On Tuesday, voters rendered a decisive verdict on the second Trump administration and the US–Israel war on Iran. On the morning after, we put a few questions to the historian Nikhil Pal Singh, whose January Equator essay “Homeland Empire” articulated an influential new theory of Trumpism’s fusion of foreign and domestic repression.

How would you describe this moment in terms of America’s long post-9/11 trajectory?

The legacy of 9/11 as a font of reactionary politics in the US is effectively over.

Since 2008, Americans have been voting against the cycle of war in the Middle East triggered by the Bush administration’s response to 9/11: Obama and Trump both rose to the top of their respective parties by openly rejecting the prevailing orthodoxies on these questions. But each of them in their own way presided over a foreign policy that continued these conflicts and got drawn into new ones in the region.

Obama sought to sensibly manage the decline of US hegemony while Trump tried (and failed) to reverse it by lashing out against American rivals, economically and militarily. Both presidencies pushed to increase and reshore US oil and gas production as a response to Middle East energy dependency. But neither was able to reduce the adhesive pull of American primacy and empire that attached to being the guarantor of the world’s fossil economy centred on the Middle East and defending America’s Israeli proxy.

Obama’s effort to extricate the country from the trajectory of future war with Iran through negotiating the JCPOA was undone by Trump, who withdrew from the deal, and by Biden, who failed to revive it, just as inflationary shocks began to course through the system as a result of Covid-related supply-chain disruptions, followed by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

Rising inflation was arguably the single greatest factor contributing to Trump’s victory over Biden/Harris in 2024. His choice to launch a new war against Iran and its accompanying renewal of inflationary shock is arguably the biggest contributor to his repudiation on Tuesday. The US empire has always run on cheap gasoline – not least because this is required to retain the consent of the domestic population for overseas conflicts.

But after 35 years of war in the Middle East and the runaway acceleration of climate change, this ‘hydrocarbon dollar complex’ is now in a phase of terminal crisis.

What was at stake in Michigan seemed much bigger than one Senate seat. Why was it such a test for American politics?

The election of Abdul El-Sayed to the Senate in Michigan is one of the most consequential victories of the night. He ran a progressive campaign on the theme of affordability (with an emphasis on Medicare for All), and in sharp opposition to spending on overseas wars (particularly those associated with the US–Israel alliance).

Much like Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City, El-Sayed’s candidacy presented a clean test of the strength of the Zionist hold over Democratic Party politics, and of the continued effectiveness of bigoted, Islamophobic politics of fear in the electorate at large.

Outside groups spent well over $150 million to defeat El-Sayed, with AIPAC alone spending $40 million (and likely more, since it started disguising its donations after losing the primary). For comparison, El-Sayed’s campaign raised about $50 million in total through individual donations, more than the campaigns of either his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, or his primary rival, Haley Stevens, but less than half of what was spent against him.

A stream of ads in the final days of the general election hammered themes of El-Sayed’s alleged links to the Muslim Brotherhood, 9/11 and terrorism. Meanwhile, Stevens defected to endorse Rogers, and was in the news every day repeating charges that El-Sayed is anti-Semitic and makes Jews feel unsafe.

His victory hopefully drives another nail in the coffin of this disingenuous discourse, and more importantly enlarges the platform for articulate opposition to the fusion of US and Israeli foreign policy in support of preventive war and genocide, which we have rarely heard voiced in the US Senate.

After Gaza and the Trump–Netanyahu war on Iran, there is a sense that Israel is on the ballot in a new way. We've seen anger over Gaza powering many insurgent Democratic and DSA campaigns, but also a very vocal faction of pro-Israel Democrats exiling themselves from the party. How is this realignment likely to play out in the next few years?

The US-Israel ‘special relationship’ is due for a period of benign neglect. The powerful ties connecting the US and Israeli financial, military and technological interests will remain, but the malignant nature of Israeli politics and society will encourage more public distance and silence around continued support for Israel. There are already efforts to announce with fanfare an end to $4 billion in US foreign aid to Israel via the State Department, even as quieter efforts to integrate US and Israeli military operations and weapons procurement practice within the Pentagon proceed with the backing of leadership within both parties.

AIPAC is now a toxic brand, but its money still flows through many different, often obscure, channels. There has also been a stunning, monopolistic consolidation of US news media by figures like Larry and David Ellison, who are major supporters of Israel. The opposition to Israeli apartheid and genocide is stronger than it has ever been, particularly within the Democratic Party, but it has gained force in the current period from what is arguably a stronger populist opposition to Middle East wars, now tied in the minds of many to defence of Israeli interests.

