It never ceases to amaze (me, at least) how people can become so fixated on the daily flow of “news” that they miss the forest for the trees. Or the substance for the tweets, as it were. My MAGA friends are quite literally dancing in the streets, celebrating each new Executive Order as if they change things (sometimes they do, often they don’t, as I pointed out back in the Biden era). Liberal/Progressive friends seem to carom from one level of outrage to another; I’m hoping the sedatives kick in soon, because it appears (like Spinal Tap) “these go to eleven.”
Between cautioning each group on their mental well-being (I’m NOT the therapist in the family), I realized something about the larger trends behind all this, and I did so from an unlikely source: the “old gray lady,” aka the New York Times. MAGA wing, stay with me now!
For its many sins of omission (not to mention commission), the Times really does try to get to the bottom of things. Ezra Klein was one of the first challenging Biden’s continued fitness for office, for example. And lately he had an interview of note with conservative legal scholar/historian Yuval Levin (read/listen here). And further to the Times’ credit, they have in-house conservative Ross Douthat interviewing figures on the right to discuss the actual ideological ferment (yes, there is) on that side of the spectrum; his talk with Steve Bannon is worth your time (and I know, my liberal friends view Bannon as “The Lesser Satan,” but you’ll enjoy/be shocked at his take about the Broligarchy and the need for a strong Consumer Financial Protection Bureau).
For those unwilling to spend the time learning, I’ll cut to the chase by sharing what I discerned listening to these sources and thinking about them.
First, Trump is a genuine phenomenon, but Trumpism is not a “thing.” There can be no doubt about Trump as a unique character, and this being the Trump era. Scream all you want, it’s reality you’re fighting against, not Trump. But Trumpism, even generalized as MAGA, is not a coherent movement. It’s a polyglot coalition held together by the uniqueness of Donald J. Trump. I’m not saying it’s unimportant, or faux. Just don’t expect it to long outlast the Trump presidency. Whatever direction J.D. Vance or Don Jr. (or whomever) takes the movement, it will be very different. Nobody is Trump, and those who try to be Trump (remember Marco Rubio and his “small hands” comment?) fail miserably. There is further evidence for this point in the election results: Trump has never gotten to a popular vote majority (not that that matters for elections, but it does tell you something about the electorate) in three tries, even though he won twice and lost once, all narrowly. His is a populist movement, but it appears to be at best a plurality, not a majority.
Second, the Trump phenomenon is a symptom, not the cause of America’s challenging situation. The Founders built our government with a separation of powers (note the plural), not a division of power (singular). The executive, legislative, and judicial branches have very different powers. By far the most important and powerful is the legislative branch (i.e., the Congress), which controls the power of the purse, must advise and consent on the Judicial branch members (and can legislate their jurisdiction), and can impeach the other two branch’s members. To be effective, the legislative branch must build a durable majority (sometimes even a veto-proof one) in order to take full command of its authority. When it can’t, it cedes that authority (in practice) to either the President or the Supreme Court. As the American electorate has become more evenly divided over the past thirty years, such Congressional majorities have evaporated. Which results in “do-nothing” congressional terms that satisfy no one. Which results in increasing calls for strong (some would say strongman) leadership from the presidency, or greater judicial oversight of vague congressional formulations (both of which we see now).
By the way, this was as the Founders intended: Congress being the most powerful branch, they wanted it to act only when it could build a durable majority, lest we become a nation where each succeeding administration (or legislative session) simply undoes what the preceding one did (sound like today? Yup). So the main problem we have is not the electoral college, nor the size of the Supreme Court, nor the two-party system, nor “first past the post” primaries, nor gerrymandering, nor–well–fill in the blank. It’s the simple fact that Americans are evenly divided, and both parties seek primarily to shore up the base rather than do politics with the other side.
Third, we are on the cusp of a third era of modern America. The first was the New Deal, which ran from the 1940s to the 1980s. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) built an enduring coalition that fundamentally changed America. He was so personally popular he was able to ignore the Washingtonian limit of two presidential terms, and the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress continuously from 1933 to 1981, with only two, two year exceptions! Even when Republicans won the White House, they accepted the permanence of the New Deal and only tinkered at the margins.
