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Let us extend our ethic of care to our celebrities, and in particular white celebrities, so many of whom contributed their time and talent to the Kamala Harris campaign. These people understand both justice and mercy, and their greatest concern is neither fame nor fortune, but the plight of America’s—and the world’s—most disadvantaged. Consider Mark Ruffalo.

The day before the election, he posted on Instagram a comedic short to “help Trump go bye-bye,” a compilation of clips of Donald Trump saying “Bye” or “Bye-bye.” The day before that, he’d posted a video of two young Native American people worried about the upcoming election: “We need a superhero,” one of them says and, just like that: Mark Ruffalo! “It’s scary,” he says. “Trump does not care about the Native people.”

He also posted a video he’d made with Rania Batrice, a Palestinian American who is a World Economic Forum “Exceptional Woman of Excellence.” Ruffalo, however, was the star. The video was intended for voters so angry about the war in Gaza, they were considering a protest vote for a third-party candidate over Harris: “If you’re thinking of voting for Jill Stein, please take a listen,” Ruffalo said, in his compelling, patronizing way. “I understand how devastated and angry you are,” he said. “For over a year now, many of us have been on the front lines of calling for the end of the genocide in Gaza and now the killing in Lebanon.” Who is “us”? And where was the “front line”? West L.A.? Studio City? (Ruffalo, needless to say, has not spent the past year sharing his outrage over the Hamas attacks of October 7 that took 1,200 lives and precipitated the conflict.)

“We’ve been outraged at the Biden administration’s complicity and inhumanity as the invasion has spread to Lebanon and marches closer and closer towards a forever war,” he said, and offered the weirdest political pitch in history: Show up for Harris because “we can and we will hold her accountable on her first day in office.” Even for those voters who might have shared his premises, it was a bizarre theory: Vote for a war criminal so we can frog-march her to American Nuremberg as soon as she climbs down from the podium.

[Read: America’s class politics have turned upside down]

This is one of the things that white celebrities do best: forge a bond with members of a marginalized community, and then tell them what to do. But this time, it didn’t work. What’s a superhero to do when he learns that at least half of Native Americans voted for Trump? (“Long time coming,” said a former vice president of the Navajo Nation, Myron Lizer.)

What about the gut punch of almost half of Latino voters choosing Trump? That’s something the white celebrities weren’t prepared for, and it hurt. But they had to put on a brave face. As Brad Pitt told Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, “Don’t cry in front of the Mexicans.” Let us respect the privacy of the white celebrities at this difficult time. Three-tenths of Black men under the age of 45 voted for Trump. There’s no one with whom white celebrities assume greater common cause than young Black men. The Black Lives Matter protests were their Tiananmen Square.

The minute it became clear that Harris had lost, reporters and panelists began offering explanations—explanations so obvious that you had to wonder why they hadn’t seen the loss coming. Of course they were correct: The results proved that millions of people don’t want to see an apparently endless flow of undocumented immigrants entering the country; they loathe the way DEI absolutism empowered an army of bureaucrats to mete out mysterious punishments for ridiculous offenses. They don’t want to hear anyone’s pronouns; they don’t want to be told that crime is down when they’re busy getting carjacked; and they never, ever want to watch The View again.

These various social causes helped win Trump the election. His narrative didn’t pass most tests of logic or economic theory and yet it was constructed on a foundation of grievances that rang true to millions of Americans, and Democrats met it with no narrative at all. It was as though the party had spent a quarter century running a very large tab, and on Election Day, the whole thing finally came due. I couldn’t really attach that vague sense of the problem to any of its component parts, so as I always do when I’m confused about the Democratic Party, I called Noah Redlich.

“How did this happen?” I asked him, and he said something that not a single aggrieved commentator or anyone on the Topanga front line had said.

“When I heard J. D. Vance say that he was in fourth grade when Joe Biden voted for NAFTA, I said, ‘We’re screwed!’”

Noah is a second-year law student at Fordham University. I’ve known him since he was 5. At 7 he could tell you the name of every U.S. senator. It wasn’t just a party trick—as he grew older, his interest in politics grew into a strong belief in the Democratic Party’s potential to improve the lives of the working and middle classes. I spend a huge amount of time talking to Democrats, some of them extremely well versed in the party’s positions on various topics. So why do I trust Noah more than these mandarins? Because more often than not, they’ll break into an argument that requires me to accept that various facts on the ground don’t exist. Noah has worked or volunteered on many campaigns, and when he would come back from a red state he would never say “Those Republican voters are scum.” He would come back saying “These voters are concerned about …”

“When Vance talked about NAFTA,” Noah said, “it had a visceral connection with a lot of people who continue to be deeply affected by it. Even the name of that agreement has deep resonance for a huge number of people from Appalachia and across the Midwest, because they saw their manufacturing jobs disappear.”

