Where did I go wrong? Or, why Trump may be like Jimmy Carter
As readers of this blog well know, I predicted that Clinton would defeat Trump in November. I was wrong. Big time.
Since the election, I’ve thought a lot about what I got wrong and why I got it wrong. Part of my failure, of course, was that I didn’t read the polls carefully enough. A lot of the polls, as my more attentive readers pointed out, showed Clinton’s margin over Trump, particularly in key states, to be well within the margin of error. That should have been a warning.
But to be honest, I wasn’t so much influenced by the polls as I was by two other things: first, my understanding of conservatism as a reactionary movement of the right; second, my understanding of the presidency as an institution.
In the last chapter of The Reactionary Mind, I argued that conservatism, at least in its modern, twentieth-century American incarnation, had essentially succeeded in its goals. That is, it had destroyed the New Deal, had effectively stopped the civil rights movement, and had significantly slowed the feminist movement. Its great success was its defeat of the left. And because I understand conservatism as an inherently reactionary movement, as a movement that mobilizes against movements of emancipation on behalf of subordinate classes, I argued that its success would prove, long-term, to be the source of its defeat. We could already see the signs, I argued throughout the book, of this coming conservative crack-up. That was in 2011.
But in writing about the election of 2016, I was also influenced by Stephen Skowronek’s The Politics Presidents Make. In that book, which came out in 1993, Skowronek argues that presidents come into office not as sovereign creators of a new world, but as the beneficiaries or burdens of an established regime. That orientation to the regime—is the president opposed to or aligned with the existing way of doing things—plus the strength or weakness of the regime, gives us a sense of how a president might govern. My sense, based on my reading of conservatism and the George W. Bush presidency, was that the Republican free-market regime of Ronald Reagan was becoming weaker, and that Trump would prove to be the equivalent of the George McGovern of the right: that is, the most outré expression of the regime’s principles, at a moment when the regime has begun to decline in popularity.
So I was obviously wrong about Trump being the McGovern of the right. The question is why?
One possibility is that I was wrong about the weaknesses of the Reagan regime. Rather than being weak, perhaps it was strong, which would make Trump an ideal candidate for election. In support of that possibility, people will point to the widespread control the Republicans have over state legislatures today, though as I said at the time this McGovern issue came up, the Democrats also had widespread control over state legislatures in the 1970s, and their control over Congress, particularly the House, was legendary and long-standing.
Another possibility is that I wasn’t wrong about the weaknesses of the Reagan regime but that I was wrong about Trump. Unlike conservatives or Republicans, he was doing something different: he was populist, he was revanchist, he was racist, he was outrageous, he was a demagogue, he reached out to the white working class. He was, in other words, the expression of an utterly new formation, not captured by the nostrums of conservatism. For a thousand different reasons, most of which I explore in my book, I think that argument couldn’t be more wrong. Virtually all the things that people point to that supposedly make Trump not like your typical Republican or conservative are, from my point of view, the emblematic features of what it means to be a conservative. And nothing anyone has said has convinced me otherwise.
But there is still another possibility: I wasn’t so much wrong about Trump or the Republicans; what I got wrong was the Democrats. What enabled Nixon to defeat McGovern in 1972, in addition to the secular factors that favor incumbents over the challengers, is that the Republicans, while divided, were moving toward a steadily more coherent sense of attack on the New Deal, and had gained some sense of how to win elections.
For a variety of reasons, I don’t think today’s Democratic Party is there. Despite the strength of the Sanders insurgency, the party leadership is not ready to make a realignment. That was clear in Clinton’s campaign, by her desperate—and ill-conceived—effort to hive off Trump from the rest of the Republican Party, by her refusal to make Trump the leading representative of the entire Republican deformation that has governed this country since the election of Ronald Reagan. In the end, I think what I got wrong about the 2016 election was not that I under-estimated Trump but that I over-estimated Clinton and the Democrats.
The real story of the 2016 election, in other words, was not that Trump won—he did, after all, lose the popular vote—but that Clinton lost. That’s what needs to be explained: not that there was a massive shift in the electorate to the right (there wasn’t; Trump’s victories came from a small group of states where there was a tiny swing of the vote), not that there was a revolt of the white working class (incidentally, an old story in American politics; Nixon mobilized the hardhat majority, Reagan mobilized the Reagan Democrats), but that Clinton lost the Democratic base: either among people who stayed home or among a tiny, tiny group of swing voters in a few Rust Belt states who jumped to Trump.
So where does that leave us today? How are we to understand Trump now? I believe that he is as vulnerable as ever: not simply because he is a weak and polarizing candidate, but also because the movement and the party for which he speaks (and against which he speaks) is fraying.
That’s what I argue in this long piece I just did for n+1: that the real precedent for understanding Donald Trump is not Hitler or Putin, not Bersculoni or Brexit, but Jimmy Carter.
Here’s a taste:
THE INTERREGNUM BETWEEN Trump’s election and his inauguration has occasioned a fever dream of authoritarianism—a procession of nightmares from faraway lands and distant times, from Hitler and Mussolini to Putin and Erdogan. But what if Trump’s antecedents are more prosaic, his historical comparisons nearer to hand? What if the best clues to the Trump presidency are to be found in that most un-Trump-like of figures: Jimmy Carter?
…
THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CARTER and Trump are many and obvious: Carter shyly confessed to having “looked on a lot of women with lust”; Trump brags about grabbing pussy. Carter was a moralist and a technocrat; Trump, an immoralist and a demagogue. Carter was a state senator and a governor; Trump has no political experience. Carter wouldn’t hurt a fly (or a rabbit). Trump takes pleasure in humiliating others, particularly women and people of color.
The parallels between Carter and Trump are also many, if less obvious. Like Carter, Trump…
Read it all here.