History will not end on November 8, 2016. The next day, the party that loses will pick itself up, dust itself off, and try again—in just 24 short months. That’s how politics in a democratic republic works. While claiming that the Battle of Armageddon is upon us helps gin up turnout every two years, the end is never actually nigh.
We should therefore take a longer perspective on the current standing of the conservative movement. We have heard all sorts of jeremiads about the fate that will befall constitutionalism if Trump loses. So, what happens if Trump wins?
It is doubtful that he will have a commanding legislative majority. The Republicans look to shed seats in the Senate, perhaps even the majority. If they do manage to hold the upper chamber, they will still have to tussle with Chuck Schumer, an inventive and relentless leader who will employ all the tools available to him. He will assuredly filibuster whomever Trump nominates to the Supreme Court. If you think the Senate Republicans will blithely go along with eliminating that procedural tool, then you haven’t been paying much attention to the Senate Republicans in the last decade.
Moreover, it is extremely doubtful that Trump could claim much of a mandate. His victory would probably be with less than half of the total vote, at best just a little more than half. A large majority of Americans have disliked him for a very long time, and there is no reason to expect that sentiment to fade, a temporary honeymoon phase notwithstanding. So Republicans will nominally be in charge of effectively divided government with a personally unpopular president. These are substantial headwinds.
There’s more. Trump would serve in the executive office for four years—from 2017 until 2021. It would be a minor miracle if there were no recession during his tenure. The last recession ended in 2009, which means the economy has been growing for just over seven years. The average growth cycle in the postwar era is five years. This average is deceptively small because of the oil-related downturns of the 1970s. Still, the longest expansion on record since the Panic of 1857 is 10 years. It is an easy bet that there would be a recession on Trump’s watch.
In sum, Trump’s first term will probably yield mostly gridlock, with reforms likely limited to what can be passed through the budget reconciliation process in the Senate. Americans will probably continue to dislike him, as they have for nearly forty years. If, as history suggests, the economy turns between now and the next election, the Republicans will probably get the blame.
This seems like a recipe for Democratic resurgence, and not the milquetoast moderation of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, or even the liberalism of Barack Obama. The ideological future of the Democratic party appears to be a strident leftism that views the country through gender, sexual, racial, religious, and class lines. Their future belongs to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
This does not mean the GOP would be better off losing the presidency, regardless of the nominee. It’s just that we should be cognizant of the problems Trump would face and mindful of his limitations in handling these challenges.
Though the president’s place in our system has been blown all out of proportion, he rightly has an important role to play in forging a national, broad-based majority around shared policy goals. Many of the better presidents of the 20th century were good at the job precisely for that reason. Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and even Bill Clinton (before the Lewinsky scandal) brokered a kind of national consensus that, though it obviously left some on the outside looking in, roped in a large majority of Americans.
If conservatives want to notch a durable victory against the left, a win in November is hardly a sufficient condition. We need a far-sighted executive that seeks to build such a majority around conservative governance—in spite of the political and economic headwinds. This is how the terms of the political debate may be altered in our favor, forcing the left to modulate in response.
Why was John F. Kennedy to the right of Harry Truman? In part it was because Eisenhower reset the terms of political conversation around a centrist brand of conservatism, forcing the Democrats to tack away from the labor-liberalism of the Fair Deal. Similarly, Bill Clinton ran to the right of Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, in part because Reagan’s eight-year tenure had changed the terms of the political debate. Eisenhower and Reagan both offered center-right leadership that garnered the support of a strong majority, and therefore had a positive effect on politics even after they left office. Clinton did the same for the left. George W. Bush offered “compassionate conservatism,” in part, because Clinton was so successful in resisting the stridency of Newt Gingrich and the House Republicans.
It beggars belief to presume that Trump can build a majority coalition in favor of conservative principles: a majority of Americans strongly dislike him, and he is bereft of principles.
Amazingly, these are not his most lamentable qualities. What should inspire the gravest doubts in conservatives is that Trump has no facility in the art of politics: he has no experience in statecraft, and though he proclaims himself a maestro of the “art of the deal,” four bankruptcies belie this claim.
Maybe Trump will luck out. Maybe fortune will smile upon him and bless the Republican coalition with another seven years of economic growth. Maybe Trump will stumble accidentally upon a governing strategy that works. Maybe exogenous forces will shift the debate in his favor, much as the emergent communist threat of the 1950s worked to the GOP’s advantage. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
But we shouldn’t elect presidents on the basis of maybes. Fortuna, as Machiavelli argued, is a fickle goddess, and can just as easily turn for or against us. What is needed is a leader with virtù, that rare set of qualities necessary for statecraft. “[T]aking everything into account,” Machiavelli argues in The Prince, the great statesman “will find that some of the things that appear to be virtues will, if he practices them, ruin him, and some of the things that appear to be vices will bring him security and prosperity.” This requires prudence—an ineffable quality that defies systematization, and instead instructs a leader to adjust his strategies according to circumstances, to assess the political situation with calm self-possession, and to seize the moments when they arrive.
Machiavelli’s concept is hard to define, but it is easy to discover through the pages of history: Lincoln using the victory at Antietam to issue the Emancipation Proclamation; FDR anticipating the threat from European fascism despite the “America First” craze; Eisenhower sending troops into Little Rock; Lyndon Johnson pushing civil rights to honor Kennedy’s legacy; Richard Nixon going to China; Reagan walking away at Reykjavik; George W. Bush grabbing the bullhorn on the rubble of the World Trade Center.
Does anybody seriously reckon Trump would behave similarly in similar moments? If not, it must be asked, what if he fails?
The answer is as simple as it is sobering: The Democratic party will come back, just as strong and twice as liberal. If you think Barack Obama was a leftist, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
In a true republic, the people are sovereign, and government officials serve as their agents. Thus, a republican citizen can be said, in a sense, to be a prince. As such, it is our duty to embody the qualities required for statesmanship, for ultimately we are tasked with ruling ourselves. So, we too, must be prudent.
If we are looking for a long-term triumph for our principles, is Trump really the smart choice? I think not. He is a polarizing figure, lacking a coherent vision of America’s future,, ignorant of the art of statecraft, and facing substantial political and economic headwinds. I expect him to fail, and I know that his failure will be an unadorned blessing for the left wing of the Democratic party.
