It’s Trump’s Revolution
His supporters wanted a
bulwark against liberalism. But his failed presidency is pushing the country to
the left.
By Ross Douthat
Opinion
Columnist
·
June 13, 2020, 2:30 p.m. ET
In 1804, the Corsican upstart Napoleon
Bonaparte crowned himself as France’s emperor. His mother, born Letizia
Ramolino, did not attend the coronation. Informed of her son’s self-elevation,
she is said to have remarked coolly: “Let’s hope it lasts.”
In conversations with conservative
friends about the Trump presidency these last three years, I often found myself
thinking about Mother Bonaparte. Before Donald Trump’s election I made a lot of
dire predictions about how his mix of demagogy and incompetence would interact
with real world threats: I envisioned economic turmoil, foreign policy crises,
sustained domestic unrest. Having lived through the failed end of the last
Republican presidency, I assumed Trump’s administration would be a second,
swifter failure, with dire consequences for both the country and the right.
In
2017, 2018, 2019, those predictions didn’t come to pass. Trump was bad in many
ways, but the consequences weren’t what I anticipated. The economy surged; the
world was relatively stable; the country was mad online but otherwise
relatively calm. And as the Democrats shifted leftward and Trump delivered on
his promised judicial appointments, many conservatives who had shared my
apprehensions would tell me that, simply as a shield against the left, the
president was doing enough to merit their support in 2020.
To which I often murmured something
like, “let’s hope it lasts.”
It
hasn’t. Now we are in the retreat-from-Moscow phase of the Trump presidency,
with crises arriving all together — pandemic, recession, mass protests — and
the president incapable of coping. If the election were held today, the result
could easily resemble 2008, the closest thing to a landslide our divided system
has recently produced. Meanwhile across corporate and journalistic and academic
America, a 1968-ish spirit is pulling liberalism toward an uncertain destination, with what remains of
conservatism turtled for safety or extinct.
In this environment, few conservatives
outside the MAGA core would declare Trump’s presidency a ringing success. But
many will stand by him out of a sense of self-protection, hoping a miracle
keeps him in the White House as a firewall against whatever post-2020
liberalism might become.
This is a natural impulse, but they
should consider another possibility: That so long as he remains in office,
Trump will be an accelerant of the right’s erasure, an agent of its
marginalization and defeat, no matter how many of his appointees occupy the
federal bench.
In situations of crisis or grave
difficulty, Trump displays three qualities, three spirits, that all redound
against the movement that he leads. His spirit of authoritarianism creates a
sense of perpetual crisis among his opponents, uniting left-wingers and
liberals despite their differences. His spirit of chaos, the sense that nothing
is planned or under control, turns moderates and normies against him. And
finally his spirit of incompetence means that conservatives get far less out of
his administration than they would from a genuine imperial president, a man of
iron rather than of pasteboard.
You
can see the convergence of these spirits in the disaster at Lafayette Park,
where an authoritarian instinct led to a chaotic and violent police
intervention, a massive media freakout, blowback from the military — and left
the president with an impious photo op and control of six blocks around the
White House to show for it.
That
last image, the president as a dictator of an island and impotent beyond it,
seems like a foretaste of what would await conservatives if Trump somehow
slipped through to a second term. Maybe he would get to replace another Supreme
Court justice — maybe. (In a Democratic Senate, not.) But everything else the
right needs would slip further out of reach.
Conservatism
needs a response to the current movement for social justice that answers just
claims and rejects destructive ones. Trump delivers a conservatism of
Confederate war memorials that vindicates the left.
Conservatism
needs new ideas about how to use power, a better theory of the relationship
between state, economy and culture than the decadent Reaganism that Trump half-overthrew.
Trump offers only a daily lesson in how to let power go to waste.
Conservatism
needs a way to either claim more space in America’s existing elite
institutions, or else a path to building new ones. Trump offers a retreat to
the fortresses of OANN, TPUSA, QAnon.
Above
all, conservatism, now a worldview for old people and contrarians in a country
trending leftward, needs a mix of converts and sympathizers to be something
other than a rump. Trump did win some converts in 2016, but he has spent four years
making far more enemies, and their numbers are growing every day.
What we are seeing right
now in America, an accelerated leftward shift, probably won’t continue at this
pace through 2024. But it’s likely to continue in some form so long as Trump is
conservatism, and conservatism is Trump — and four more years of trying to use
him as a defensive salient is not a strategy of survival, but defeat.
