At RealClearWorld Andrew Bacevich traces the path that led us Donald Trump’s being elected president:
Where exactly did Trump come from? How are we to account for his noxious presence as commander-in-chief and putative Leader of the Free World? The explanations currently on offer are legion. Some blame the nefarious Steve Bannon, others Hillary Clinton and her lackluster campaign. Or perhaps the fault lies with the Bernie Sanders insurgency, which robbed Clinton of the momentum she needed to win, or with Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted, and Low Energy Jeb, and the other pathetic Republicans whom Trump trampled underfoot en route to claiming the nomination. Or perhaps the real villains are all those “deplorables†— the angry and ignorant white males whose disdain for immigrants, feminists, gays, and people of color Trump stoked and manipulated to great effect.
All such explanations, however, suggest that the relevant story began somewhere around June 2015 when Donald Trump astonished the political world by announcing his intention to seek the presidency. My aim here is to suggest that the origins of the real story are to be found much earlier. The conditions that enabled Trump to capture the presidency stemmed from acts of commission and omission that occurred well before he rode down that escalator at Trump Tower to offer his services to the nation.
Here’s the sad part: at each step along the way, other alternatives were available. Had those alternatives been exercised, a Trump presidency would have remained an absurd fantasy rather than becoming an absurd and dangerous reality. Like the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Vietnam War or 9/11, Trump qualifies as a completely avoidable catastrophe with roots deep in the past.
Read the whole thing. To my eye every step along the trail passes through the Washington Consensus. I also think he underestimates the role of social change in bringing the Trump presidency.
Is he right? Wrong? Partially right and partially wrong? I think I can see a Forrest Gump in his story, a figure that shows up in most of the debacles of the last 30 years. Please share your thoughts.
Bacevich is a gifted writer but his story is always the same. I think this case is particularly weak but that’s probably because I’m not fond of “coulda, should, woulda” narratives. Counterfactuals have their place, but most are not realistic.
One example – Ross Perot winning. Yes, I agree with Bacevich that had Perot won things would be much different. But for Perot to win, the country itself would have had to been much different to begin with.
It’s similar with Congress rolls over – yes Congress rolled over (and continues to do so), but the reasons for that have little to do with Congress itself.
I would look at history a bit differently than he does. For me, I would go back to the early 1900’s. Back then, the Federal government had an important but small role. Beginning with WWI (one could argue it was a bit earlier), the US was presented with a long series of crises that required federal action and therefore greater federal power: WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, the Cold war.
Each of these also had a uniting effect on the American public and thus our representatives tended to subsume some political squabbles to present a united front to what was viewed as bigger, primarily external, threats.
Then the Cold War ended and, along with it, norms that had been built-up over the ~80 year period of crises and ratcheting federal government power creep. The excesses of domestic partisan politics were no longer restrained. People began to view politics as zero-sum. Control of the federal government became a prize, not a responsibility.
The parties expanded on their considerable influence to ensure there would be no more Ross Perot’s to challenge them. All the mechanisms of politics and electioneering are now under partisan control. But Partisanship is decentralized and party leadership cannot discipline or restrain these factional movements anymore.
And so in a country with increasingly factional politics, this means there are only two avenues to achieve power – either through the Republicans or Democrats. And so we’ve seen various blocs fighting for control of one of the parties (particularly in the GoP).
We are ending up with the factionalism of late 19th and early 20th centuries in combination with an entrenched but decentralized two-party system and a very powerful federal government. These factions fight for control of a party, then hope to gain power and ram through their policies on either a 50+1 basis or through the bureaucracy or by Executive fiat.
If anything Trump’s election signals that we are leaving the transition period and entering the new normal.
I think that the story I would tell is a bit different. However we got there by 1990 we had two political parties that were in substantial agreement: more federal power was always beneficial. The parties differed primarily in where they thought the power should be applied. Republicans mostly thought that military power could solve any foreign policy problem. Democrats thought that enough federal power could solve any problem—military power on the foreign policy side and taxation and regulation on the domestic side. There was something called the “Washington consensus”.
The “Washington consensus” has flopped at least as far as most of us are concerned. Military power has been unsuccessful in achieving our foreign policy objectives. On the social side our least democratic institution has imposed changes about which no one really knows the implications. On top of all of that failure and tumult those in positions of power pretty clearly demonstrated they had no respect for the people and didn’t really care what they thought.
That’s how we got Trump.
it’s hard to believe that the country that elected Donald Trump did so because simply because of elite political arrangements. My take is that a certain slice of Americans expected things to turn out one way, but instead they turned out the opposite.
If you, for example, believed that gay people were immoral, that coastal cities were dysfunctional crime-ridden nightmares, and that liberalism was a dead-end for society, you would have been comfortable in 1985, when gay people were dying of AIDS, New York and LA were having huge problems with crime, and liberals were marginal crazies. But you are not going to be comfortable in 2016. Liberals have lost politically across the board, but they have won almost all of the social capital in America. Combine that with evangelical Christianity, which in the 90s was literally happy to traffic in fantasies about the Rapture coming in an entertaining fashion, and you have the people who are voting for Trump. His SOTU was basically a shout-out to 1986. It had nothing to do with humans alive today.