Industrial decline began long before NAFTA, of course, but it was an efficient engine for taking away jobs. Corporations did what they always do, if they’re allowed to do it, which is chase cheap labor. Their response to union efforts and worker resentment was to say, You better just keep working or we’ll send your jobs away.

“No one at the Democratic convention talked about NAFTA,” Noah said. “How could they? They’re too in love with Bill Clinton.”

Bill Clinton spent his first year in office aggressively lobbying for the passage of NAFTA. He curried favor with Wall Street, and in 1999 signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall regulations enacted after the 1929 stock-market crash, which helped lead  to the 2007–08 financial crisis and the Great Recession. He ushered in the era of the billionaire-friendly Democratic Party, which was somehow going to coexist with—and benefit—the members of its traditional stronghold: the working class.

Clinton once held a lot of credibility with the working class, but that was a long time ago. And yet the party remains so convinced of his popularity that it sent him to Michigan to campaign.

And then there’s Hillary. “Noah, why in the world is Hillary Clinton still taken seriously by the Democratic Party?”

“I have no idea! She lost an election; her entire worldview has been rejected; people don’t like endless free trade that sends their jobs overseas; they don’t like the endless wars, like the Iraq War, which she voted for. People don’t want that anymore. She’s stuck in a previous era that people have moved away from.”

And yet she wields a particular power at the most elite levels of the party. In the rooms where the rounds of toast are always spread with roasted bone marrow and the “California varietals” are always Kistler and Stag’s Leap, and where the sons and daughters are always about to graduate from Princeton or rescue an African village or marry a hedge funder or become an analyst at McKinsey—in those lovely rooms, where the doors close with a muffled click of solidity, Hillary Clinton still wears the ring to be kissed.

She was perhaps the first person to launch a woke argument during a presidential campaign, ridiculing Bernie Sanders’s intention to break up big banks by asking: “Would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?” Seeing that argument in its infant form, made by a woman who several times collected $225,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, is a reminder of how stupid and morally bankrupt it is.

For that matter, why does the party keep dragging Liz Cheney everywhere like she’s Piltdown Man? Yes, there are Republicans who don’t like Trump, but they don’t hold much sway with Democratic voters. Nicolle Wallace and Bill Kristol do not a coalition make.

One thing the party needs to learn is that no one, anywhere, ever wants to be reminded of the Iraq War.

“It was disastrous to use her so heavily,” Noah told me. “She represents the establishment, the ruling class that people rejected during this populist moment. These people aren’t popular. That’s why Donald Trump runs the Republican Party, not the Cheneys or the Bushes.”

He’s a second-year law student! Why couldn’t the leaders of the Democratic Party see these obvious mistakes?

Harris’s campaigning with Liz Cheney allowed Trump to say, as he did many times, that the Democrats are tied to the Cheneys and their endless wars, and liable to send your kid off to die in a foreign conflict. Trump ran as an anti-war politician, but he certainly wasn’t one the last time he held office. He did most of the things Liz Cheney would have wanted him to do: He ripped up the Iran nuclear deal, and increased military spending numerous times. He was more hawkish on Russia than Barack Obama was, and increased sanctions against the country. I’m not saying any of these things were necessarily wrong, but it certainly wasn’t John and Yoko on a bed-in for peace.

But all of these are mere blunders when compared with the real problem. The sign that needs to be Scotch-taped to a window at the Democratic National Committee should say: It’s the billionaires, stupid. What ails us is that 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and 40 years of allowing private equity and an emergent billionaire class to have untrammeled power has created—in the country of opportunity—a level of income inequality that borders on the feudal. Changing that is supposed to be the work of the Democratic Party, but three decades ago, it crawled into bed with the billionaire class and never got out.

Billionaires are, of course, precious snowflakes, each one made by God and each one unique. But one thing unites almost all of them, be they Republican billionaires or Democratic billionaires: They want to protect a tax code that keeps their mountains of money in a climate-controlled, locked room.