In many ways this fight has only just begun, but now efforts will be made by the establishment to persuade us that it is already over and that it no longer matters.

Only when we see American politicians arguing for normalisation of relations with Iran (a major country of more than 90 million people), and uncompromised support for Palestinian statehood, will we know that we are on a changed trajectory. The Israelis, of course, view both of these as existential threats and will, accordingly, continue to act against them.

The proof of genuine realignment will be a US willing to exert sufficient force and sanction to discipline and constrain its Israeli ally. That still seems a big hill to climb.

What is the conventional explanation for the Democrats’ gains, and what's missing from that picture? Did mainstream analysts underestimate the backlash against the Iran war?

Mainstream analysis always underestimates the genuinely radical sentiments that underpin popular discontent – war, immiseration, despotism, corruption and elite impunity.

Public opinion these days is thermostatic; political coalitions dissolve as soon as they form and recombine anew. It is crystal clear, however, that opposition to the Iran war and what are popularly understood to be its economic consequences is a key factor in the election. No less so, as particularly evidenced by Gina Hinojosa’s stunning victory in the race for governor in Texas, is the massive defection of Latinos back to the Democratic Party. (Some counties on the Mexican border that had gone for Trump in 2024 swung 40 points back in the other direction.)

After Trump’s re-election, Democrats in Congress were immediately cowed into supporting the Laken Riley Act, presaging acquiescence in, if not full-throated support for, the Trump administration’s unprecedented expansion of draconian immigration policing and detention across the country. Whether they will learn the right lessons and now move towards dramatically scaling back the powers of ICE, CBP and DHS remains to be seen.

Hinojosa has also been an especially articulate proponent of “populist” opposition to big tech and to data centre spending, which, alongside the Iran war, has been a driver of rising interest rates and energy costs. Her victory in Texas, the second-largest state in the US, makes her the state’s first Democratic governor in 36 years, and its first Latina governor. Next to El-Sayed winning in Michigan, her victory is the big story of the election.

Does this result mark ‘the end of the Trump era’?

Alongside the election in Brazil, and the protests in India, this election and especially the magnitude of the victory tell us that the far right is not the juggernaut it’s been cracked up to be. To be sure, the forces of the right have coalesced and radicalised in the past decade, but they have also in many ways been exposed as yet another ruse against popular aspirations.

After telling people to vote as if he was on the ballot, Trump’s first post in response to early results claimed that he was not on the ballot, and that if he had been, Republicans would have won in a landslide. It is typical Trump bluster, a salve to damaged ego, a damaged presidency, and a broken political project. By the morning, Trump was saying he was “willing to accept the results” and “prepared to work with Democrats,” whom he and the likes of Elon Musk, the single biggest donor to the GOP, had labelled Islamists, communists and an existential threat to the country.

There is no doubt that this is a very significant turn. This is the largest popular vote margin either party has lodged in any US Congressional election since 1976 – a vote that signalled the final fallout from the scandal and corruption of Watergate and the drag of an unpopular Vietnam War.

Part of what this tells us is that a seismic realignment, similar to that which emerged from the crisis of the 1970s, is potentially underway. It does not, however, tell us what political forces will capture this realignment going forward.

The idea that the United States is a country polarised into red and blue states has long obscured the more promising, marbled grain of political contention. The idea that the GOP was becoming the party of the working class and the Democrats the party of professional elites obscured the fact that both parties assemble cross-class coalitions through appeals to culture and identity, while presiding over increasing concentrations of wealth, overseeing a stagflationary economy for wage-earners, and delivering a spigot of taxpayer dollars to overseas wars.

But the Trump era, or better, the Trump-Obama era since 2008, is certainly over. They are doppelgangers of sorts: emerging from the shock of the financial crisis but unable to resolve the problems it revealed, both ruled in Caesarist fashion as charismatic individuals pretending to be agents of historic change, and both presided over the collapsing political fortunes of increasingly hollow parties.

People are now rejecting the forced choice between neoliberal progressivism and nativist, Christian nationalism. Whether we are on the threshold of a new era of civic renewal toward the ends of collective flourishing is far from assured. We face a volatile period in which our best hope remains working to harness popular discontent into constructive mass politics.