This is an adapted quote 7 November “All In Chris Hayes” episode.

Since then Donald Trump After winning the election, I have two fundamentally different feelings about where we are and what happens next, and neither of them, in my opinion, is based on a realistic view of what the election is telling us.

The first feeling is something like President Joe Biden In his speech to the nation, he said: We will be fine.

“We lost this war” Biden said on Thursday. “The America of your dreams calls you to rise again. This is the story of America for over 240 years and it continues. This is the story of all of us, not just some of us. The American experiment continues and we will be fine.”

This won’t convince many people. pro-democracy coalition. I strongly disagree that we will be fine or that the American experiment will continue.

We must take action to protect it and ourselves. And to do this, you must avoid giving in to the other emotion I see: complete despair.

I’ve seen a lot of people on social media say things like: “Be prepared to strengthen your spine for when they put you in camps.” But when you tell people that terrible things are unstoppable, you invite them to surrender to the terrible.

There is a better way forward; A path to be drawn in the wide area between “everything is fine” and “everything is terrible.”

To me, it’s really about understanding the basic structure of today’s soil. I can tell you one man who absolutely does not understand this.

“America has given us unprecedented and powerful authority,” Trump said at his victory party early Wednesday morning. Republicans had regained control of the Senate.

While it’s true that Republicans took back the Senate, it’s not true that Trump has overwhelming power, and that’s certainly not unprecedented. But there are a lot of people on the left who seem to agree with him, who say on the internet that this is not even close, that this is a landslide, a complete explosion.

It definitely wasn’t.

It was always It is predicted to be a close election in a country that is fairly evenly divided. And it was a close election where Trump dropped out, which was an obvious possibility that we talked about on basically every show. And he won the popular vote by a similar margin last time a Republican won the popular vote: George W. Bush after the invasion of Iraq in 2004.

The basics of this election were that things were changing around the edges. The most important thing that has changed is that Americans overwhelmingly says the country is on the wrong track And they say this largely because they feel financially strapped.

There is much to examine as to why this is the case. When is Biden? Saved the USA from the epidemic and recession It curbed inflation while boosting real wages, industrial growth and infrastructure; It didn’t make many American workers feel that way.

I’m as big a fan of the science of Bidenomics as anyone, and I continue to believe that this is truly a tremendous achievement, the best economic management by a president in my lifetime. but it didn’t work politically.

We just made the decision about this. To many voters, it was the same. This is not a trend specific to the US

The whole world experienced the recovery from Covid increase in inflation It is worse, if not greater, than any global crisis in 30 years. Voters absolutely hated it everywhere, from the UK to India, Poland, Argentina, Botswana, North Macedonia, South Korea and South Africa; voters punished incumbent politicians and parties in the wake of Covid.

Accordingly US economist Gennady Roodkevich, In every major national election in the West this year, all incumbent parties lost ground, many by double digits.

The Democratic Party was actually the most successful of the incumbent parties. They lost only 7% of their support.

It’s undeniable that people all over the world stop and look where they are and say, “This stinks.” Take this seriously. All theories about what to do now, how to resist MAGA’s worst plans, and how to win people back to honesty and democratic pluralism are based on a clear understanding and grasp of the situation.

The biggest task we have to do now is to convince our American friends and change public opinion. And he does this when MAGA Republicans go overboard and pick fights that will be disastrous for them. And they will overdo it.

You’ve heard Trump talk about a big mandate as if this were a red wave election. It wasn’t. you have a lot Democrats are winning narrow, closely contested races in tough terrain. And a lot of your House seats were not called and The balance of power has not yet been determined.

Republicans may face a narrow trio in Washington. But the basic truth about the United States in the 21st century is that it’s basically a 50/50 country, and it’s a country where this massive class realignment is happening beneath the surface.

In every election, one party or the other gets a slightly better share of the trade-off between working-class and college-educated/professional class voters. In fact, this is what happens in every election.

Trump and Republicans got the better part of the trade 2016. They lost some land 2018. Democrats later benefited from this trade 2020 and it worked pretty well for them 2022especially in the suburbs. This is the basic selection structure.

Now, to be very clear, we have to take into account the information environment in which all of this happens. The most autocratic forces in our political culture also have the ability to manipulate public opinion. through social media and misinformation. In truly frightening ways. Ways we really need to take into account. This needs to be a big part of our conversations going forward. I actually spent the last few years writing a book on this subject.

But this wasn’t a walk. we don’t look Ronald Reagan’s He won in 1980, or Richard Nixon won in 1972, or even Barack Obama in 2008. This was a tight race in a bad environment for the incumbents. In a 50/50 country previously governed by a narrow but resilient pro-democracy majority. I think it still has a pro-democracy majority, and a certain portion of those people voted for other things.

America did not surrender itself to Trumpism. We reached this conclusion because three out of 100 people changed their votes in a country that weathered a global pandemic and global inflation pretty well, but not well enough.

Yes, it’s disappointing, but a pro-democracy movement has a lot to build on.