Many observers of the recent American presidential election predicted that Donald Trump would win – perhaps as many as felt that Kamala Harris would prevail. Few expected what at first appears to be a decisive victory by Mr. Trump. He won 312 electoral college votes compared to Harris’ 226.

However, only about 232,000 voters of the 245 million eligible voters in three swing states in the upper Midwest provided the decisive victory in the electoral college. The same small voter margins were true for congress where the Republicans won a few more seats than the Democrats. (A useful summary of the facts is provided by David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times on November 22.)

If we look back over the last three election cycles, we see that in 2016 Trump stormed onto the political scene attacking and criticizing his way to a narrow victory. Four years later in 2020, a similar fraction of the electorate enabled Joe Biden to oust Trump. The Democrats also won congress. In 2024 the pendulum swung the other way with a number comparable to those who went for Biden in 2020 voting Republican to give Trump the White House with a Republican congress.

The question I wish to ask is how may we explain the swing back and forth in which an evenly split population gave first Trump and his Republican party, then the Democrats and now the Republicans again control over the three branches of the federal government?

For an answer I turn to a model presented some seven decades ago by anthropologist Anthony F.C. Wallace. He was attempting to account for a great religious revival and cultural transformation that took place among the 18th century Seneca nation of the League of the Iroquois. In a 1956 paper published in the American Anthropologist, “Revitalization Movements,” Wallace persuasively argued that such moments of transformation were a break with the past that led to something new. The process he referred to as “revitalization movements.”

The anthropologist’s study of times of revitalization shows us what happened in the campaign.

During such movements opposing segments of the population often mobilize around different visions of what the future would look like. The United States appears to be in the process of revitalization. In the case of the 2024 presidential election, however, only Donald Trump and the Republicans mobilized a revitalization movement. His Democratic opponent didn’t do the same. Harris’ campaign came across as a defense of the status quo, but the American people were looking for a campaign of cultural revitalization.

Wallace posed the question: what happens when the members of a society are exposed to circumstances that make their ordinary, everyday cultural behaviors no longer rewarding and fulfilling but instead lead to dissatisfaction, anxiety, and stress?

For the Seneca, the circumstances were the arrival of European colonists’ intent on displacing them, destroying their culture and perhaps them. For the United States the circumstances affecting its people are the transformation of the neoliberal capitalist market economy. When it globalized and production was moved offshore, services and finance replaced it domestically. This has made a small number of people rich beyond imagination while the vast majority have difficulty staying afloat.

Many have lost the jobs that enabled them to attain middle-class status, or what sometimes has been called the American Dream. The loss of income, purchasing power, prestige and sense of self-worth has led to them feeling displaced, anxious, frustrated and stress ridden, looking for someone to blame, and to provide them with a direction that will lead to a better imagined future.

Trump’s campaign, I contend, more this time than last, recognized this dissatisfaction and capitalized on it. He blamed his Democratic opponent and her party for the deplorable situation and campaigned saying he would move away from the status quo to a new direction for the country.

There has been a growing divide in American culture going back at least to the great depression and World War II with one side moving to introduce changes it envisions as progress and the other reacting to these changes and mobilizing to not simply end them but to move to their version of the new. Upon examination, their “new” looks more like a photo shopped version of the past that existed prior to at least the early 20th century.

Each side of the growing divide tends to be organized around one of the two major national political parties believing that control of the machinery of government, at the federal and state levels, will enable them to enact legislation that will affect top-down change in the direction they wish.

The progressive side has pursued, and in part succeeded in, making possible changes in the personal aspects of culture sometimes summed up in the term identity politics. Their motto has been Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI), recognizing with approval the growing diversity of the population. Their fight was for all members of the diverse population to be accepted and included as equals in the activities of society. They have forcefully defended, for example, affirmative action programs to give opportunities for descendants of slaves and other minorities, the rights of gays and transexuals, same sex marriage and for women the right to have control of their bodies.

