By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, April 08, 2020
I’ve been telecommuting for decades, so for me sheltering
in place isn’t remotely the burden it is for a lot of Americans. But it does
make the job of following politics more difficult for two reasons.
First, to a certain degree, politics are on lockdown too.
To the extent that the Democratic primaries are in the news, it’s mostly as a
public-health story, thanks to Wisconsin’s debate over whether to carry on with
in-person voting and questions of how to conduct a convention while social
distancing. Bernie Sanders — who is still running, by the way — wants to debate
presumptive nominee Joe Biden again, but few in the party are interested in
that. Biden himself is running a pandemic version of a front-porch campaign via
teleconference from his home office.
The second reason is more vexing: Nobody has any clue
what post-pandemic politics will look like.
On the left, some fantasize about somehow replacing Biden
with New York governor Andrew Cuomo, which makes a lot of sense given Cuomo’s
impressive performance of late, except for the near impossibility of
orchestrating such a handoff. Meanwhile, progressive groups, still licking
their wounds over the almost-instantaneous marginalization of Sanders, are
suddenly seeing their massive grassroots organizations starved of money and the
ability to organize.
The situation on the right is even more opaque. For good
or ill, the pandemic has made President Trump an even more central figure in
our politics, thanks to the role the White House plays in a national emergency
and his nightly, often rambling, news conferences.
That’s not all to the GOP’s advantage. Trump’s refusal to
admit any error in how he’s handled the crisis has had the unintended effect of
starving Republicans of some useful talking points. Senate majority leader
Mitch McConnell tried to float the idea that the Democrats’ impeachment
fixation distracted Trump from following through after the travel ban with a
more robust response to the pandemic when it would have made a difference, but
Trump himself threw cold water on that.
Regardless, as the Right gears up for either a Trump win
or a lame-duck presidency amid a hard period of recovery, it’s possible to
glean some contours of post-pandemic Republican politics.
Trump was always going to be the nominee, but his set of
issues has been reshuffled entirely. He was all set to run on a roaring
economy, pitting himself against “socialism” — even though his preferred foil,
Bernie Sanders, was sidelined on Super Tuesday. Now, the economy has headed
south, and our anti-socialist president is ordering businesses to do the
government’s bidding and handing out direct payments to millions of Americans.
Trump’s vacillation between the need to clamp down on the
virus and his desire to open up the economy is somewhat symbolic of the broader
divides on the right. Longtime MAGA consigliere Steve Bannon tells the New
York Times that the GOP’s commitment to “limited government” is gone
forever. Others in the Trumpist orbit, such as Donald Trump Jr., are still
pushing the idea that the corona-hype is overblown and just part of an effort
to take down his dad.
Somewhere in the middle, conservative politicians and
intellectuals are trying to find a less Trump-centric path.
Long before the coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China,
Senator Marco Rubio and a coterie of eggheads were firing salvos at “unfettered
capitalism” — as if that described the status quo at any point in the last
century of American politics — and offering a blueprint for “common-good
capitalism.” Meanwhile, Nikki Haley, Trump’s former U.N. ambassador (for whom
my wife worked), resigned from the board of Boeing last month in protest over
its request for a federal bailout. It was a principled stand, but it’s anyone’s
guess whether corporate bailouts will be as unpopular on the right as they were
before the pandemic.
While it’s hard to know whether crony capitalism will
remain out of favor, you can count on China to stay in the doghouse for years
to come.
That’s good news for one politician worth watching:
Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. Long a China hawk, Cotton is credited with
convincing Trump to implement the China travel ban (though Trump didn’t go as
far as Cotton wanted). He deserves credit for spotting the threat and speaking
out early on. Widely assumed to have presidential aspirations, Cotton has also
deftly managed to avoid being seen as a Trump yes-man — unlike, say, Senator
Lindsey Graham — while remaining a favorite of the president’s.
If the GOP ultimately sours on Trump’s handling of the
crisis, Cotton would be ideally situated to highlight his prescience. But
that’s a long way off, and for now it’s worth noting that Cotton is running ads
supporting the president’s response to the pandemic.
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