1) With the election over, new dad exhaustion is finally catching up with me. Before I fall off a sleep deprivation cliff, I want to share a few thoughts on where US politics is at right now.

Tl;dr: Trump has exposed what’s wrong. The key question is how to fix it.

2) The close election, and subsequent Republican willingness to entertain bonkers conspiracy theories about voter fraud, underscores that the GOP didn’t suffer a huge penalty for its embrace of an authoritarian style of politics.

3) Think about the recriminations among Democrats after 2016. Are any Republicans talking about tacking the center? About being out of touch with “real America,” where most of the people live?

No. They’re talking about “corrupt city machines” and “Ryanism versus Trumpism.”

4) Both of those ideologies are extreme by developed world standards, depending on minoritarian institutions to win power. That’s a recipe for a crisis of legitimacy down the line; the fact that we may dodge one bullet with Trump doesn’t mean there aren’t others in the clip.

5) The most urgently needed policies in America are structural reforms that can limit the threat here: democratization, like a new Voting Rights Act, and depolarization, like 17 year term limits for Supreme Court justices.

These are also the hardest to get past Leader McConnell.

6) This makes the Georgia runoffs absolutely vital. But even if that fails, it means that liberal and left thinkers need to keep these ideas at the top of the agenda — and think of ways, at both the state and national level, to improve things even without a national trifecta.