By electing Donald Trump again, the American electorate has made a bad decision, one that will expose our country to unreasonable risks in areas from foreign policy to public health. Fiscal policy will get worse—budget deficits will become even larger, keeping interest rates high, and programs that provide health care to the poor and elderly are likely to be trimmed back to finance tax cuts for rich people. Abortion rights are likely to be further restricted by a hostile administration that uses the powers of the FDA and the Department of Justice to make abortion harder to provide. And we’ll have another four years under Trump’s exhausting, mercurial, and divisive leadership, making our politics nastier and stupider.

I wish the election had gone the other way. I am annoyed. That said, when Trump won eight years ago, I was much more than annoyed. I was really upset and shocked. This time is different, because Americans have been through this before, and I expect we’ll get through it again. But it’s also different because there’s a big part of me that feels Democrats deserved to lose this election, even if Trump did not deserve to win it.

I write this from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, which doesn’t mean we receive the best government services. Our transportation agencies are black holes for money, unable to deliver on their capital plans despite repeated increases in the dedicated taxes that fund them, because building a subway line here costs four times as much per mile as it does in France, and because union rules force the agency to overstaff itself, inflating operating costs. Half of bus riders don’t pay the fare, and MTA employees don’t try to make them. Emotionally disturbed homeless people camp out on the transit system—the other day, I was on a bus where one shouted repeatedly at another passenger that he was a “faggot.” And even though police are all over the place (at great taxpayer expense), they don’t do much about these disturbances, and I can’t entirely blame them since our government lacks the legal authority to keep troubled people either in jail or in treatment. The city cannot stop people from shoplifting, so most of the merchandise at pharmacies is in locked cabinets. A judge recently said the city can’t even padlock the illegal cannabis stores that have popped up all over the place—that’s apparently unconstitutional, and so years into what was supposed to be the “wokest” legal cannabis regime in the country, our government still can’t figure out how to make sure that people who sell weed have a license to do so, even though they’ve done that with regard to alcohol forever.

[Read: The ‘stop the steal’ movement isn’t letting up]

Ever since the COVID shutdowns, Democrats here have stopped talking very much about the importance of investing in public education, but the schools remain really expensive for taxpayers even as families move away, enrollment declines, and chronic absenteeism remains elevated. Currently, we are under a state-court order to spend billions of our dollars to house migrants in Midtown hotels that once housed tourists and business travelers. Housing costs are insane because the city makes building anything very hard—and visiting here is really expensive, too, partly because so many hotels are now full of migrants, and partly because the city council made building new hotels functionally illegal. And as a result of all of this, New York is shedding population—the state will probably lose three more congressional districts in the next reapportionment. And where are people moving to? To Sun Belt states, mostly run by Republicans, where building housing and growing the economy is still possible.

Meanwhile, the voters of New York have just adopted an equal-rights amendment to the state constitution, which was put on the ballot by the Democrat-controlled state legislature. One effect of this amendment is to create a state constitutional right to abortion. Of course, abortion was already legal in New York, and a state constitutional provision will not override any new federal laws or regulations that Republicans might impose with their new control in Washington. This is exactly the sort of brain-dead symbolism that exemplifies the Democrats who rule our state: They pat themselves on the back for a formalistic, legal declaration of the rights of the people who live here, and meanwhile, people of all races and identities flee New York for other, officially less “inclusive” places where they can actually afford a decent quality of life.

I am unfortunately a Democrat, but as someone who lives in a place that is governed very badly by Democrats, I can easily understand why “Can you imagine what incompetent, lunatic shit those people will do if they get control of the government?” would fall flat as an argument against Republicans. It doesn’t surprise me that the very largest swings away from Democrats in this post-COVID, post–George Floyd, post-inflation election occurred in blue states. The gap between Democrats’ promise of better living through better government and their failure to actually deliver better government has been a national political problem. So when Republicans made a pitch to change all this (or even burn it all down), it didn’t fall flat.

Right before Election Day, Ross Douthat wrote a column for The New York Times that left me quite uneasy. It was about the campaign signs he was seeing all over New Haven that read Harris-Walz 2024: Obviously. Douthat started with a point that’s almost tautological: Because the election appeared close, by definition neither candidate was the obvious choice. And he looked at why the decision would not be obvious to so many voters, writing:

Let’s take one last survey of why some waverers might not yet be sold on Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, by returning to where this all began: The world of 2016, when Americans normally disinclined to vote for liberals were first informed that there was no other reasonable choice … the promise was that even if you disagreed with liberalism’s elites on policy, you could trust them in three crucial ways: They would avoid insanity, they would maintain stability, and they would display far greater intelligence and competence than Trump and his hangers-on.

