George Packer on the end of Democratic delusions
Today’s must-read: The “Trump Reaction” and what comes next

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Donald Trump’s voters “don’t think Trump will destroy democracy,” George Packers writes. They think “he’ll restore it to the people.”

(Illustration by Ben Hickey)

The Roosevelt Republic—the progressive age that extended social welfare and equal rights to a widening circle of Americans—endured from the 1930s to the 1970s. At the end of that decade, it was overthrown by the Reagan Revolution, which expanded individual liberties on the strength of a conservative free-market ideology, until it in turn crashed against the 2008 financial crisis. The era that followed has lacked a convincing name and a clear identity. It’s been variously called the post–post–Cold War, post-neoliberalism, the Great Awokening, and the Great Stagnation. But the 2024 election has shown that the dominant political figure of this period is Donald Trump, who, by the end of his second term, will have loomed over American life for as long as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s dozen years as president. We are living in the Trump Reaction. By the standard of its predecessors, we’re still at the beginning.


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