Donald Trump won the US presidential election in resounding fashion, winning the electoral college and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 consolation prize, the popular vote, by a significant margin. The Republicans have maintained control of the House and flipped the Senate. Conservatives already control the Supreme Court.

On the eve of the election, the Guardian ran an article with the headline “Is Trump actually a fascist — and why does the answer matter?” Whether Trump is a fascist is open to debate, and scholars of fascism and the far-right have weighed in on either side. But as Jan-Werner Müller has put it, not being a fascist “doesn’t make [Trump] any less dangerous,” and the threats of his return to the White House are very real: millions of undocumented immigrants will live in fear of being swept up in his mass deportation plan. Transgender people will be the subject of even greater vitriol from people occupying even higher positions of power. More Americans will be forced to give birth or denied lifesaving care while pregnant as reproductive rights come under further attack. Far-right groups will be emboldened, as they were under the last Trump presidency, and the threat of violence targeting the myriad groups Trump has declared “enemies from within” will only grow. On the global stage, the United States will go from climate laggard to lead arsonist, and Israel’s genocidal violence will continue to go unchecked.

The threats ahead are clear. But to understand this political catastrophe — and prevent the next one — we need to take a hard look at the Democratic Party’s stunning failure to prevent it. A large share of the blame for this disastrous result falls on the ineffectual and self-satisfied Democratic Party establishment. They did not put up a good fight; they put up a bad one, having stymied every effort from the Left to reform the party on terms that would avert the current disaster. Party leaders exerted considerable effort in 2016 and again in 2020 to block Bernie Sanders from securing the Democratic presidential nomination, even though polls indicated that the Vermont senator would outperform Trump in critical battleground states. Polls continue to show that a majority of Americans support progressive demands, such as a federal jobs guarantee, Medicare for All, and raising taxes on the superrich, all of which are off the table under Trump and none of which were championed by Kamala Harris. These progressive economic policies could be an antidote to the pseudo-populism of the Trumpist right — if only they weren’t anathema to the Democratic Party leadership.