Over the weekend Ross Douthat had an interesting column about the“crisis of liberalism.” “The 2016 campaign was a crisis for conservatism,” he writes, “its aftermath is a crisis for liberalism.”
I wonder to what extent the second part of this formulation is true.
Perhaps you’ve heard the term “bad beat.” In poker, a bad beat is when a player has a statistically massive advantage, but loses the hand on a fluke of the cards. If you ever want to waste ten minutes of your life, head to YouTube and look at some of the bad beats from the World Series of Poker over the years, where you’ll see grown men having their dreams set on fire in public. There’s the guy sitting on quad-aces who loses to a royal straight-flush. (The chances of quad-aces and a straight flush occurring in the same hand are roughly impossible-to-one.) Or the guy with quad-nines getting beat by quad-queens. Or the revenge of the German. Or Jesus bad-beating the Hellmuth.
(Actually, Phil Hellmuth gets his own highlight reel of bad beats.)
Anyway, a bad beat can be soul crushing, but it doesn’t mean that you did anything wrong. If you’ve got a 95 percent chance of winning and you push all of your chips into the game, then you played your cards the right way. Even if you lose.
All of which is to say that over the next couple of months the Democrats are going to have to decide if 2016 is a genuine crisis of liberalism, or if it was just a bad beat.
Three weeks before the election, the conventional wisdom was essentially this: The Republican party was fracturing. The Democrats were ascendant, both because of demographics but also because of ideological victories. Conservatism had been routed at the political, legal, and cultural level.
A little after midnight on November 9, that conventional wisdom was turned on its head. Suddenly the view, formed by ten years of events, was that the Republican party contains multitudes: It is the party of free trade and anti-free trade, of war hawks and anti-war America firsters, of immigration restrictionists and immigration liberalizers, of anti-unionists and also some labor folks. It suddenly looked like a party that was the primary home to both sides of many questions.
And the Democratic party was now nothing more than the party of identity politics and abortion.
But is this inverse view of the two parties actually true?
I don’t know the answer. On the one hand, it could be that 2016 was an aberration, just a bad beat for the Democrats that doesn’t change the foundations of our politics. If you lose a hand once with quad-aces, that doesn’t mean you should fold the next time you’re dealt them.
But on the flip side, every hand of poker is independent, while elections are highly contingent events.
As my colleague John McCormack put it to me the other day, you could argue that World War I was fluke, that it was the result of a perfect storm of events that, if you re-ran the scenario a hundred times it wouldn’t have happened again.
But it did happen. And the events of the first World War made the Second World War virtually inevitable.