Their conservative opponents, meanwhile, see these goals and their attainment as an affront to what they take to the nation’s (read their) basic values that they state most often in religious terms. While they have no monopoly on religious belief, part of the conservative revitalization movement has been to claim that the nation’s founders favored a single religion, the one they hold and contended should, by law, be that of the nation.

In the second half of the 20th century, the progressive side was more organized socially and politically, so they gained many of their goals. In the first quarter of the 21st century, the conservatives began to mobilize bringing together members of the business community, who were still smarting from the policies introduced by the Roosevelt administration following the Great Depression, and the religious right, who believe that secularism and the innovations of the progressives are to blame for the current problems.

The model for the current conservative mobilization and organizational success is to have big money interests fund think tanks manned by conservative economists and lawyers who provide the intellectual and legal arguments for the rank and file who are organized through churches and local groups–also funded by the big doners– and motivated to vote for conservative candidates. In 2025 Katherine Stewart called this “the money, lies, and God movement to destroy American Democracy.” This rank and file often are referred to as Trump’s, or the Republican party’s base.

In his 1956 article, Wallace outlined a series of stages of the revitalization process beginning with 1) a Steady State in which “for the vast majority of the population, culturally recognized techniques for satisfying needs operate with such efficiency that chronic stress within the system varies within tolerable limits….” This is followed by 2) The Period of Increased Individual Stress when “individual members of a population…experience increasingly severe stress…. While individuals may tolerate a moderate degree of increased stress and still maintain their habitual way of behavior, a point is reached at which some alternative way must be considered.” This is 3) The Period of Cultural Distortion when stress continues to rise and spread throughout society, leading to 4) a Period of Revitalization when a new, more satisfying and less stressful culture is developed leading to 5) The New Steady State.

The United States is moving thru Stage 3. Increasing numbers of Americans are complaining about their dissatisfaction with the culture and the way our domestic institutions (read political economy) and foreign policies (read endless wars in places far from the public’s awareness), has worked against their interests leading to a growing public anxiety and stress. As we enter Stage 4, some political actors are competing for power by proposing to throw out the cultural forms that they blame for our unsatisfactory state. What they offer are contending visions. There is no way of knowing before being tried, of course, whether any of the proposals will work.

Wallace noted that leadership in revitalization movements often is taken by a prophet who either leads it or supports one of the contenders as being guided by supernatural forces. Numerous prophets (sometimes called “apostles”) from extreme evangelical Christian nationalist movements have claimed that Trump, despite his former life-style, has been ordained by God to take the reins of the power. In 2024, Mathew D. Taylor raised the alarm about The Violent Take it By Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening Our Democracy. He cited (page 189) one of their leaders saying, “We need to believe that God called us to invade this mountain of government, and bring his kingdom and his presence, and bring heaven’s solutions. There are solutions that can only be fixed in this state from heaven.”

With Trump in charge, the prophets believe God’s kingdom will be introduced and the nation revitalized. The more strident contend that those who oppose him are in the service of Satan. So, the Christians are in a spiritual war it must win even if violence is necessary. This extreme Christian wing may be a small part of Trump’s base, but they may have influenced enough fence-sitters in swing states to cast the small number of votes Trump needed to win.

During the campaign Trump blamed his predecessors, Democrats and Republicans alike, holding them responsible for the circumstances causing the dissatisfaction and complaints of so many. He promises to make our lives better.

His proposals may have been vague but that was not necessarily important for a revitalization movement. He grasped the mood of the many people who felt that the leaders of their government had forsaken them. He said, in part, that the cause of their problems was a conspiracy by the elites who controlled the system of formal education and the machinery of government through a “deep state” which had thwarted him during his first term. He promised to drastically change the established system perhaps along the lines advocated by the religious right who want public funding for private and religious schools. With respect to the machinery of government, he proposed, and is implementing in the transition, throwing out vast numbers of the several million people who work for the government in order to replace them with loyal followers who will implement the changes that he believes will resolve America’s problems and Make it Great (again).

