Yesterday, I wrote about my swings between optimism and pessimism as we approach November. I’ve now read a depressing article suggesting that even a “best-case” election result will not erase America’s Trumpist plague.
An article from The Bulwark began with the following quote from Philip Bump:
The Trump era is about Trump in the way that the War of 1812 was about 1812: a critically important component and a useful touchstone but not all-encompassing. Turning the page on the era requires more than Trump failing to get an electoral vote majority.
Perhaps a more accurate time span to consider is something like 15 years. The election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 was hailed as a signal moment in the evolution of American politics and demography, but it also triggered a remarkable backlash. Ostensibly rooted in concerns about government spending, it was largely centered on the disruption of the economic crisis (which triggered an increase in spending) and that overlapping awareness of how America was changing.
The author went on to agree. As he recounted, he’d originally viewed Trump as an aberration–after all, he’d gotten through the Republican primaries with pluralities, not majorities, of Republican votes, and he’d underperformed his poll numbers in virtually every primary. Large numbers of Republican voters hated him. He trailed Hillary Clinton in all of the polling. All of these data points led him to conclude that Trump would lose the 2016 general election, that in the wake of that loss the GOP establishment would take measures against those who’d supported him, and the Party would go back to being the Party of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Marco Rubio.
As the author candidly admits, he was wrong on all counts.
My first mistake was not understanding that Trump had turned the mild tilt of the Electoral College into an enduring 3-point advantage.
By trading suburban, college-educated voters for rural, high-school educated voters, Trump maximized the GOP’s Electoral College efficiency. This trade turned the GOP into a permanent minority party, making it extraordinarily difficult for it to win a national popular majority. But it tilted the Electoral College system to Republicans by a minimum of 3 points in every election.
This was a true innovation. Prior to Trump, no one had viewed minority rule as a viable electoral strategy.
His second mistake was his belief that party elders would expel or neuter those who had supported Trump. As he now recognizes, that mistake wasn’t simply because Trump won. “It was wrong because the real war was not the general election, but a Republican civil war between traditional Republicans and those who wanted “grievance-based political violence.”
The grievance aspect was important because it meant that Trump could deliver to his voters even if he lost. Trump understood that Republican voters now existed in a post-policy space in which they viewed politics as a lifestyle brand. And this lifestyle brand did not require holding electoral office…
So no, there were never going to be recriminations against conservatives and Republicans who had collaborated with Trump. The recriminations would run in the opposite direction: The forces of Trumpism would continue to own the Republican party and anti-Trumpers would continue to be driven out. (Unless they chose to convert.)
That led to a third mistake: believing that the Republican Party would revert to its previous identity as a normal, center-Right political party. He now believes there is no going back.
If anything, the dynamics inside the party—the self-selection making the party whiter, more rural, and less-educated; the desire for minority rule; the eagerness for political violence; the disinterest in governing—seem likely to push the party further away from what it was.
We can’t control the future. And we can’t control the Republican party. All we can control is ourselves.
Which starts with being clear-eyed about reality and the work ahead.
The essay confirmed my reluctant realization that far more of the American electorate falls into that “grievance-based” category than I want to believe. Americans aren’t simply engaged in a Presidential campaign, but a much longer, more protracted struggle for the soul of the nation.
Even if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz win in November, those of us who define patriotism as allegiance to the philosophy of our founding principles will have to contend with the White “Christian” Nationalists who want to abandon those principles in favor of an autocratic, theocratic vision that accords them social and cultural dominance. (If you don’t believe me about that “vision,” take a look at Project 2025. Or–if you live in Indiana– read statements from Micah Beckwith or Jim Banks.)
November is just Round One. That said, winning it decisively is an absolutely essential first step.
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