On Nov. 5, the American majority made a historic decision: They refused to go back to the past with Democrats and decided to welcome the future, promised by Donald Trump. While she famously declared “We’re not going back,” it was Kamala Harris who wanted us to go back to “liberal democracy,” commonly called “democracy,” ruled by familiar capitalism and its stable supply of life’s needs, and regular peaceful elections.

What kind of a future is Trump promising? Although the liberal media likes to call Trump’s government fascism or dictatorship, I prefer to call it “imperial democracy,” as his style of governance recalls not Jeffersonian or even the consumer-capitalist era of American history, but a stronger and improved model of the Roman, Nazi and British empires who ruled the world with brute force.

Trump’s modernized version comes with two historical wrinkles: One, he masterfully mixes disinformation with brute force; and two, his imperial democracy is a historical successor to liberal democracy’s natural death.

Harris and Democrats wanted to take us back to the past dominated by capitalism and liberal democracy. But their promises of better wages and lower gas prices were too insignificant, much too little, too late, to pacify voters. Trump’s future America, remade in his image, was just too appealing and exciting, just like the TV and internet entertainment we have become accustomed to. Harris wanted to take America back to the days of community, love, and trustworthy government. Trump promised a future full of exciting spectacles.

Our founding generations witnessed feudalism’s end and the new democratic era’s birth — perhaps the greatest historic event at the time since the Creation. Likewise, today we are witnessing liberal democracy’s end and Trump-inspired imperial democracy’s birth. Just now, our capitalist economic reality coexists peacefully with our political fantasy.

Although Harris had faced racism, gender bias, misinformation, and other usual suspects, her defeat was historically preordained: She was flailing on a sinking ship, the USS Liberal Democracy. As the last actor in the drama of a dying democracy and the unfortunate messenger of bad news, she tried to save liberalism in America on its last leg. (Nearly half of Americans still refused to abandon ship).

At the edge of the liberal cliff, Harris and old America embraced and fell to their historic death, as Trump beat his chest in triumph. Both Harris and Trump played out their historical parts.

But no political candidate had worked so hard against his own candidacy as Trump did. If a modern-day Machiavelli wrote a manual on how to lose an election, Trump’s own story would be perfect for it: He committed crimes, talked like a third-grader and showed no signs of normal humanity. He got elected almost in spite of his own sabotage. Liberal democracy couldn’t even beat a corpse.

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Obviously, America needed Trump to fill the deep desperate void that liberal-capitalist overkill had spawned in America’s private life. Equally obvious, always-on entertainment and drugs — so abundant and effective in liberal arsenal — could not appease its empty hearts and souls. Instead of looking to revive themselves and their society, they just simply adopted Trump’s one-man salesmanship to fit their moral atrophy.

It was par for the course for America, which had so long papered over its empty lives and miseries with Hollywood. Trump’s act was the last component in the perfect storm that would wipe away old liberal garbage and fill the space with new imperial wreckage.

As liberal America shifted from Jeffersonian liberty and equality to capitalism and its consumerism, its liberal ideology contained fatal faults for self-destruction: Unlike Europe’s and Japan’s “social democracy” focusing on the whole, America’s “liberal democracy” was a system of “no system,” in which everything is open to individual persuasions and decisions as “free choice.” It simply says “You are free. Do your thing.” That left too much for individuals to decide and liars to manipulate. The result is inconsolable disharmony in America’s society and its personal lives.

Slowly, liberal American society had become ungovernable and individual life unlivable. Such voids could not be made whole just with always-on junk food of pleasures. Statistically, the American economy was prosperous, but personally, working Americans never had enough money to enjoy the Great American Fantasyland. Anger and scapegoating were natural responses. The great American liberal democracy, which had run practically by itself for the nation’s whole existence, has finally come to an end and nothing can nurture it back to health. How capitalists, survivors of liberal demise, will coexist with imperialists remain to be seen.

Did anybody see all that coming? I did — nearly half a century ago. I predicted that liberal democracy, the political foundations of America, would not survive. (For the record, it died on Nov. 5). I predicted so in my book, “The Dead End,” written in 1975, published in 1977, and called by Time magazine in 1980 “an important and brilliant book (about) America’s national death wish.” Both the book and its author quickly disappeared into obscurity. Only few historians ever see their historical predictions come true in their own lifetime, but only last week I saw mine come true while I am still alive and YMCA-kicking.

As we remember and celebrate July 4, 1776 for the death of feudalism, our future generations will also remember and celebrate Nov. 5, 2024 for the death of (liberal) democracy and the birth of Imperial America under Trump and his successors and imitators.

Before our time in America, no nation has ever exhausted their own democracy or seen what awaited them after democracy. Now, as history’s very first creators of full democracy, we are also history’s very first to see a world that comes after democracy — without conquest or war.

Such irony gives me the shivers.

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield.