This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea.

I love a good bean: tossed with vinaigrette in a salad, spooned over pasta, served on a plate with rice and corn. The bean is a powerful little food, all the more for its shapeshifting capacities. Many people can appreciate that these legumes are cheap and healthy, but they still fall short of widespread adoration or even respect.

Yet, over the decades, Atlantic writers have turned to the bean’s revolutionary potential again and again. The humble bean, small, unglamorous, packed with protein, has been a source of inspiration for those seeking to remake the food system, fight climate change, and add some better flavors into American homes. In a 1975 article loftily titled “A Bean to Feed the World?” the historian Richard Rhodes made the case for centering the soybean in the American diet. “We continue to sing of amber waves of grain, not dusty pods of beans,” he bemoans in the opening line.

Noting that the soybean was, at the time, the No. 1 cash crop in the country, Rhodes argues that Americans should be eating it as a source of protein on its own, rather than feeding it to the farm animals that then became dinner. “Conversion of soybeans to food for humans is worth looking at,” he writes. (The soybean, a cousin of the lentil and black bean, has about 30 grams of protein per cup.) Alas, soybeans remain primarily the provenance of livestock today, with the exception of the small percentage used to make popular foods such as tofu.

In 2017, James Hamblin made the urgent climate case for replacing beef with legumes in Americans’ diets, given that cows are among the top agricultural sources of greenhouse gasses worldwide and take up great swaths of arable land. Hamblin explained that by swapping beans for beef, the U.S. could “achieve somewhere between 46 and 74 percent of the reductions needed” to meet the 2020 greenhouse-gas-emission goals set out by President Barack Obama in 2009. (Americans have not wholesale rejected beef in favor of beans, but, in large part because the pandemic slowed travel and economic activity, we did end up meeting those climate goals.)

Part of the problem with beans is that they are not that attractive a food. In a 1992 article, the food writer Corby Kummer acknowledges the “insipid” nature of beans before walking readers through some ways to prepare tasty—and easily digestible—bean-based dishes. But for the horticultural writer Richardson Wright, the bean’s humility is what makes it heroic. During World War II, he wrote that “the coincidence of Saturday night and baked beans was of divine provenance, and with the ardor of the freshly converted, I insisted that we practice.” In a time of loss, a pot of beans—which he calls “farinaceous catechumens,” likening them to starchy bodies readied for baptism—can mean everything. The quasi-religious tone of his Proustian meditation on beans is moving; still, his dietary choice was borne out of desperation and limited rations.

The image of beans as a backup when you don’t have, or can’t afford, anything better has proven hard to shake. Even as vegetarian diets are on the rise and Americans recognize the environmental impact of beef, eating meat remains an intractable part of American life. For all the trendiness of brothy beans and Rancho Gordo subscriptions in recent years, many Americans still haven’t made legumes central to their diets. One estimate found that, as of 2019, the average American ate approximately 55 pounds of chicken a year compared with roughly 2.5 pounds of cooked black beans (American bean consumption is low compared to many other countries). Still, there are reasons to hope: Americans have embraced hummus, which is made of chickpeas. Chic New York restaurants are serving bean-based dishes. And a climate campaign with ties to the United Nations is pushing to double global bean consumption by 2028. Though the bean may not be the flashiest ingredient, it is persistent—and it may even shape a better world in its image.

Representative Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat, cut me off before I even finished my question: Congressman, were you— “Surprised? No, I was not surprised,” Torres, who represents a poor and working-class district in the Bronx, told me. “Much of my side in politics, and much of the media, was in a state of self-deception. We confused analysis with wishful thinking.”

Which is to say, too many in Torres’s party assumed that they were heralds of virtue and endangered democratic values and that Americans would not, as a despairing New York Times columnist put it this week, vote for an “authoritarian grotesquerie.”

This, Torres argued, was purest delusion. Inflation and steeply rising rates on credit cards, car loans, and mortgages may not have been President Joe Biden’s fault, but they buffeted Americans. The immigration system was broken, and migrants swamped shelters in big cities. There’s no need to assume—as some commentators have after Donald Trump’s sweeping victory Tuesday—that the United States has a uniquely fallen electorate; across the globe, voters have tossed out governments on the left and right over the disruptions of the past five years. “A majority of Americans disapprove of Biden’s performance and felt they were worse off,” Torres said; Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, “was not responsible for the inflation, but objectively, that was a near-insurmountable disadvantage.”

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

Torres pointed as well to the cumulative toll taken by progressives who for at least a decade have loudly championed cultural causes and chanted slogans that turned off rank-and-file Democrats across many demographics. “Donald Trump had no greater friend than the far left,” Torres told me, “which alienated historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews with absurdities like ‘Defund the police’ or ‘From the river to the sea’ or ‘Latinx.’”

