The long Obama era is over | Osita Nwanevu

The Democrats must learn to speak to voters who don't believe in the politics of old and aren't interested in returning to it

The ever-splenetic HL Mencken once wrote that democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard". He was no liberal, but it's a line many Democrats today would be taken with. On Tuesday, the first wave of election postmortems have lamented, the American people took the full measure of Donald Trump - oaf, cheat, bigot and fascist - and re-elected him under no illusions, in full cognizance of what another Trump term would mean for the country.

One can quibble with this just a bit: there's a lot that emerged over the course of this campaign that most voters probably didn't know much about, from a plan to invade Mexico that Trump may well have forgotten himself to late breaking news on the depth of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Still, frustrated Democrats are directionally correct here on the whole. Trump won this election fairly, squarely and soundly as a well-known quantity - a former president and the most widely discussed man in the world, who will return to the White House in his 10th year at the center of American life.

Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist