The nation's wounds

Even an arsonist didn't start the fire

So much for the politics of joy. Today Europe is in crisis, Kyiv in despair, a lot of people in the great American cities are bewildered, and if the re-election of Donald J. Trump really is the basis for a Trudeau comeback, as the prime minister’s supporters have sometimes seemed to believe it could be, we will now get to see how that works. I admit to skepticism.

Millions of Americans woke up shocked and weary in a way they hoped they’d never have to be weary again. The exit polls say mostly unsurprising things: that those Americans are likelier to be women, likelier to have a university education, likelier to be non-white, likelier to live in cities. I’m with them. We didn’t win.

Here’s the night’s most astonishing graphic, from the New York Times, showing change in the county-level vote since 2020.

“Longing on a large scale is what makes history,” Don DeLillo wrote. Our job is to understand how this happened. I believe much of the answer has been decades in the making.