
• An incompetent and unprincipled Media that disgraced the profession and earned our contempt and derision.
• A foreign power that tried, possibly in collusion with the Trump campaign, to swing the election.
• The FBI that tried, possibly in collusion with the Trump campaign, to swing the election while apparently unconcerned about the alarming intervention by Russia.
• Fake-news peddlers making full use of the anonymous, profitable, and fact-free nature of social media. 

These all are enablers: they gave voters cover to vote for a petulant, lying, horrible human being.  Those voters, though, are the final arbiter of any election, and every voter ultimately makes his own decisions.  Blame needs to be assigned there, as well, and beyond the obviously guilty: the white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

• Feeling ignored and resentful of minorities and immigrants is not an excuse for making an ignorant, dangerously malleable clown Commander in Chief. 
• Feeling sorry for yourself or being worried about a changing society is not an excuse to empower potentially the most corrupt administration in history. 
• Party loyalty is not an excuse for putting a clumsy amateur who believes any conspiracy theory that comes along in charge of the nuclear arsenal. 
• Addiction to right-wing hate radio and right-wing hate television is neither an excuse nor excusable. 
• And wanting to “shake things up” is not an excuse in any presidential election – ever. 

There is blame enough also for the Clinton campaign, and the above distinction between enablers and voters suggests where it starts.  The Clinton campaign spent most of its time and effort taking down the enablers and very little on talking up the voters, those with the final say.  The campaign ignored some voters more than others and none so much as those who used to be a reliable cog in Democratic victories but that, this time, were rallying en masse to the opposition.  These voters, it would turn out, would decide the election.  The Clinton campaign, much like the media, got distracted by the non-stop circus of enablers.  We tried to hold them accountable, but because that is all we tried, we lost.

This is not to argue that we should ignore the enablers.  The media already are normalizing the extremism and the corruption flowing from the transition team that will become a flood once Trump gets power.  The incompetence of the media rises to the level of unwitting collusion.  The Republicans, meanwhile, are close to being able to suppress our voice for generations.  They had been working on exactly that at the state level.  Now, complete and potentially irrevocable power is within their grasp.  They will not relent out of love for democracy.  Confrontation must be forceful and unrelenting.  But that never will be sufficient.

While we pushed back against Kellyanne Conway’s efforts to make a toad look like a prince, the toad was promising to bring back well-paying, reliable, yet low-skill jobs (sans the unions that made them livable) and to bring back a time when your neighborhood all looked just like you.  We thought it would be enough to point out that he was, in fact, a toad, but the voters to whom he was speaking could not have cared less. 

We never tried to reach out to those fearful of change; our “inclusiveness” did not include them.  We never countered the jobs fantasy other than by Clinton’s previous backtrack on the TPP, which only made her seem more the establishment politician.  Yes, we needed to point out the number of lies Conway could pack into a 30-second response to an unrelated question, but how many votes did we expect to earn from that?  And yes, we won the popular vote, but part of the popular vote that we lost had outsized power.  That was due to a contorted and undemocratic election protocol, but we knew about that going in.

As I’ve written before, Clinton above all others should have known that “it’s the economy, stupid,” that it’s always the economy.  No one will vote to blow the system up when they have a secure job and a full belly.  That should be instinctive to all Democratic politicians, yet it was missing in action from the Democratic campaign.  It was not missing from Trump’s campaign.  Worse, while he talked about jobs and the economy, we countered with “love trumps hate,” a meaningless, syrupy slogan that missed the points on which the election would turn and could only further convince white, blue collar voters that we purposely had abandoned them.

Nor is this to argue that we should abandon “identity politics,” a fad phrase that is as vacuous as “love trumps hate” (which, apparently, it doesn’t).  All politics is identity politics.  The names and the faces change, but it’s the same game – and Trump beat us with it like a stick.  Instead, this is an argument to expand the identities we listen to and talk to, to become that “big tent” that we always are bragging about.  As I’ve also written before, this is not a zero-sum game.  

The Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have two years to fix this – if Democratic incumbents have the will to fight Trump for two years.  We must give voters a reason to vote for us and not just against the other guy.  We saw the consequences of not doing this when so many Republicans, especially women that we thought were solidly in our camp, decided, in the end, that a dysfunctional misogynist in the White House was not a deal breaker.  We also must work at the state and even the county level.  We need to take back the state house as we take back the House and Senate in preparation for taking back the Presidency.  

• Call out the Republican Party for the racist, anti-democratic organization it is, but don’t think that that obviates the need to talk about jobs and unions and our commitment to both. 
• Call out surrogates for deflections and lies, but don’t think that doing that lets us write off part of the electorate just because they are white males, especially if they used to be a mainstay of our party. 
• Scream about Russian intervention.  Scream louder about Comey’s intervention.  And keep screaming about both – they represent stabs at the heart of our democracy.  Understand, though, that screaming is not a substitute for listening to those who are resentful over a changing society and showing them where that resentment might be better directed
• Criticize, censure, condemn, and denounce the media five times before breakfast and more often afterward.  But never stop making a positive case for involvement to the uninvolved, the bored, and those dangerous purists.
• Keep pointing out that Republicans are a minority party and that we won the popular vote – by a lot.  Say it loudly because, well, because that’s all we have right now.

We have two years, if we’re lucky and the Republicans are slow, to figure out how to listen to and to talk to voters again and to address the concerns of those, of all those, who will decide the outcome of the next election.