The takesabout this election, hot and otherwise, are already coming fast and furious and I expect they will continue with tedious regularity for some time to come. I’m guilty of it myself jabbering away on podcasts and radio shows yesterday on no sleep and too much adrenaline. I’ll share some of those thoughts here as I get my head straight over the next little while. But I have been reading a lot of instant reaction pieces and I must say that more than anything I persuaded by the anti-incumbency analysis which I posted about yesterday. Here’s another argument laying that out from Derek Thompson in the Atlantic: A better, more comprehensive way to explain the outcome is to conceptualize 2024 as the second pandemic election. Trump’s victory is a reverberation of trends set in motion in 2020. In politics, as in nature, the largest tsunami generated by an earthquake is often not the first wave but the next one. The pandemic was a health emergency, followed by an economic emergency. Both trends were global. But only the former was widely seen as international and directly caused by the pandemic. Although Americans understood that millions of people were dying in Europe and Asia and South America, they did not have an equally clear sense that supply-chain disruptions, combined with an increase in spending, sent prices surging around the world. As I reported earlier this year, inflation at its peak exceeded 6 percent in France, 7 percent in Canada, 8 percent in Germany, 9 percent in…