The New Republic and its editor Michael Tomasky are serving up a series of articles which endeavor to discern just how much of a break Donald Trump's 2024 election is from historical American voting patterns. Though the Trump regime seems novel in its ostentatious corruption and bottomless ignorance of the work of democratic governance, are we really seeing a profound realignment of political coalitions to meet popular demand?
I should preface this by saying I doubt we are living anything as profound as the realignment that occurred in the 1840s and 50s at the birth of our current parties or even akin of the shuffling of party allegiances in response to the Civil Rights movement which gave the GOP the recalcitrant white South and encouraged Democratic dominance of most cities.
The presidential election of 2024 was very close. Donald Trump's margin was tiny by historical standards. It seems overblown to assume it points to stable realignment.
But Trump himself seems such a radical break from what Americans at least pretended to expect from a president that we have to think about whether there is really something new, something discontinuous with our history, in this moment.
Tomasky is giving scholars and observers space to take a shot at this question. The New Republic offers a long interview with Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the Harvard scholars who were co-authors of the 2018 bestseller How Democracies Die. Here are some excerpts to ponder:
Excessively flattering image - but he'd like it
What if Trump Does Everything He’s Promised—and the People Don’t Care?
... ZIBLATT: I think there’s an analogy here to Bonapartism in France. When Napoleon Bonaparte came along, he added a new element to French political culture. And that continues through today. You know, his nephew then ran for president some decades later, [and] every French president ever since has these kind of overreaching tendencies. So it’s now a part of French political culture—along with a Republican tradition and the socialist tradition, there’s a Bonapartist tradition.
Maybe this is what has happened in the United States. Political scientists used to talk about the liberal tradition in America. But there’s always also been an illiberal tradition. But there’s now a new distinctive illiberal tradition in American politics today, which is the Trumpist tradition. And so, even if we get through this over the next several years, there’s an electorate that’s out there, there’s a way of thinking about—and talking about—the world that is not going anywhere. And so, to make our democracy stable means, on some level, that we need to have at least two political parties that are committed to democracy, that are committed to the rules of the game. And so if we want our democracy to be stable, our parties need to figure out how to sideline that now persistent part of our political culture.
... TOMASKY: Final question. What if, after watching all this and possibly more unfold, the people just don’t care?
LEVITSKY: That’s always a challenge when it comes to democratic backsliding. I don’t think the problem is merely apathy. A combination of factors—fear for some, exhaustion for others, resignation for others—may push many activists to the sidelines, limiting our capacity to slow down and eventually defeat Trumpism. Apathy would play a role in that. The reality is that life will go on as usual for most people during the Trump administration. Most people won’t be targeted by DOJ, the FBI, or the IRS. The economy may remain relatively healthy, so many people may continue to live good lives. So the combination of some people moving to the sidelines out of fear or exhaustion and others remaining on the sidelines because they don’t feel a compelling reason to join the fight—that could easily deplete the ranks of the opposition. It’s something I worry a lot about.
I have always looked back at periods of abuse like the internment of Japanese Americans and McCarthyism and wondered why so few people rose up against it at the time. Now I fear we may see something similar under the second Trump administration.
ZIBLATT: I guess I don’t accept the premise. I think overwhelming majorities of Americans are committed to democracy. We may just take it for granted. But when citizens lose their democracy around the world, the record is pretty clear: They clamor to get it back, and they begin to appreciate it. I only hope we all have the collective imagination to realize what’s at stake before we lose it ourselves.
Kevin Mahnken writes for a non-profit education news organization, The 74, named for the number of young people undergoing that education. In The New Republic, he offers an interesting effort to situate Trump's re-election in the history of political parties and federal government.
Constant Change: The Global Anti-Incumbent Bias Is Real. But America’s Is Worse.
... Americans’ distaste for their own elected officials is not the symptom of a memetic bug recently caught from Argentina or Poland, but a distinctly homegrown phenomenon. In fact, it has been at work for the better part of two decades.