Many voters believe these promises were broken. Of course, the most politically significant aspect of the instability has been post-COVID inflation—a global problem that has taken out incumbent governments of the right and left all over the world. Inflation is mostly not Democrats’ fault, though they did exacerbate it by overstimulating the economy with the American Rescue Plan, and then they failed to focus early enough on inflation as the key economic problem of this administration.

To be precise, the ARP, passed in early 2021, constituted an unnecessary $2 trillion stimulus that mostly produced inflation rather than real GDP growth. Then, throughout 2022, even as inflation started to bite, Democrats were still looking for every way they could find to spend as much money as possible to satisfy interest-group constituencies. Even the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which was supposed to reduce inflation by reducing the deficit, is currently increasing the deficit by tens of billions of dollars a year and, if left unchanged, will continue to do so through 2027. The deficit reduction does not begin until 2028, far too late to be politically relevant for Joe Biden’s Democrats.

The other big destabilizer is the migrant crisis, which was born out of this administration’s fecklessness—Biden rapidly reversing Trump’s immigration executive orders upon entering office without any plan for controlling the border and apparently without realizing that migrants are smart, and will be more likely to come if you make clear that coming very likely means they will get to stay. (A failure to consider incentives is a running theme when Democrats fail.) Democrats did not pivot to enforcement until far too late—and not until after Texas Governor Greg Abbott made the crisis a blue-state issue by bussing migrants here en masse to fill Democrats’ hotels and consume Democratic budgets.

On the “insanity” front, Douthat cites the political movement in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, responses to COVID, and trans-youth medicine—all areas where liberals’ moral fervor has caused them to lose sight of whether the ideologically driven courses they had taken were actually producing the intended positive effects. Democrats know they paid a price for “Defund the police” and they have mostly learned their lesson, or at least they will now, because several high-profile “progressive” prosecutors lost their blue-city posts this week. On the COVID restrictions, Democrats have not really reckoned with how off-putting a lot of the busybody moralizing was, but this issue will likely simply fade with time.

As for trans issues, I have been skeptical about their political salience—although I don’t believe that Lia Thomas belonged on the Penn women’s swim team, I also can’t imagine casting a vote based on my views about that story. But Kamala Harris’s 2019 declaration to the ACLU that she would have the government pay for gender-affirming surgeries for prisoners and people held in immigration detention became a major attack line against her in this campaign. That’s because it highlights several problems with the party’s image all at once: Here was the Democratic nominee, bowing to pressure from interest groups to look for ways to spend your tax dollars on the most bespoke concern of a criminal, or of a noncitizen who isn’t even supposed to be here, before thinking about you and your interests. But the truly grim irony about the political cost of this promise is that, of course, the federal government that only got seven electric-vehicle-charging stations built in two years has performed zero transgender surgeries on detained migrants. That’s the Democrats in a nutshell: the party that promises trans surgeries for undocumented immigrants but doesn’t deliver them.

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

And all of this is why I think Democrats’ approach to the cost-of-living issues that have dominated this campaign has fallen so flat. The Democratic argument is, more or less, “look at all my programs”—all of the things I’m going to have the government do to make life easier for you. In some cases, they have a clear track record to run on: The Affordable Care Act has gotten more popular over time, and the expanded subsidies that reduce the premiums most Americans pay to buy individual plans on the exchanges have increased enrollment. But mostly, I think Americans look around at how it goes when the government actually tries to help, and they have a healthy skepticism about how helpful the government is really going to be, and about whether the benefits are really going to flow to them. Democrats are making too many promises; they have tried to do a zillion different things and done them badly at great expense, as was the approach with the moribund Build Back Better Act. They instead need to pick a few things for the government to do really well, with a focus on benefits to the broad public rather than to the people being paid to provide the services.

Although I think Harris should have picked Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate, I don’t think choosing him would have changed the outcome. But Shapiro is a popular swing-state governor who will be a front-runner for the 2028 nomination. And Shapiro’s signature policy achievement is rebuilding a highway underpass. There is a lesson here: When government focuses on its core responsibilities and delivers on them quickly, efficiently, and with a laser focus on making sure people can go about their lives as normal, the voters reward that. You don’t need a grand vision; you need to execute.

Winning the next federal election is important. For that reason, it is important that Democrats get the voters to believe they deserve to win that election. They have two years to work on it before the midterms.

This article was adapted from a post on Josh Barro’s Substack, Very Serious.

In Jilly Cooper’s world, men conquer, women sigh, the sun shines perpetually on pale-gold Cotswolds mansions with bluebells in bloom, and absolutely everyone is DTF, as the parlance goes. If Charles Dickens had been alive at the end of the 20th century, with a Viagra prescription and a window into the sporting pursuits of the English upper classes, he might have written books like Cooper’s: as heavy as doorstops and horny as hell, meticulously researched and brimming with romps in the verdant countryside. The Marvel Cinematic Universe wasn’t even a gleam in Kevin Feige’s eye when Cooper created Rutshire, a fictional county occupied by a cast of wicked aristocrats, innocent heroines, and vulgar strivers who rotate in and out of her novels, fortune hunting and bed-hopping and scrutinizing one another’s family trees with one laconically arched eyebrow.