While campaigning, Trump spoke directly to the voters using their language and popular social media, which he dominated. In British newspaper The Independent, Jacob Stolworty highlighted an interview that actor Ralph Fiennes gave to The Guardian, an influential liberal newspaper, also in the United Kingdom. As Stolworth tells it, “British actor Fiennes, whose credits include Schindler’s List, Harry Potter and new drama Conclave, has mused on how Trump came out top in the election race – and said he believes it’s because Trump has a “remarkable gift” as a storyteller.

Fiennes told The Guardian, “The way [Trump] described the problem with America and what he could do, was a story. He has a remarkable gift for talking and accessing people’s deeper gut feelings. And the story in its simplicity appealed…. Whatever you think of the horror of the language and the racism and sexism that we all identify on the liberal side, it speaks to people. He’s the man in the bar who says: ‘I’ll get rid of this s***. We’ll make your lives better.”

Enough of the voters listened to him — at least long enough — to feel that he understood their plight, offered them someone to blame, and promised that he would make the changes causing their frustration and replace it all with something that would make it better. His story, and the way he told it, shored up his loyal supporters and convinced the small number of voters in the swing states that were the crucial difference between victory and defeat.

Harris meanwhile campaigned in defense of the system saying that she would relieve the electorates dissatisfaction and help the distraught by making what exists better. She asked people to look forward but refrained from criticizing a political-economic system of which she has long been a part. Moreover, to again quote Fiennes, Harris and the Democrats “were increasingly perceived as a sort of removed elite” with a story that “wasn’t put across very strongly.” Reflecting on the campaign, some of Harris’ advisors recognize this in accounting for the loss, according to the November 21st report of Dan Balz of The Washington Post.

In brief, Trump campaigned as one leading a movement that would tear down and revitalize American culture, breaking with what is and offering something new. He did not precisely present his vision of the new. He did not have to. Promising to upend and even discard the agencies that regulate and control our economic and political institutions, ending foreign entanglements and wars was all that was necessary to convince the small number of voters in the swing states to vote for him. That he was vague in what he was offering to do did not hurt him.

Before the inauguration, Trump has floated a list of nominees for top administrative positions who will help him implement the changes he promised in his campaign. They may know little about the agencies they will head, but they will promise to change or eliminate some of them. Critics fear Trump’s authoritarian proclivities and worry about the future of our “democracy.” But that was what he, in his view, was elected to do.

In the “imagery of revitalization,” he is about to get rid of what exists and implement his vision of the new.

Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing beforehand whether it will work. If it does not, and the Democrats learn to acknowledge the dissatisfaction of the electorate, mount a campaign the next time that addresses it, no longer defending the status quo that has not worked, and promising something new, they may be able again to convince the slim minority of voters in the small number of swing states to enable them to return to office, provided there will be future elections.

The real issue beyond elections, however, is whether the vision of society offered by either party as they are now conceptualized and constituted will resolve the legitimate concerns of the population and lead to a new steady state. If not, baring a civil war, the pendulum will continue to oscillate.

References cited

• Balz, Dan. 2024. “Harris Aids Say Discontent Was Too Much to Overcome.” Washington Post, November 21.
• Stewart, Katherine, 2025. Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.
• Stolworty, Jacob. 2024. Nov. “Ralph Fiennes says Trump’s ‘remarkable gift’ helped him win US election.” The Independent. Nov. 22.
• Taylor, Matthew D. 2024. The Violent Take It BY Force: The Christian Movement That is Threatening Our Democracy. Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books.
• Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1956. “Revitalization Movements: Some Theoretical Considerations for Their Comparative Study.” American Anthropologist n.s. 58(2):264-281.
• Wallace-Wells, David. 2024. “Why You May Be Wrong about Harris’s Loss.” New York Times, Nov. 22.