This becomes clear when one asks which recent election, whether in a presidential or midterm cycle, was decided in favor of continuity rather than change. Control of either the White House or at least one chamber of Congress switched parties in nine of the last 10 federal elections dating back to 2006; even in the lone exception, 2012, Republicans held onto their majority in the House of Representatives despite winning 1.3 million fewer votes than their Democratic opponents nationwide.
While Biden’s belated exit from the 2024 race will be remembered as a singular episode of political hubris, the whiplash of those results has befooled a generation of leaders in both parties—periodically leading them to make, and lose, political gambles that subsequently appear mysterious. George W. Bush staked the political capital he won in 2004 on Social Security reform, only to have it open a trapdoor under his entire second term. Barack Obama hit the Tea Party wall just two years after charging into office on a generational tide of progressive enthusiasm. Mitt Romney’s team was reportedly dumbfounded on election night in 2012, just as Clinton advisers deluded themselves on their way to a 2016 shock for the ages. The list goes on.
The peculiarity of the age is even more apparent when examined over the sweep of the twentieth century, during which an incumbent president was reelected in almost every decade. More impressive still, he typically captured more votes, a higher vote share, and often a better Electoral College margin than in his previous race (or that of the man he succeeded in office). Theodore Roosevelt accomplished the feat in 1904, Wilson in 1916, FDR in 1936, Ike in 1956, LBJ in 1964, Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984, and Bill Clinton in 1996.
You can throw in Bush II for good measure, but none others have followed. Barack Obama, as gifted a vote-getter as any of his predecessors, couldn’t recreate his huge 2008 margins after four years in Washington. Trump collected 11 million more votes in 2020 than he had in 2016, yet still lost by a considerable margin. Add it up, and a different party has won the White House in each of the last four consecutive elections.
The most recent time that happened was between 1880 and 1896, when Republicans traded blows for five straight campaigns with a Democratic Party that had finally washed off the reek of slavery and secession. Not coincidentally, it was also the only other period when a president—New York’s Grover Cleveland, beloved of bar trivia contestants and mugwumps alike—served two nonconsecutive terms.
The politics of the late nineteenth century are often cited as an analogue for those of modern times. We too live in an era of close elections and ultra-high voter turnout, each driven by our intense partisan identification. And, as in the Gilded Age, modern Americans’ animus toward incumbent politicians extends from the Oval Office to Congress. Back then, the House flipped between parties six times in the span of 20 years.
The political entrepreneurs of our own times have put a ceiling on that kind of volatility through the use of algorithm-powered gerrymandering, but it is impossible to imagine one party installing a four-decade majority, as the Democrats did in the 1950s.
The electoral lessons of this comparison are undeniably murky. In 1884, the Democrats managed to break the GOP’s 24-year stranglehold on the White House by running Cleveland, the governor of what was then the country’s most important swing state. If they wish to turn the page from the Obama-Biden-Harris epoch, they can choose from among its talented governors in Pennsylvania, Michigan, or North Carolina, none of whom are closely associated with the party’s disastrous 2024 performance. ...
But nominating a few outsiders in the short run won’t quell the apparently perpetual disgust that Americans feel for their leadership class. ...
I think Mahnken is onto something in that those of us shaped in the long 20th century experience did tend to assume that incumbent presidents get re-elected. We projected that onto Biden until it became completely obvious that he could no longer cut it as a candidate. (I assume his incapacity was also true of him as a President and his post-election behavior seems to confirm that. But the two roles are different, a main driver of much political dysfunction.)
What this country needs to get out of this cycle is some inspirational politicians with a uniting vision. Obama once offered that, however shallow it proved in practice. Is inspiration that grips a majority still possible in a time of imperial uncertainty and the collapse of trust in any media to communicate truth? We don't know. But humans have a strong desire to be inspired, so such a turn seems possible, even if we currently don't see it. The USofA-- to be continued ...
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