The result is the reality that Americans woke up to on Wednesday. The overwhelming majority of counties in the nation, even some of the bluest of blue, had shifted rightward. The Republicans had broken down the door to the Democrats’ house and were sitting in the living room drinking its beer (or wine, as the case might be). On the day after the election, I clicked through a digital election-results map of New Jersey. Biden in 2020 took New Jersey, a Democratic Party bastion, by nearly 16 percentage points over Trump; Harris won the state by a more parsimonious five points. Everywhere, Republicans sanded down Democratic margins. In the state’s northeast corner, across from New York City, Biden had taken prosperous Bergen County by 16 percentage points in 2020; Harris took the same county by three points. Far to the south, in Atlantic County, which includes the deteriorating casino capital of Atlantic City, Biden had won by seven points; Trump took it by four points.

Torres emphasized that in his view, Harris ran a vigorous and effective campaign, given the circumstances. He did not discern many missteps. Although she sometimes tossed up clouds of vagueness when asked about past positions, she was disciplined and avoided mouthing the buzzwords of the cultural left during her 2024 campaign. But she could not sidestep her previous concessions to liberal cultural fevers, as she discovered when the Trump campaign bludgeoned her with endless commercials highlighting her decision, during her bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, to champion state-funded gender-transition surgery for prisoners.

In recent election cycles, Democrats have invested much hope that “people of color”—the widely varied and disparate peoples long imagined to be a monolith—would embrace an expansive list of progressive causes and rearrange American politics.

Politics, alas, is more complex than simply arranging virtuous ethnic and racial voting blocs, and Trump’s gains this year among nonwhite voters are part of a longer trend. Four years ago, even as Biden triumphed, a majority of Asian and Latino voters in California rejected a ballot proposition that would have restored affirmative action in education and hiring.

For some anti-Trump and progressive commentators, the leakage of Latino, Black, and Asian voters from the Democratic column this year registered as a shock, even a betrayal. This week, the MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough and his guest, the Reverend Al Sharpton, both upset with Trump’s triumph, suggested that Harris’s race and gender worked against her. “A lot of Hispanic voters have problems with Black candidates,” Scarborough opined; Black men, Sharpton said, are among “the most sexist” people.

To accept such stereotypes requires ignoring piles of contrary evidence. In 2008 and again in 2012, to cite an example, Hispanic voters up and down the Rio Grande Valley in Texas delivered huge electoral margins to President Barack Obama, who is Black. Many millions of Black men, nearly 80 percent of those who cast a ballot, exit polls suggest, voted for Harris this past Tuesday.

Black and Latino voters are not the only demographics drawing blame for Trump’s victory. Some commentators have pointed an accusatory finger at white women, suggesting they bear a group guilt for selling out women’s rights. This fails as a matter of fact. Nearly half of white women voted for Harris. But more to the point, telling people how to think and not to think is toxic in politics. Yet many liberal commentators seem unable to help themselves.

A week before the election, Marcel Roman, a Harvard government professor, explained on X that he and a Georgetown colleague had discovered that Latino voters deeply dislike being labeled Latinx, a gender-neutral term now widespread in academia. This term also came into use by Democratic politicians eager to establish their bona fides with progressive activists. Alas, voters liked it not so much.

[Josh Barro: Democrats deserved to lose]

This problem seems easily remedied: Refer to voters by the term they prefer—Latino, say, or Hispanic. Roman drew a different conclusion, calling for “political education meant to root out queerphobia in Latino communities.”

Professors might heed the words of Representative Ruben Gallego, a Latino Democrat who is currently wrapped in a tight race for a Senate seat in Arizona. Four years ago, I spoke with him about identity politics in his party. A progressive, Gallego is a favorite of Latino activists, who flock from California to work on his campaigns. He told me that he appreciated their help but warned them that if they used the word Latinx when talking to his Latino constituents, he would load them onto the next bus back to Los Angeles.

“It’s just important that white liberals don’t impose their thoughts and policies on us,” he told me.

And nonwhite liberals too, he might have added.

Having lost twice to Trump in three election cycles, and this time watching Republicans reclaim control of the Senate, Democrats might do well to listen carefully and respectfully to the tens of millions of Americans whom they claim to want to represent. This need not entail a turn away from populist economics so much as remaining clear-eyed about self-righteous rhetoric and millennialist demands.

The party might pay some heed to Torres, the Bronx representative. A veteran of political wars, he is a progressive Democrat on economic issues and has taken much grief of late from left activists for his vigorous support of Israel. He noted in our conversation that he is strongly in favor of immigration, and his majority-Latino district has many hardworking undocumented residents who need his aid.

But he recognizes that the national electorate, not least many Latino and Black voters, now seeks to at least partially close the door and tighten restrictions. He accepts that reality. “You have to recognize that in a democracy, public opinion matters,” he said. “We cannot just assume that we can reshape the world in a utopian way.”

In an election year that fell decisively, disastrously short of utopian for Democrats, such advice registers as entirely practical.