After Wednesday, people are wondering what’s next: for the end of President Trump’s time in office, for the republic, for voters, for the Republican Party.
Fox News’s Tucker Carlson has been thinking about it, having asked on his Thursday program, “So, what is life going to be like for us on Jan. 20?” he asked, continuing, “Donald Trump thinks almost exclusively about Donald Trump, but so does almost every single Democrat and Republican in the Congress. Who’s got your concerns top of mind? Who wakes up in the middle of the night worried about your family?”
Presumably, you, the reader, the listener, do.
Naturally, it is the duty, the sacred responsibility, of elected officials to take with them to Washington the concerns of their constituents as preeminent priorities. Though the way in which Carlson personalizes these questions, suggesting that a president or representative should be (or was ever) waking up over your family, reflects the almost spiritual disorientation that ails U.S. politics.
Part of what led to Wednesday is that Trump and his closest allies got people thinking, really believing, that on Jan. 20, or Jan. 25, or Feb. 25 or whenever, that the answer to “what is life going to be like for us?” was “fundamentally different than it is today.” That’s wrong.
A Biden administration will not act on the policy concerns of conservative and Republican voters, but it ain’t the end of the road, or the world, because Trump is leaving the White House. That Carlson could even frame it as “what will it be like on Jan. 20?” or that Fox News morning host Ainsley Earhardt could draw conclusions from the environment and offer the assessment of Trump’s voters that “they don’t want to be forgotten” illustrates this horribly unhealthy obsession with the presidency.
One of the tasks that congressional Republicans have is to work toward a healthier politics by reasserting the supremacy of Congress as the primary governing body of this country. Another is to communicate to voters that its members’ proximity to the people, the frequency of their elections, and their general accessibility are the greatest virtues of Congress’s design.
It won’t be easy because a preeminent Congress is not what we see, nor do many voters apparently want a preeminent Congress in this environment.
Here is one barrier: “The main problem, and this really is the main problem on the Right, is that the people who run the Republican Party don’t really like their own voters,” Carlson also said on Thursday, continuing, “Many Republicans in Washington now despise the people they’re supposed to represent and protect.”
Who is he talking about? He doesn’t name anybody or quote anybody saying nasty things about Republican voters or describe the actions of voter-despising Republicans.
I gather that Carlson particularly means Republicans despise Trump supporters. No, the party went to the very bitter and deadly end with Trump out of, for all I can tell, a belief that he could do some good and out of a deference to Republican voters. Vice President Mike Pence went with Trump to the bitter and deadly end out of deference to him and to voters. Carlson’s vague judgment is of little use.
Another barrier to a healthier politics is that the presidency has extraordinary power. Think about two priorities that conservatives and Republicans have: religious liberty and limiting abortion. It was Trump’s administration, not Congress, that dropped the Mexico City policy. It was his administration that expanded conscience protections with regard to contraception. Congress would never have been able to achieve either, but Trump could — because the sprawling bureaucracy had control over those things, and he had control over the sprawling bureaucracy.
Biden will soon have that kind of power and will use it. We will see again that the undeserved and undesirable status of the presidency can be, at least politically and practically, justified.
Whatever the barriers, there needs to be a reorientation: more Congress, more trust in Congress, and less president. And ultimately, the public has to return to a place where less of people’s existential meaning is found in what’s happening in Washington.