Dave,
In my view, the Washington Consensus grew out of necessity for the reasons cited in my comment. Those factors disappeared with the end of the Cold War. Momentum kept it going for a while but, thanks to the failures you noted, it is now a shadow. In short, I think factionalism will be the future and the Washington Consensus will continue to weaken.
and yet the establishments on both sides of the aisle still hold true to it as did the last president. Pretty substantial shadow.
Dave,
The establishment in the GoP was jabbed in the face by the Tea Party and then kicked in the crotch by Trumpers. Trump dispatched all the establishment GoP candidates with ease. Sure, the #nevertrumpers are still around and still have a voice but I doubt they are the future of the party.
On the Democratic side, the establishment was taken over by the Clinton Borg Collective which pretty much vanished when Clinton lost. The national party is in shambles and basically broke.
Establishment candidates can’t compete nearly as well in primaries anymore – that means they are slowly getting weeded out.
Bacevich writes:
I think the post Cold War period that Bacevich describes is drawing to a close as the establishment fades and we enter an era of factional politics.
Clinton was the paradigmatic establishment candidate, practically definitionally so. She completely subscribed to the Washington consensus. Schumer is establishment, Pelosi is establishment. Rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated.
WRT overarching dominance of the “American Way”, I knew that was nonsense as soon as I heard it. Just as I’ve been saying about world government for 40 years, it requires consensus and there is no consensus. So, for example, we don’t even have a consensus about what constitutes innate rights within this country let alone with countries that have very different views than ours.
What consensus there is is an elite consensus. The divergence between the elite consensus and what ordinary voters believe is why Trump trounced the GOP establishment candidates.
Dave,
My claim isn’t that the establishment is dead – it’s that it’s on its last legs and its demise is inevitable and it is being replaced by factional politics.
Sure, we still have Schumer and Pelosi. Where will they be in 10 years? Who will their replacements be? Are people like James Joyner ever going to get their party back from the populists and Tea Party “conservatives?” It’s not looking good.
And we certainly do have a divide between elites and ordinary people. I just think that it will morph over time to resemble the division in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We see parts of it already with the media transforming into mouthpieces for various factions and ordinary people are sorting themselves accordingly. That is going to continue IMO.
It certainly won’t help when people’s knowledge is limited to what fits neatly onto a screen that will fit in your pocket or, worse yet, projected onto a screen an inch or so from your eyeball.
You don’t build persistent organizations or institutions on firebrands but on ordinary bureaucratic drudges. In 50 or 100 years we’ll still have political parties and they’ll still be run by very ordinary individuals. The idea that Trump will be followed by any sort of organization built in his image is fantastical in the extreme.
If the Democratic establishment is replaced, something I see little evidence for sitting here in Chicago, it will be replaced by another Democratic establishment very much like the one it supplants.
Not to engage in a reductio ad Hitlerum but what made Hitler dangerous wasn’t just Hitler and the Nazis but the Germans. The Germans were just being Germans, approaching things in their highly systematic fashion, in this case applied to mass murder.
Meh.I think that Trump is the logical result of what the right wing think tanks and media have pushed for the last 20 years. They have preached hatred for liberals (yes, I will get to the liberals doing this also), disdain for facts and fear of the “other” (not the same as racism). They have pushed their own stabbed in the back narrative for years, with the non-right wing media as the bad guys. With the amount of vitriol floating around, you don’t get a reasonable candidate, you get one who is all id, all the time. (Ever drive through the South or the Midwest or even Pennsylvania and listen to conservative talk radio? If you have, can you honestly disagree that Trump was made for the people who listen to the talkers?)
This also plays out on the left. Hatred for the right is preached, disdain for the emotional issues of the right like religion, and an effort to claim everything is racism (as though that is some magic trump card that wins everything when played). I am not entirely sure what this will end up with on the left once they get past the Clintons, and old timers like Biden and Bernie. I am thinking it probably won’t be good.
Steve
I don’t listen to right wing or left wing talk radio. I tried to once for educational purposes but gave it up after about five minutes. I used to listen to NPR faithfully which I guess counts as left wing talk radio-adjacent. Lately I’ve found it too stress producing and just listen to old-time radio programs when I’m in the car (the only time I listen to the radio).
You cannot understand the Trump election without the backdrop of the Obama presidency. The evil, unforgivable, dying out, white male electorate was constantly on parade. Trump simply, and correctly realized, we ain’t dead yet.
You should give it a try sometime Dave. It will probably be hard to tolerate very long, but it will pretty clear that Trump is what they have been longing for.
Steve
So who’s your Forrest Gump analogue? Newt Gingrich?