Why didn’t those tactics bring victory?

As Ron Brownstein tells it, the “coalition of transformation,” his phrase for “the modern Democratic voting base that’s mostly clustered around the nation’s major metropolitan centers: minorities, Millennials, and college-educated whites, especially women, “generally express optimism about the demographic, cultural, and economic changes remaking American life,” and “provided Democrats with insurmountable margins on Tuesday that reflected their intense antipathy toward Trump.”

Watching those voters turn out in Virginia suburbs to defeat the Republican candidate, I thought of another insight from Stenner that helps to explain their behavior.

In her taxonomy, “authoritarians” are those who have the most extreme preference for oneness and sameness; at the other end the political spectrum are her “libertarians,” so-called because they are not merely anti-authoritarian, but ascribe a positive value to diversity and difference, and thus strongly oppose coercive measures to impose sameness on the population in the name of unity. Under many circumstances, those two types behave almost indistinguishably. In 2008, for example, Barack Obama had supporters from both of those groups; the folks with a latent predisposition to authoritarianism had not been activated—and because difference and diversity weren’t threatened, libertarians weren’t activated either.

But once authoritarians are triggered, they “clamor for authoritative constraints on racial diversity, political dissent, and moral deviance,” a broad crackdown on difference.

“Libertarians will have little concern for the uses of the collective authority until other people’s ambitions for its usage suggest that they ought to take interest in its limits,” Stenner writes. “The challenge presented to libertarians by these same conditions, then, is to celebrate and defend individual autonomy and diversity at precisely those moments when these favored social arrangements and outcomes might seem to be in jeopardy.”

Hillary Clinton’s weakness as a candidate, the Electoral College, Trump’s celebrity (which blinded some Americans to the authoritarianism of his campaign), and the widespread expectation that he would lose combined to help the president to win in 2016, despite the backlash that authoritarianism reliably triggers. Nevertheless, Stenner’s “libertarians” were awoken by his victory. They took to the streets in protest, spontaneously congregated at airports to help those affected by Trump’s first travel ban, and began to organize politically at the local level.

Enter Gillespie, who needed to appeal to the authoritarians in Trump’s base to win over the president’s coalition; and he appeared to win those voters, but in doing so, he guaranteed a backlash populated by those suddenly-invested libertarians.