The election is over, or at least almost over — some votes are still being counted in congressional races, and there will be a run-off for the Louisiana Senate seat that the Republican challenger will win.

Harold Meyerson, social democrat and labor analyst, says the country is looking for solutions for an economy that doesn’t “deliver broadly shared prosperity” and the Democrats, like center-left parties around the advanced capitalist world, have not provided those solutions — and that they better soon if they want to win elections. Larry Kudlow, manic apostle of unshackled capital, triumphantly tweets, “Leftward redistribution lurch over. Free-market capitalism, incentives, free enterprise.”

So what really happened and why? Here are a few points, offered as more of a sketch of an answer to those questions than a definitive reckoning.