On Wednesday morning, Democrats woke up with a hangover after an eight-year-long binge. Despite the consolidation of the whole of the progressive movement around opposition to Donald Trump, his success this week makes him only the second person in American history to have won non-consecutive presidential elections. The size of his victory reveals the magnitude of progressive anti-Trumpism’s defeat.

So whither Democrats today — response or resistance? There are some ominous signs for those hoping for a full-scale Democratic rethink. On MSNBC, talking heads blamed “white women voters” and the “patriarchy” for Harris’s defeat. A piece of news “analysis” at the New York Times opens with the headline “America Hires a Strongman” and warns that “America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history.” That sounds like ingredients for an even stronger resistance cocktail.

In the months leading up to the election, political players in the Beltway were already sketching out a new recipe for the Resistance if Trump were to win. A group called “Democracy Futures Project” led a series of simulations in mid-2024 to lay out strategies of resistance to a second Trump administration. In a column published in the Washington Post, one of the advisors for this project offered a vision of complete mobilisation against Trump on the part of business executives, Government bureaucrats, and local officials. In addition to raising the possibility of mass protests in the streets, the column also proposed a series of sanctions — from legal action to “loss of future employment” — in order to “deter the president’s enablers”.

Despite facing an uphill climb, proponents of a more sober response to Trump’s rise could point to his decisive victory as a sign for necessary changes to progressive politics. A Democratic congressman representing the Bronx, Ritchie Torres, slammed the “far left” on social media and said that “there is more to lose than there is to gain politically from pandering to a far left that is more representative of Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok than it is of the real world.” He added: “The working class is not buying the ivory-towered nonsense that the far-Left is selling.” Many of those who hope that Democrats will avoid the debacle of the past eight years have looked to elected officials such as Torres and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as potential leaders for a movement to help the party regain the cultural centre.

Still, these would-be Democratic reformers face major challenges. It’s one thing to rebuke the “far-Left” in the abstract; it’s another to support concrete policies that would break from the vision of identity-politics activists. During the Biden years, elected Democrats often complained about the chaos at the border, but those talking points rarely translated into concrete legislative action. Even the grand “bipartisan border bill” would in fact have created a revolving door for the processing of asylum seekers. Putting a camo hat on the same old policies is unlikely to move most voters.