Suppose, for a moment, that Donald Trump is elected president Tuesday evening. It seems unlikely, but is not impossible; and we’ve faced the apocalypse a couple of times in recent memory.
In 1992, for example, American voters dismissed from the presidency a heroic naval veteran of World War II who had served his country in a variety of high offices, as well as playing a leading role in ending the Cold War. We replaced him with a 46-year-old playboy governor of Arkansas who had been a draft dodger during the Vietnam war and admitted to having smoked marijuana, but hadn’t inhaled. For that matter, a dozen years earlier, we had elected a 69-year-old movie actor from Hollywood with no foreign policy experience, who was alleged to believe that trees caused more pollution than factories and, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills, was a product of the John Birch Society culture of Southern California and little more than the puppet of a handful of Los Angeles millionaires.
We have largely forgotten, in the intervening four decades, what a shock to the system Ronald Reagan’s election proved to be. He recruited dozens of suspect “movement conservatives” to populate his administration—Anne Gorsuch at the EPA, C. Everett Koop as surgeon general, James Watt to the Interior Department, etc.—and whereas his predecessor had bemoaned our “inordinate fear of the Soviet Union,” Reagan publicly described it as an “evil empire.” Four months after taking office, when Reagan was shot and wounded, the aforementioned Garry Wills was asked for comment: He found it ironic, Wills replied, that “a man of the gun” like Reagan had become the victim of one. I still recall, well into his second term, the invariable snickers and shaking of heads at the Council on Foreign Relations when the subject of Ronald Reagan was broached.
I say this not to suggest that there are instructive similarities between Reagan and Trump—there are very few—but that the election of Trump is likely to be more anticlimactic than not. Even Trump recognizes that the powers of the presidency are limited, and that the hope and change he promises as a candidate may prove as illusory—certainly as difficult to realize—as our incumbent president’s campaign rhetoric.
Trump has been criticized for raising the expectations of voters who have suffered in the modern globalized economy. It’s a fair criticism. But one could also say that Franklin Roosevelt did little, during his first two terms in office, to ameliorate the effects of the Depression for “the forgotten man.” That’s a fair criticism as well. Yet what FDR did offer those Americans was not just the semblance of hope but the clear indication, expressed politically, that he cared about their predicament. The same could be said of Trump—and cannot be said of his opponent. This does not mean that Donald Trump is a reasonable facsimile of Ronald Reagan or Franklin Roosevelt, but that the appeal of Trump as potential president is as palpable, in this strange election season, as it is absent in Hillary Clinton.
But let us suppose, as seems more likely, that Trump is defeated on Tuesday. In the postwar era, the electoral misfortunes of the Republican party have invariably led to learned speculation about the party’s future, or more specifically, whether it has a future. This is an intellectual gambit very nearly as familiar, and certainly as timeworn, as postwar lamentations that the GOP—the party of Lincoln, the party of everyone’s grandfather!—has moved dangerously to the right, is trafficking in extremism, has awakened the ghosts of some lamentable past. In Trump’s case, there is some evidence to this effect, and his critics include innumerable members of his own party. But it should also be noted, in fairness, that the same things were said when Dwight Eisenhower was elected president, and Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Bush the Elder and Younger— and as recently as 2012, when Mitt Romney was the Republican standard bearer. It will be remembered that the election of Barack Obama in 2008 was hailed, with evident relief, as the “death of conservatism”—until, of course, conservatism in the guise of decisive GOP majorities in Congress, was revived from the dead two years later.
The closest analogy to this campaign is 1964, when the party’s age-old ideological fissure collapsed, and Sen. Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination. Once again, I do not mean to suggest that there are close similarities between Goldwater, who, by the time of his death in 1998, had achieved elder-statesman status, and Trump. But the dynamics of that distant campaign must seem familiar. Fifty-two years ago, it was asserted that the Republican party had been captured by its extremist elements; visions of apocalypse were literally invoked, in the form of the hydrogen bomb; and prominent Republicans were obliged to choose between their conscience and their nominee—and more than a few chose their conscience. This year, Trump is described as being in political communion with Russia’s Vladimir Putin; in that year, Daniel Schorr of CBS reported that Goldwater’s post-convention campaign was to begin among “right-wing” Germans in Bavaria—”Hitler’s onetime stamping ground,” as Schorr explained. Fact magazine surveyed the nation’s psychiatrists on the subject of Goldwater’s mental health, and 1,189 of them testified that he was “psychologically unfit to be president.”
Of course, Goldwater was trounced by Lyndon Johnson in the last presidential election in which a candidate won more than 60 percent of the popular vote, and the future of the Republican party seemed especially bleak. In fact, it was bleak: In 1964, the Democrats gained 36 new seats in the House to give them a two-thirds majority; and in the Senate, Democrats held more than two-thirds of the seats (68). There were twice as many Democratic governors as Republican, in that year, and the vast majority of state legislatures were controlled by Democrats as well. Goldwater returned briefly to Washington after the election to announce the founding of something called the Free Society Association, and promptly disappeared from public view until regaining his old Senate seat in 1968.
What remained of the Republican National Committee, for its part, reassembled in January 1965 and elected the Ohio party leader, a plump, bespectacled, uncharismatic workhorse named Ray Bliss, as its chairman. And within two years of the historic debacle of 1964, Republicans regained a net of 47 seats in the House (while remaining in a prohibitive minority), and just two years after that, Richard Nixon was elected president against Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, and the populist-segregationist-Democratic governor of Alabama, George Wallace. This time it was the Democrats’ turn to look inward: Discarding their traditional system of choosing presidential candidates, and embracing open primaries, the party moved decisively leftward and nominated George McGovern in 1972.
All of this, and none of this, could recur after Tuesday evening. But in the minute-by-hour frenzy of a presidential campaign, perspective is customarily lost in the excitement. Donald Trump is an anomaly, but disruption has not always led to disaster. And whether Trump wins or loses, the weight of precedent and history—the vagaries of human nature—count for more than the screech of the news.
