An anti-racism protest. The election results shake our faith that the U.S. is a country that cares about basic justice. | Getty Images

A policy tweak here. A change in messaging there.

This, apparently, was what had to happen to thwart Donald Trump and elect Kamala Harris president on Nov. 5, according to the experts’ election post-mortems.

Sorry, but there is an elephant in the room. Policy? messaging? It goes far deeper than that.

We had a Republican candidate who campaigned by checking all the ism boxes. He bet heavily on racism, white nationalism and toxic masculinity that channeled his long history of misogynistic anti-feminism. 

And voters preferred even that to a Democrat. Perhaps any Democrat. We don’t know if  the outcome would have been any different if Trump hadn’t faced a woman of color this election.

This is not solely a party problem. It’s a national one that lays bare our majority identity.

Few are owning up to it, neither the Republican voters who embraced Trump’s message nor the Democrats who dare not speak the isms lest they further alienate voters whose support they covet for the next election.

We must grapple here with a distasteful probability. 

This is who we are.

We say voters simply preferred Trump’s policy prescriptions to Harris’. We say that Harris projected weakness and Trump strength.

And we refuse to acknowledge the deeply retrograde impulses that underly  many of Trump’s prescriptions, particularly those dealing with immigration. And we refuse to accept that many assign strength and weakness according to gender, misunderstanding both true strength and weakness.

Yes, we heard Trump plainly vilify undocumented immigrants as rapists and killers. We heard his condescension on protecting women whether they want it or not. We were savvy to his actions that led to upending Roe v. Wade. We know of his bromances with the world’s authoritarians. We bought that this election was about fixing an economy that wasn’t really all that broken. Voters bought the  fear Trump was peddling  not of just immigrants who supposedly suck up tax dollars for benefits they have no chance of accessing, but transgender people in bathrooms and locker rooms. We even knew of Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, of his felony convictions and the charges still pending.

But people  dismissed the news about Trump’s  corruption, racism, anti-democratic goals and misogyny as politically correct whining.

Many delude themselves about who and what Trump is. So, we can all delude ourselves about who we are, the nation that elected him..

A fear: Democrats will draw a faulty lesson from Harris’ failed bid, refusing to acknowledge the party’s own culpability in not forcing President Joe Biden to withdraw from the race far earlier.

The lesson I fear they will draw is that the nation – primarily the nation’s males – are just not ready for a woman president much less a woman of color. 

Too risky to let this happen again, they will say – which amounts to tacit acknowledgment that this is who we are.

Right, this vote couldn’t possibly be an expression of racism. After all, Trump attracted sizable numbers of Latino and Black men though Harris won the majority of those voters. 

The shift toward Trump  might say more about those  voters as men than it does about  voters of color. We still have  a national problem if a sizable minority of  men of color equate women with weakness.

Pander to or ignore these sentiments for the next election or deal with them in patient, straightforward fashion? This is the question Democrats face.

If it’s pander, voters of color may very well start believing that there really is no difference between the major parties.

We won’t go back. That was Harris’ failed pitch to voters. But what if this vote is a sign that we haven’t moved as far forward as we thought?  

This is who we are.

The question moving forward: Is this who we have to be?