Mark Cuban was a huge and very visible Harris supporter, but for a Democrat, he took some strange turns. He wanted Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission, out of her post. Khan has taken on corporate monopolies that block competition and filed some of the most aggressive antitrust litigation in a generation, and has been especially critical of Big Tech. “By trying to break up the biggest tech companies, you risk our ability to be the best in artificial intelligence,” Cuban told a reporter. The response to that was so severe that he backpedaled by saying that he was “not trying to get involved in personnel.” Personnel? She’s the chair of the FTC, not a booker on Shark Tank. Breaking up the monopolies that rule Big Tech would be very bad for Cuban, but probably give the rest of us some breathing room. (On the other team, Vance said he agreed with some of Kahn’s positions.)

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: What the left keeps getting wrong]

In a populist moment, the Democratic Party had the extremely rich and the very famous, some great music, and Mark Ruffalo. And they got shellacked. Now a lot of people seemed stunned by what happened, sobered by it.

Cuban scrubbed his X account of all political posts, declared himself on “political vacation,” and joined Bluesky, where, if not absolution, then at least a less political position could be staked out. He made a bad bet (why does Bezos make all the right moves?) and now needs to retool the factory.

Ruffalo appeared at a long-scheduled awards dinner for the ACLU of Southern California five days after the election. He got a little choked up, asked everyone to stand up and hug it out, and admitted that it had been hard for him to come to the event at all—which was a relatable position, because everyone hates the Beverly Hilton, but surely it was an easier gig than the front line?

But it’s not the trans athletes or the immigrants or the wokeism that lost the Democrats this election. It’s the rigged economy that has had its boot on the throat of working people for decades. Billionaires, even our very special Democratic billionaires, care about all kinds of things—and many of them peel off a lot of dollars for worthy causes, no doubt—but their political involvement usually comes with a specific price: that the party leaves alone the tax code that safeguards their counting houses.

And, really, after all the billionaires have done for the Democrats, is that too much to ask?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrong about a lot of things in public health. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Raw milk is more dangerous than pasteurized milk. And cellphones haven’t been shown to cause brain cancer. But the basic idea behind his effort to “Make America Healthy Again” is correct: America is not healthy, and our current system has not fixed the problem.

Joe Biden entered office promising to “beat” the coronavirus pandemic, cure cancer, and get more people health care. Arguably no one on Earth can talk more passionately about funding cancer research than Biden, whose son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015 and who, in 2022, announced an initiative to halve U.S. cancer deaths in the next 25 years. Robert Califf, Biden’s FDA commissioner, has been particularly stalwart in arguing that the agency must play a role in reversing a “catastrophic decline” in Americans’ life expectancy, and has repeatedly warned of “an ever-growing epidemic of diet-related chronic diseases,” such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. A 2019 study found that just 12 percent of Americans are considered metabolically healthy, based on their waist circumference, blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol.

Of course Biden’s White House was never going to end cancer or obesity in four years. But many of its policies barely scratched the surface of America’s wide-ranging health problems. Despite Califf’s dramatic language about the country’s diet problems, for example, the FDA’s efforts to improve the situation have mostly revolved around giving Americans more information about healthy foods.

The public-health bureaucracy that the Trump administration will inherit is more focused on and skilled at treating America’s health problems than preventing them. That shortcoming—despite the billions of dollars spent every year at these agencies—has damaged the credibility of the public-health establishment enough that Kennedy is now Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services. Marty Makary, Trump’s pick to lead the FDA, has similarly risen in prominence by second-guessing "medical dogma" in the U.S. and beyond. And Trump’s pick to lead the CDC, former Representative Dave Weldon, has criticized the agency’s vaccine policies and once attempted to block its vaccine-safety research because of what he claimed were conflicts of interest. A set of men who have made careers of distrusting our existing health-care agencies may soon be empowered to try to blow them up.

The Biden administration, to be fair, had less time to deal with America’s deeper health issues, because it was forced to deal with at least a few calamities. Much of Biden’s term was spent navigating the country out of the pandemic. On the whole, his administration achieved most of its COVID goals. The Biden White House provided Americans with free COVID tests and mounted a vaccination campaign that resulted in more than three-quarters of the country getting a shot. Still, the pandemic left the CDC beleaguered by claims that it was simultaneously too slow and too aggressive in its efforts to fight the virus. During Biden’s presidency, the agency promised to “share science and data faster” and “translate science into practical policy,” but it has struggled to respond to the continued spread of bird flu. Public-health experts have slammed the CDC for not sharing enough information about the virus’s spread, including a human case in Missouri earlier this year, and farmers have been reluctant to implement the agency’s recommendations for preventing transmission of the virus from sick cattle to humans.

