I had prepared a post about the September data from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), but this seemed more important. November 3 will be remembered in history as a day like December 7 or July 4. It was the day that tens of millions of people stood up to defend democracy in the United States.

I have no illusions about the many, many dark points in this country’s history, which predated Donald Trump, many of which were still very much present when he took office. But a democracy that has at least the pretense of respecting human rights and basic decency is infinitely better than a dictatorship that has open contempt for anything that challenges its power.

We are a long way from being completely out of the woods. Donald Trump still has two more years in his term, and his sycophants still command the most powerful military in the world, as well as a squad of domestic henchmen that openly act outside of the law. They can do enormous harm to the country and the world in this time.

But our ability to limit the damage is hugely greater today than yesterday. And to be clear, the mission is far larger than surviving the last two years of Donald Trump’s term. We have to reverse the inequality and corruption that led to a situation where tens of millions of people could look to a bumbling reality TV show star as the solution to the problem.

We need to create a government that people believe is on their side, that actively works to make their lives better. However much better the Biden administration and prior Democratic and even Republican administrations might have been in serving the public, people had real grounds for believing that the government was not serving their interests. Elon Musk was already incredibly rich on January 20, 2025.

Anyhow, that is a long and incredibly important project, but for now, we can all take a deep breath. The immediate threat to democracy has been turned back with an electoral landslide of historic proportions. We should enjoy the moment while still recognizing that much more needs to be done.

Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the author of the 2016 book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Please consider subscribing to his Substack, from which this is reprinted with permission.