We shall not shock anyone, we shall merely expose ourselves to good-natured or at any rate harmless ridicule, if we acknowledge that we were startled, in our callow youth, by a suggestion from a professor. The comment came from Adam Ulam, the distinguished scholar of Soviet foreign policy. In response to a question in class, he offhandedly noted that America might have been better off, at least in terms of Cold War policy, if the loser rather than the winner had prevailed in most of the recent presidential elections. He then went on (as I recall) to entertain us with a somewhat lighthearted and of course speculative account of how a Dewey administration might have deterred the Korean war, a Stevenson administration might not have broken with Britain over Suez, a Nixon administration might not have tempted Khrushchev to provoke the Cuban missile crisis, and a Goldwater administration might have kept us out of Vietnam.
I remember being a bit shocked by all this, though in retrospect it’s hard to see why. Except that, as a young man, I was presumably in thrall to the common dual fallacy that, somehow, what happened in the past had to have happened, and that what happened in the past should have happened. Or as Machiavelli put it, “the vulgar are taken in by the appearance and the outcome of a thing, and in the world there is no one but the vulgar.”
Donald Trump’s victory might seem to confirm Machiavelli’s judgment of the omnipresence of the vulgar. But it’s increasingly clear that it will be important, going forward, not to judge by mere appearance or short-term outcome.
This means, for example, not assuming that just because Trump won the election, all his public policies are therefore correct, his political judgments infallible, or his rhetorical arts irresistible. But it also means not falling into the reverse set of errors. It means understanding that while many of his tweets may be foolish, several of his appointments may be impressive; that a chaotic White House isn’t inconsistent with a successful administration; that a president who has little interest in constitutionalism might still have a presidency during which we see a reinvigoration of constitutional forms and authorities (as Christopher DeMuth recently put it, “one of the many astonishing results of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Republican sweep on Election Day is that they have set the stage for a constitutional revival”); that a man who has shown little interest in governing might—might!—turn out to have some appreciation for the importance of governing.
On this last point, we take heart from Donald Trump’s remarks on election night: “It’s been what they call a historic event, but to be really historic, we have to do a great job. And I promise you that I will not let you down. We will do a great job. We will do a great job.” Ronald Reagan was a historic president not because he won an election victory over Jimmy Carter. He was a historic president because he did a great job. He was a historic president because his economic policies worked, and because we won the Cold War.
Results matter. As the economist Lawrence Lindsey put it recently in a client memo, after delivering an interesting analysis of the 2016 election results, the fact is that Republicans’ future strategy and electoral prospects will be “determined for them by Trump’s performance. If he delivers what he promised to Midwestern voters in terms of the economy, the Blue Wall will become purple and maybe slightly reddish—a ticket to victory. It would also doubtless help the Republicans in the rest of the country. But if Trump fails on the economy, particularly in the Midwest, the Republicans will be out in the wilderness for a long time.”
If Trump performs well, if he governs successfully, a future Adam Ulam will have a hard time arguing that the country would probably have been better off if Trump hadn’t won. Donald Trump is all about winning. But now winning is all about governing. And as I suspect Machiavelli would admit, or even assert, at the end of the day appearances only take you so far. Reality matters most. And so, governing matters most.