This is no country for modern men. Rivals, arguably the best of Cooper’s particular brand of bonkbusters, is set in 1986, which makes the new TV adaptation for Hulu technically a costume drama, stuffed with shoulder pads, canary-yellow Versace shirts, permed hair, and lots of Laura Ashley. To love Cooper’s stories, as I have for several decades, is to be constantly aware of how enmeshed they are in a particular time and place, one where racehorses were celebrities, groping was standard, and everybody seemed to be in love with Princess Diana. Even the author herself has floundered when she’s tried to update her style for the 21st century. (I’m too often haunted by a line from her 2006 novel, Wicked!, in which she tackles 9/11 by lamenting that the “people leaping out of the flaming tower windows” tragically had “no wisteria to aid their descent.”)

And yet, I can say: Make room in your life for Rivals. It’s undoubtedly the silliest show that’s come to television this year, but it’s also deeply serious about pleasure, which makes it as faithful to the ethos of its source material as anything could be. In the opening scene, Rupert Campbell-Black (played by Alex Hassell), the gravitational center of Cooper’s world, is seen pleasuring a woman in the bathroom of a Concorde jet, thrusting so vigorously that she hardly notices when the plane goes supersonic. Rupert is a former Olympic show jumper, a Conservative MP, and a lothario in the James Bond (or Casanova, or Warren-Beatty-during-the-1970s) mold, which is to say that he’s entirely unlike anyone who’s ever actually lived. When he swaggers back to his seat, the female passengers swoon slightly as he passes. The tone, immediately, is one of absurd, winking excess. Rupert, arrogant, priapic to a fault, and vulnerable underneath the machismo is—somehow!—hard not to root for, if only because everyone who hates him is so much worse.

[Read: Let’s never do this to Edith Wharton again]

The actual dramatic arc of Rivals involves the arcane world of British commercial-television franchises—which, the less fretted over, the better. The primary villain is Lord Tony Baddingham (David Tennant), the cigar-chomping, new-money heir to a munitions fortune and the boss of a regional British TV network who’s both evil and pathologically jealous of Rupert. In need of a hit show, Tony poaches Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner), a fiery Irish talk-show host, from the BBC, and promises Declan total authority over his interviews. Declan’s feckless wife, Maud (Victoria Smurfit); his angelic elder daughter, Taggie (Bella Maclean); and his younger daughter, Caitlin (Catriona Chandler), all immediately fall for Rupert, whose ancestral manor house is located just a couple of fields away. Declan, quite a serious character in the novel, proceeds to drink obscene amounts of whiskey and smoke intellectually in the bath, glowering beneath his mustache.

The business of television during the heady Thatcherite ’80s feels fundamentally at odds with the bucolic Cotswolds setting—an aesthetic clash of giant cellphones and gentle pastures, boardroom meetings and stray sheep. The unifying force, of course, is sex. Everyone is doing it, and with gusto. Tony is sleeping with his star new producer, Cameron Cook (Nafessa Williams), imported from NBC for her professional acumen and passion for yelling. Maud is sleeping with an old flame. Rupert is sleeping with basically everyone. In the first episode, a mortified Taggie catches him playing naked tennis with the wife of one of his fellow MPs. Patient, virtuous, and brave, Taggie is obviously the romantic heroine of the story, yet the TV adaptation finds surprising depth in a will-they-won’t-they storyline featuring a dowdy writer, Lizzie (Katherine Parkinson), and a gentle, gruff tech investor, Freddie (Danny Dyer). Both married to (terrible) other people, they have the kind of sincere, curious chemistry that defies more conventional romantic storytelling. Pleasure, Rivals insists, should be for all.

To be this camp now, this kitschy and unabashed, is no easy feat. Cooper’s novels are easy to parody, yet Rivals never veers too far in that direction. The clothes, the music (a key romantic scene is scored to Chris de Burgh’s “The Lady in Red”), the extravagance, and the boozing—all are roundly mocked. But the writers, Dominic Treadwell-Collins and Laura Wade, seem to have an underlying affection for both the source material and the era. This isn’t to say they’re nostalgic; quite the opposite. The series is savvy about what women in 1986 were working with, and it even has flashes of real acuity toward the end. But watching Rivals, I was more drawn to the qualities it has that’ve been largely absent from more prestigious shows this year: joy, and also abundance, sly humor, and fun. Amid a glut of dour, depressed series with Serious Things to Say, a show that carries itself so lightly is absolutely welcome.

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