Aww heck, why not? As long as I’m all animated and expansive about US politics for the first time since 2008, why shouldn’t I also get a little garrulous and mansplainy as well? It’ll spare Geri from having her ear bent anymore today, if nothing else. Someone on NPR just said Democrats are the dogs who caught the car, and now they have to learn how to drive it. Yeah, that’s the problem, all right.

In addition to having mostly just the ability to hedge the President in from his worst excesses, the Democrats are kind of, ideologically, in the boat the Republicans were in ten or eleven years ago. Then they had MAGA (not really named yet as I recall) along with the traditional wing of the party (which MAGA called RINO—Republican in Name Only), still calling the shots but about not to be. The RINOs were eventually cleared out of the party by the Trumpist yahoos, who redefined the Republican Party, turning it into the personality cult it is today. And they’ve now had a good run (having in the process burnt down the most powerful country on earth).

Ok. Now. When I now mention the traditional Democrats and the progressives and Democratic Socialists, I don’t want to be misunderstood as making any false equivalency with Reagan Republicans and MAGA. Because the progressives and DSA are not yahoos. They are not anarchists, they are not violent radicals, and they are not sparkly-eyed youngsters who haven’t tasted their own medicine yet. They’re serious people with a serious, for the most part well thought through, political philosophy that is quite salutary in many of its proposals. They’re a legitimate wing of the Democratic Party.

This, though: the next two years is going to be a three-way chess game between Trump, the traditional Democrats, and the progressives and DSA. I think the model might be the politics in many Western European countries. At least as I’ve seen it in Portugal, there is no equivalent for the Republican Party. Not the historic Republican Party. There’s an equivalent for MAGA, which is Chega (Enough!), but Chega’s racist anti-immigrant stances have generally kept them out of power so far. (It is, unfortunately, encroaching, just as the far right is gaining ground all across Europe.)

But up to now, when the right and the left compete in Portugal, it’s more like the traditional Democrats vs the DSA. They all agree, for instance, on the need for tax-supported national health care. They all agree on free public education, including pre-school and four years of college or the equivalent. They disagree mainly on how much leeway to give the business community, how much “private investment” to encourage, and so on. At least so far, they all agree that Chega is toxic, and that Portugal must remain a liberal democracy.

I think the next two years is going to see some vigorous, healthy debate in the style of Western Europe. It will be mainly about the direction the Democratic Party should take. And this is what we can’t forget over the next two years: we wouldn’t have had this landslide without getting quite a broad spectrum of Democrats elected. The party needs to remain inside a very big tent. It can’t let happen what happened to the Republicans, this time with people on the left giving ideological litmus tests or centrists too easily caving for the sake of perceived pragmatism. The job for the next two years is going to be watchdogging, holding the Trump and his cronies to account, and finding creative ways to advance the liberal agenda, no matter how incrementally.

Only six years after an even bigger congressional rout than the one we had yesterday—the election of ’76, just after the Watergate scandal, when it seemed the Republican Party would dwindle to extinction—the US elected Ronald Reagan. There are so many twists history can take. We’ve got to twist this right.

Ok, left. Anyway . . .