Given Donald Trump’s scandal-plagued record in office, failure to contain the COVID pandemic, and provocative behaviour, Democrats have been flabbergasted that former Vice President Joe Biden only managed to win the Presidency by razor-thin margins in battleground swing states.

The election was neither the landslide nor the repudiation of Trump’s populism, character, or governing style that many Americans on the Left had expected and yearned for. Though 7 million more people voted for Biden, many Democrats wondered why more than 72 million American would vote to keep a man of Trump’s character and aggressive demeanour in the White House for another four years?  Now they also have to figure out why some 70% of Republicans believe that Trump actually won the election but is being denied victory through massive voter fraud.

Nightmares in America

An explanation for these collective delusions can be found by analysing the new, illiberal, far-right Republicanism that is aligned behind Trump’s banner and marches when his trumpet blares.

This new voting bloc has complex drives and concerns that led them to coalesce behind Trump. The factors include economic insecurity and despair, racial and ethnic prejudice, religious fundamentalism, anti-scientific and anti-elite bias, ignorance of history and civics, over-reliance on social media and biased TV coverage, and feeble critical thinking muscles. Another calculatingly rational component of Trump’s support comes from the more affluent business community that likes the tax cuts and minimal government regulation that Trump supported.

On the other end of the economic spectrum, the heartland and working-class of America have been hurt by automation and globalization. Workers’ real wages have barely increased in the past 40 years. Since 2009, the U.S. Federal minimum wage has been stuck at only $7.25 an hour for non-tipped workers. How do you live or support a family in 2020 on $14,500 a year? This has been fertile ground for the seeds of Trumpism to take root.

As the nation continued its recovery from the 2008 recession, Trump pointed to his deregulation policies and trade wars as the reason why unemployment had declined. Under his economic policies, however, stable manufacturing jobs became rare and were replaced by low-wage service industry jobs.

With little savings, no secure path to the middle class enjoyed by prior generations, and a realistic fear of the future, many workers without a college education accepted Trump’s lies that their economic position was somehow stronger. In fact, most gains went to the highest-paid workers, and his massive tax cuts dramatically favoured the wealthy and corporations.

The stock market has hit record highs under Trump, throwing off cash to stock investors and pumping up employees’ 401K plans for those lucky enough to have them. Interest rates have been held at record lows, buoying up the housing market and lowering costs for Americans with enough disposable income and credit to buy a home.

Meanwhile, in many cities and towns in Middle America, shops were being shuttered on drab and run-down Main Streets. Many workers struggled with bills, could not pay for high-priced prescription drugs or medical insurance, and had no way to afford to send their kids to college.

Average rents today for an unfurnished apartment are about five times what they were in 1980. A concomitant epidemic of homelessness has put 500,000 Americans on the street. The prior opioid epidemic soared wildly during this time and expanded into a broader epidemic of substance abuse, suicide, violence, and other “deaths of despair.”

The Spectre of Joe Biden

Trump and other Republicans have successively scared the public into believing that Biden will raise their taxes, impose onerous regulations, defund the police, halt fracking, take away their doctor (“Medicare for All”), their guns, and their religious freedom.

    At his rallies and in his tweets, Trump—a former Democrat from 2001-2009—depicted the Democrats, with their coalition of Blacks, Latinos, immigrants, Native Americans, liberals, young voters, and environmentalists, as a force that will end the American Way of Life his supporters want to preserve.

He also succeeded in making climate science denial another ideological issue that appeals to people who resent and mistrust elites, read: intellectuals, journalists, and scientists. He stoked fears that the Left would use climate change and decarbonisation—the Green New Deal— as an excuse for Big Government, Big Spending, overregulation, and the elimination of the fossil fuel industry and its jobs. Biden also provided additional ammunition for the latter charge with his truthful remark that the nation does need to transition away from fossil fuels and must eventually phase out the oil industry.

To an uninformed person who heard these charges relentlessly confirmed by the polemics of Fox opinionators and ultra-conservative television stations, the charges gradually became credible. (Fox is by far the most viewed U.S. cable network.) Democrats unwittingly aided Republicans on law-and-order issues by rallying behind the ill-chosen “Defund the police” slogan that Biden disavowed.

Deprogramming the Base

Although the diverse segments of Trump’s base each see some interest of theirs being served, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts here. Trump’s core group of followers has the hallmarks of a cult.

Cult followers relinquish reliance on their own judgement and let their leader provide a uniform dogma to which they conform. It is a form of mass psychosis. As Trump famously said, "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose voters."

Those familiar with history know that mass psychosis can be induced by a charismatic sociopath, as Hitler demonstrated in Weimar Germany. So it is not irrelevant that many mental health professionals have found the charismatic President mentally unfit. Nonetheless, he has persuaded millions of people to vote against public health, environmental protection, and their own economic interests.

How now can Democrats convince them that Trump sides with rich people over low-income and ordinary Americans, and that he's been playing them for fools? Again, there are no simple answers. Trump is a dangerous cult leader. The millions of followers in his thrall badly need help... But that won’t be easy. Deprogramming is not generally successful, although it must be tried.

The most trusted deprogrammer is likely to be the very Pied Piper who led the flock astray in the first place. Therefore, one possibility would be for wealthy Democratic donors to establish a new media platform where right-wing media celebrities willing to gradually wean their followers from Trump could receive lucrative contracts. At their core, these highly paid ideologues are opportunists willing to say anything that advances their career and is in their financial interest.

Be that as it may, when Joe Biden assumes the Presidency, he should also immediately and patiently begin, issue-by-issue, to re-educate the shellshocked American electorate to bring the psychologically abused Trump voters back to their senses.

Some will be hard to reach. The conspiracy-minded branch of the Republican Party gets their news from social media and opinion shows on radio and TV.

With the individual realities that social media algorithms feed each victim, conspiracies and misinformation circulate at warp speed, confirming biases and inducing the gullible to share these stories and impressions widely as memes. That’s what the business model was designed to do—to generate more ad revenue. (Hat tip to Tristan Harris in “The Social Dilemma.”)

Pervasive reform of social media is thus essential. Perhaps a bipartisan effort can be cobbled together to break up social media powerhouses like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

But so long as they remain unchecked, the grassroots Democrats who walked precincts, made phone calls and sent texts, must now find ways to get into the social media enclaves and actively engage with conservatives. Dems must enter the hitherto homogeneous “thought bubbles” of the Radical Right to at least challenge if not puncture the distorted, unhinged “reality” circulating there.