As an outsider and vicarious participant in American politics, the 2016 election unleashed in me a plethora of foreboding senses.

For persons such as me, we will feel it because United States politics is the politics of the world in which we are just its disenfranchised citizens. Leading into the election, the Republican Party was struggling for its survival while the Democratic Party appeared as contemporaneous and in step with the social evolution of America and the world.

Donald Trump’s victory proved that, beyond fallacy, winning alone can mean everything as we watch politician after politician relinquish their own stated values and quickly fall in line with the winning team.

Even television news panellists discard their principle and values on the basis that those who stood and fought with principled ethics lost.

Now the Democratic Party, in spite of winning the majority vote by three million, is doubting itself and trying to ascertain what it has done wrong and how it must change to become a winner again. What if nothing innately has been done wrong? What if the philosophy is right and the defeat had nothing to do with that but was purely tactical?

In 2012, Barack Obama, after a heated presidential primary race against Hillary Clinton, chose her as his running mate. In this year’s election, we witnessed two populist movers, Trump and Bernie Sanders. Clinton might have become too confident in the notion of it being manifest destiny for America selecting its first female president. After the historic victory of Obama becoming the first African-American president, it would seem a natural sequence of progress that the US was now ready for its first woman president.

Perhaps Clinton was too confident and wanted to show a solo victory rather than share the spotlight with Bernie Sanders. A combined Clinton/Sanders ticket might have pulled the mere 80,000 votes that denied her the presidency.

Not choosing Sanders was a tactical mistake. The Democrats and Clinton threw away this election, which actually gave the victory to Trump. To the billionaire tycoon’s credit, he possibly pulled more votes than the faltering GOP would have otherwise gained with any other candidate. And, as fate would have it, another manifest destiny is now the game in town.

This was not just a Democratic Party loss, it was a global loss. The next step for the US should have been a tilt towards the ideology of Bernie Sanders. His ideology, while seemingly unpalatable and too far to the Left, might have found a softer landing if introduced behind the veil of a Clinton presidency. America is stepping away from its global position as arbiter and friend of a better world, and seems to be retreating to an insular, nationalist ideology.