Democrats lost the election because they misunderstood the truth of the culture war
I have just rewatched Kamala Harris's last speech before polling day . There is pathos in doing so. Her delivery was good, her rhetoric soared, and she did her best to sell her mission as finding America's "common ground".
"We are all in this together," she said, sensibly seeking the floating voter rather than the Democrat loyalists in the Philadelphia hall. Now it is all dust and ashes .
Obviously, such speeches are always generalised and waffly (as is equally true of Donald Trump's admittedly more amusing riffs), but I was interested by the one bit where the vice-president became very specific.
Her passage extolling freedom climaxed with her support for "the most fundamental freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body, not have her government tell her what to do". She promised that when Congress passed a "reproductive freedom Bill" she, as president, would "proudly, PROUDLY sign it into law". All her passion was engaged.
You can see why Ms Harris emphasised the subject. All polls showed the Democrats led the Republicans among women, and that most American women favour abortion rights. Many thought this would make all the difference in the ballot box. It did not.
Yes, more women voted Harris than Trump, but in a smaller percentage than had voted for Biden against Trump four years earlier. On Tuesday, Trump won 40 per cent of the votes of young women (18-29), compared with 33 per cent four years ago. By the same comparison, he shot ahead with young men. Harris fell back.
The abortion issue may help explain a few other things about the election result. My own suspicion, though it can be no more than that, is that it does not work politically in the way pollsters imply.
Yes, most people in the Western world, of both sexes, support abortion , at least in the sense of not wanting it to be illegal. But they tend to be uncomfortable about it.
Men, in particular, would rather not discuss the matter, and will not be attracted to candidates who make much of it. Advocacy of maximised abortion rights is often part of strident anti-man rhetoric.
Women, on average, have to think about abortion more deeply than men. It does not follow, however, that they want it to be the centre of the political stage. It is not a joyous subject, and it is a personal one.
There is something strange and unsympathetic about its most ardent, politicised advocates. There is something stranger still when abortion is held up as the strongest part of the Democrats' idea about what women want.
Does most people's vision of a good future society include ever-rising abortion rates and ever-greater abortion freedoms? I doubt it. Most mainstream political debate centres on what we want for our children. It is about hope.
A party or candidate obsessed with not bringing children into the world is unappealing, even if you agree with the specific policy it, she or he advocates.
This works subliminally in politics, I think. When Donald Trump appeared on the victory stage in Florida, his vast family crowded in beside him. He had so many children on show that it seemed for a moment he might have trouble remembering all their names. Elon Musk, who shared the limelight, has 11 children (and one who sadly died in infancy).
Whether through her own choice or through misfortune, Ms Harris has none. Some will tut-tut at such male over-production – and of course no one should hold up either President Trump or Mr Musk as ideal family role models – but, on the whole, such fathers imply vigour and optimism about their country.
By mistake, I think, the Democrats have made themselves the party of demographic decline , now a more serious problem for the West than the population explosion my generation was brought up to deplore.
For obvious numerical reasons, there are fewer votes in decline than in growth. Abortion was "our future", I saw a distraught young Harrisite telling a Guardian reporter on video as the election went against her. Future? In what way? There is another sense in which Kamala Harris misplayed the abortion issue. It is that she was factually in the wrong. It is not the case that Donald Trump was telling women they could not have abortions.
The change in American law was a decision of the Supreme Court, not of politicians (though admittedly, he appointed some of its more conservative judges). It did not ban abortion. It overturned its own controversial 1973 decision in Roe vs Wade, which was that there is a right to abortion contained in the US Constitution.
The United States, as its very name tells us, is a federal not a unitary state. The Supreme Court decision simply returned the power over abortion to the individual states, which are duly making their own decisions.
That is the American way. In the same voting booths in the same election which Ms Harris lost, 10 states held ballots on abortion laws. Seven, several of them Republican, voted in a pro-abortion direction.
Donald Trump understood the politics of all this very well. In Florida, the state where he resides, he voted not to liberalise the current ban on abortions after six weeks and was on the winning side on that.
As a presidential candidate, however, he did not have to have a policy on abortion: in a low-key way (yes, he can be low-key when he wants to be), he reminded voters that it was simply not a matter for him .
He could therefore scoop up most of the large number of anti-abortion voters in America without saying anything which would prevent pro-abortion voters voting for him.
In short, she invented a Republican bogeyman on the subject. He capitalised on the actual facts. He is much the better politician.
Harris's abortion position epitomises the problem the Democrats have. It shows that even on matters where they seem to identify with the majority position, they mess up.
They remind me of extreme British trade union leaders in the 1970s. In the 1945 generation of British voters, there was widespread, even election-winning respect for organised labour as the best way of advancing the cause of working people, but the militant union leaders destroyed this by seeming to regard strikes as the pinnacle of their achievement.
What was going on in their heads was different from what was going on in the heads of most of their natural supporters. Same with the Democrats – extreme, unrelated to ordinary life, and highly judgemental of people who disagree with them.
You can see it in issues of race too. The Democrats have moved from the Martin Luther King era of dignity for all to the violent anti-white fury of Black Lives Matter . This trend Kamala Harris never confronted; indeed, she half endorsed it.
You see it in issues of the environment, where a massive speculation on the timeframe and the energy measures allegedly needed to stop global warming is used to try to end the cheap fossil-fuel energy on which the prosperity of most Americans depends.
The Democrats seem to have extreme difficulty in understanding the question which, by implication, the voters were asking them: "You cannot guarantee our basic wants on the economy and immigration. What makes you think you can tell us how to be better people?"
This is what Donald Trump does understand. By winning the American ground war, you win the culture war too. Indeed, they are almost the same thing.