That all changed with the advent of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The second era of modern America could be called the Global/Internationalist era, wherein the defining characteristic was a commitment to free trade. While the Congress and White House changed hands repeatedly, both parties played along with the idea that more free trade was better for the world, better for the United States, and better for Americans. The triumph of capitalism over communism proved this in Russia with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and even in China with the Chinese Communist Party decision that “to get rich is glorious!” Economists assured us that via the magic of comparative advantage, if every country played by the rules and traded freely, all would benefit.*
See, there’s always the asterisk. In macroeconomic terms, this is all undeniably true. However, the benefits are not equally distributed: there are always winners and losers. The losers in this case were middle- and lower- or working-class Americans who found themselves without decent paying jobs, let alone careers. They did get cheap sh!t from China, so they had that going for them. Oh, and the elites of the world, the highly educated, those with access to capital due to family, university degree, or initial business success, were wildly rewarded. That era officially ended with the 2008 financial crisis.
Since then, the American public has been in search of the next formulation or era. Progressives/Liberals put forward a sweeping set of individual rights (gay marriage, abortion on demand, trans rights, immigrant rights, etc), new government benefits (“ObamaCare,” student loan ‘forgiveness’) and controls (guns, internet censorship). Conservatives offered tax breaks (which generally favor the wealthiest), new religious protections, and opposition to “woke” ideology. The American public bought neither side’s arguments in total. They selected one from side A, one from side B, oftentimes contradictory choices (especially when it came to paying for benefits).
The one constant has been a growing awareness that economically, the free trade proposition has been a losing one for the average American worker. The trend first became noticeable during the Obama administration, when the Democratic party wrongly believed it had established a lasting demographic coalition of the working class, people of color, and progressives. When white working class voters started to leave the party, party stalwarts attributed it to simple racism: they weren’t ready for a black President, so good riddance. Most working class voters were still in the party, so what?
Then the trend continued during the Clinton campaign, with more white working class male voters leaving, culminating in Trump’s first unfathomable election. The knee-jerk reaction among Democrats was that Trump attracted those same racists and added white working class sexists (who couldn’t stomach a woman in the White House), so that was all the problem was. Trump was an aberrant candidate who rode an aberration in the electorate to one-time victory, probably with the help of Russia. Nothing to see here. Joe Biden’s victory cemented this view, bringing back some–but not many, just enough– of those working class voters.
Trump’s second inexplicable victory showed remarkable gains in groups which confounded the Democrats’ reading of the electorate: working class men, Latinos, blacks, youth, and women all demonstrated a real shift despite supposedly Trump being a threat not only to their rights and their benefits, but also to democracy. Those voters overwhelmingly voted on the economy, and thought Trump would do a better job managing it for them.
While cultural issues played a part, it’s somewhat misleading. The most memorable campaign ad was Trump’s “She’s for they/them, Trump is for you.” This did not attract voters because it was anti-woke, or anti-trans, or anti-anything else. It worked because it coincided with those voters’ beliefs about the two party’s priorities: Trump on the economy, Democrats on social issues. Kamala Harris did not run a campaign heavy on identity politics; she practically ran away from it. But you can’t talk about something all the time for years (as a party) and then suddenly pivot away in a campaign. Voters thought that such issues were what was important to Democrats, and in many ways the voters were right. The voters weren’t necessarily against those issues, but they most certainly were more interested in economic ones. And they turned back to Trump.
Is that the end of the story? No. While politically this is the Trump era, who the ultimate winner of this new era is, is up for grabs. The working class of all races is in play, it’s a majority of the electorate, and it wants to see action on the economy. These voters are patient: they don’t expect prices to drop tomorrow, but prices sure-as-cheap-Chinese-sh!t better stop going up like clockwork. They want to see more and better jobs, lower taxes, and yes a little bravado from our federal government. They would also like less regulation, and the same or better benefits. I didn’t say all their claims are reasonable or even consistent, did I? Most of all, they don’t want to see business-as-usual when it comes to the economy, because that means more of the global/internationalist way.
Whichever party addresses those issues will cement the backing of this large group, probably for a decade or more. The good news is, if they meet some or most of the voters’ demands, that party will have earned the right to govern with a durable majority.
Thanks, Pat. Insightful, well researched, balanced, coherent.