Some of those calamities were self-inflicted. The FDA is entrusted with ensuring that our food and medicines are safe, and it generally does spot issues quickly after they occur. But for months, the FDA failed to act on a whistleblower complaint alerting regulators to deplorable conditions at an infant-formula factory that eventually caused nationwide formula shortages and two infant deaths. The FDA is also supposed to decide what tobacco products can be sold, but it has failed to police the illegal market for vapes and nicotine pouches, such as Zyn. And for all the administration’s talk of being guided by “science and truth,” the White House seemingly bowed to political pressure and abandoned a plan to ban menthol cigarettes at the very end of a long rule-making process. The past four years have revealed that crucial parts of the agency’s remit—most notably its oversight of tobacco and the food system—have been neglected by agency leadership; in 2022, independent reviews of the FDA’s food and tobacco centers found that both lacked clarity on mission and goals.

At the same time, the administration has failed to deliver on its loftier ambitions. Biden quietly dropped some of his bolder ideas, such as his campaign promise to create a public-option insurance plan. The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, a new government agency that funds high-risk, high-reward research and is essential to Biden’s cancer goals, is in its infancy, and Republicans in Congress are already eager to cut its budget. And some promises, such as Biden’s grand goal to help change America’s diet, have been approached more like trivial pursuits.

The administration branded its 2022 hunger and nutrition conference, for instance, as the largest and most important gathering on nutrition policy since the Nixon administration. That 1960s conference led to millions of children gaining access to school lunch and to the creation of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (or WIC), which provides food to about 6 million Americans each month. The Biden administration’s summit ended with a pledge to end hunger and improve America’s diet by 2030, but the steps taken toward tackling those goals—such as developing a plan to add warning labels to unhealthy foods—have been modest. And all the agency has done so far on that project is conduct research on the labels’ potential design. The FDA has also pledged to lower the sodium in foods, but the targets it’s set for the food industry are entirely voluntary.

These efforts are understandably careful and bureaucratic. The agency’s caution over warning-label design comes amid threats from the food industry to sue over any label deemed unjustified. Indeed, in the U.S. legal system, regulators have trouble mandating that companies do much of anything without it being branded as unconstitutional. But the Biden administration’s efforts look comically inadequate given the scope of America’s health problems.

RFK Jr. is promising a break from the status quo. This is not to say that he, should he be confirmed as health secretary, has a better plan. Most of his ideas amount to little more than pronouncements that he will take sweeping actions immediately once Trump is sworn in as president. The reality is that many of those efforts would take months, if not years, to implement—and some might not be feasible at all. He has signaled, for example, that he will clear house at the FDA’s food center, despite rules that prevent government bureaucrats from being fired willy-nilly. He also has pledged to ban certain chemicals from food, which he’s argued are contributing to American’s lower life expectancy. But for every chemical the FDA bans, it will have to go through a lengthy regulatory process, which would likely be challenged by food companies in court. Kennedy’s notion of significantly altering the system of fees that drug makers pay the FDA to review their products would likely send the agency into a budgetary crisis.

If Kennedy gets confirmed to lead HHS, he will quickly be confronted with the reality that governing is a slow and tedious process that doesn’t take kindly to big, bold ideas, even with an impatient leader like Trump calling the shots. At the outset of his first term, Trump declared war on drug companies, which he claimed were “getting away with murder” due to their high prices. Trump’s then–health secretary, Alex Azar, in turn spent the next four years trying radical fixes that included requiring drug makers to post their prices in TV ads, importing drugs from Canada, tying American drug prices to other countries’, and eliminating the rebates that middlemen negotiate for insurance companies. But each idea got bogged down in bureaucracy and lawsuits. Trump’s early attempts to contain COVID by blocking international air travel similarly did little to keep the virus out of America, despite his claims at the time that the policy “saved us” from widespread outbreaks.

Biden benefited from Operation Warp Speed's rapid push to create vaccines, but it was his team of technocrats that finally got them distributed. And they eventually lowered drug prices too, in a much simpler way than Trump was proposing. But technocracy has also failed to address our most pressing—and most visible—health problems. Trump’s picks have little experience navigating the Rube Goldberg puzzle that is American bureaucracy. They certainly aren’t afraid of trying something new, but we’re about to find out how far that will get them.

Jill Biden, accompanied by her grandson Beau, welcomed the arrival of the festive fir hailing from North Carolina.