JV Last at the Bulwark published one of those essays this morning that make you both depressed and relieved at the same time. Depressed because it tells a truth that you really wish wasn’t true and relieved because you realize you haven’t been crazy for thinking the same thing.
He starts off by quoting one of my favorite analysts, Philip Bump of the Washington Post:
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.
I’d say this had started long before, all the way back in the 90s when Newt Gingrich ascended to the leadership of the party. Rush Limbaugh and Fox news all set the stage for Trump. It was inevitable that they would end up with a demagogue. Obama was just the final catalyst.
However, that’s not the issue Last addresses in his piece. He says that he had assumed that once Trump was gone there would be large scale recriminations within the party for having fallen for Trump and in the end it would snap back to its usual ideological positions. He was wrong:
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.
True that. It was already happening but he finalized it by turbo charging that rural vote and repelling the college educated suburbanites. That has changed everything,
Anyway, this is the important insight:
I had always believed that in politics causality was a wheel. You turn it in one direction, then you turn it in the other direction. You set course, then you reverse course.
That view was incorrect. Political causality is like causality in most other realms: It branches.
Something happens and that action or event creates an entirely new universe. Which leads to another branch. And another. There is no going back. There is never any going back. The world is contingent.
Let me give you a historical example: The First World War was an accident. It didn’t have to happen. If you ran the events leading up to it ten times, it probably doesn’t happen in seven of them.
But the fact that the First World War did happen caused a bunch of contingent events which created a new universe. And in that universe, the accident of the First World War made the advent of the Second World War inevitable.
I’m sure some people in 1917 looked at the First World War and thought, “This whole thing was an accident that never should have happened. Once it’s over we can go back to normal.”
But that was incorrect. The Great War created a branch away from normal. “Normal,” as people understood it in 1912, was never coming back.
I made the same analytical error in 2016.
Other people continue to make this error today. Larry Hogan, Chris Sununu, and Nikki Haley make it on a daily basis. So do the conservatives who insist that they are (still) skating to the puck of some post-Trump future.
They’re never going back to normal.
THEY’RE NEVER GOING BACK TO NORMAL.
We need to internalize that. Whatever happens going forward, it’s not going to be what it was. Not even close:
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.
Neither will it be the same as it has been under Trump. But I think we need to consider that it might be worse — and harder to beat. Trump is a dumpster fire in a million ways despite the hold he has on the GOP base. It’s unlikely we’ll be so “lucky” as to face someone so uniquely corrupt, criminal and stupid again, The next one may be harder to beat.
As I said, depressing but oddly relieving. I hate it but I’m relieved to know that I’m not alone in thinking this. The Republicans are on a different path than the one we’ve known. I’m not sure they know what it is themselves. But the incentives are what they are for the foreseeable future and we need to be prepared for that.