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Over a year after the election that handed Donald Trump a decisive return victory, the Democratic Party has still not issued its election autopsy. However, last week, an prominent liberal advocacy organization published its own. The Harris campaign, its authors contended, did not resonate with key voter blocs because it failed to concentrate enough on addressing basic economic anxieties. In focusing on the threat to democracy that Maga authoritarianism represented, progressives overlooked the bread-and-butter issues that were uppermost in many people’s minds.

A Warning for Europe

While Europe prepares for a tumultuous period of politics from now until the end of the decade, that is a lesson that needs to be fully absorbed in European capitals. The White House, as its recently published national security strategy makes clear, is optimistic that “patriotic” parties in Europe will quickly replicate Mr Trump’s success. Within Europe's Franco-German engine room, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) lead the polls, backed by large swaths of working-class voters. Yet among mainstream leaders and parties, it is hard to discern a response that is sufficient to troubling times.

Major Challenges and Expensive Solutions

The issues Europe faces are costly and era-defining. They encompass the war in Ukraine, maintaining the momentum of the green transition, dealing with demographic change and building economies that are less vulnerable to bullying by Mr Trump and China. According to a European research institute, the new age of geopolitical insecurity could require an additional €250bn in yearly EU defence spending. A major study last year on European economic competitiveness demanded massive investment in shared infrastructure, to be financed in part by jointly held EU debt.

Such a economic transformation would stimulate growth figures that have flatlined for years.

But, at both the EU-wide and national levels, there remains a deficit of courage when it comes to revenue raising. The EU’s so-called “budget hawks resist the idea of collective borrowing, and EU spending plans for the next seven years are deeply unambitious. In France, the idea of a wealth tax is overwhelmingly popular with voters. But the embattled centrist government – though desperate to cut its budget deficit – refuses to contemplate such a move.

The Price of Political Paralysis

The truth is that without such measures, the less well-off will bear the brunt of fiscal tightening through austerity budgets and increased inequality. Acrimonious recent conflicts over retirement reforms in both France and Germany highlight a growing battle over the future of the European social model – a phenomenon that the RN and the AfD have happily exploited to promote a politics of welfare chauvinism. Ms Le Pen’s party, for example, has resisted moves to raise the retirement age and has stated that it would focus any benefit cuts at foreign residents.

Avoiding a Strategic Advantage for Populists

Across the Atlantic, Mr Trump’s promises to protect working-class interests were largely insincere, as later Medicaid cuts and tax breaks for the wealthy demonstrated. But without a convincing progressive alternative from the Harris campaign, they worked on the campaign trail. Without a radical shift in economic approach, social contracts across the continent are in danger of being ripped up. Governments must avoid giving this electoral boon to the Trumpian forces already on the march in Europe.