By Jack Butler
Wednesday, December 16, 2020
Way back in November 2016, shortly after Donald Trump had
defeated Hillary Clinton, Vice President-elect Mike Pence went to Broadway to
see Hamilton. One of the most successful Broadway productions of the
modern era, the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical combines a historical grounding in
Ron Chernow’s biography of the titular Founding Father with songs that draw
from modern music. It also has a diverse cast — the only one white performer
plays King George III — to help make the story of America’s origins accessible
to new generations.
After the performance Pence attended had finished (and
after he had already been booed by some in the audience), the cast assembled on
stage, and Brandon Dixon, who played Aaron Burr, addressed him. “We, sir — we
are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new
administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or
defend us and uphold our inalienable rights,” Dixon said. “We truly hope that
this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf
of all of us.” Pence took the experience in stride, stressing the right of
people to speak their minds in this way. Unsurprisingly, President-elect Trump
was less conciliatory, demanding an apology.
It has become something of a cliché to characterize the
events of the five years since as “the Trump show,” and for good reason: It is
undeniable that Trump has been the main character of American political life
for the past five years. But if we are to speak of real life in terms of
fiction, then it is worth noting that shows, movies, and plays typically
involve bookends, with something at the beginning of the work being invoked,
resolved, or otherwise referenced at its end. So it was somehow fitting that on
Sunday night, Jonathan Groff, the original Hamilton cast’s King George
III, headlined
a livestream fundraiser with other castmates in support of the Georgia’s two
Democratic Senate candidates, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, who are competing
in runoff elections against Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue,
respectively.
The progressive desire to marry dominance of culture with
dominance of politics should by now come as a shock to no one. One consequence
of the Trump years has been the abandonment of any pretense that much of
mainstream media, culture, and academia is anything other than liberal, and the
radicalization of many already openly liberal institutions. In response to what
they identified as the unique threats President Trump posed to the American
political system, many on the left adopted a decidedly antagonistic pose toward
him. In some cases they were right to find Trump’s words or actions abhorrent;
in many others, they treated a more typical, if almost always clumsily
advanced, conservatism as fascism, or indulged outright lies about him and
other Republicans. Trump, of course, often invited such treatment and seemed to
relish the scorched-earth political combat.
So the Trump years dragged on, until an election outcome
that represented the American political system at its frustrating best: Trump
lost, but not in the landslide for which his opponents had hoped; down-ballot
Republicans did far better than expected, making gains in the House and giving
themselves a good chance to hold the Senate. Which is why now, more than a
month after the election, all eyes in the American political universe are fixed
on Georgia. If Republicans win the January runoffs there, they’ll be able to
impose a kind of moderation on President-elect Joe Biden; if Democrats win,
they’ll control both chambers of Congress and the White House for the first
time since 2009, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking
vote in the Senate.
Here it should be pointed out that Obama took office with
commanding House and Senate majorities, while the best Biden can hope for is
tenuous control. But Groff and his castmates clearly prefer even tenuous Democratic
control to the alternative, and have thrown their considerable profile and
resources behind the effort to secure it. To them and others on the left who
seek a return to the seeming progressive cultural and political hegemony of the
Obama years, one can only say: Be careful what you wish for.
It was not the case that President Obama was a perfect
figure, impossible to mock. Conservatives spent those years frustrated by the
media’s willful blindness to Obama’s obvious defects. But Obama was undeniably
a more inspiring and competent political talent than his former vice president,
who wallowed in mediocrity for nearly a half-century until he was elevated to
prominence and a succession of incredible fortune sufficed to place him in the
White House. The same progressive cultural mainstream that could find no fault
in Obama while it simultaneously covered for him will surely attempt the same
for Biden, but it will have a much harder time. After four years (or maybe
less), the propping up of Biden could end up far more noticeable because the
Biden edifice might end up mostly scaffolding.
And having noticed the effort that’s gone into propping
Biden up, people could dislike it, and reject it. In an environment in which
liberal preferences seem to win out in almost every institution of note, people
who, for whatever reason, do not share these preferences can grow frustrated.
As Ross Douthat put
it in a somewhat prescient September 2016 New York Times column:
Outside the liberal tent, the
feeling of being suffocated by the left’s cultural dominance is turning voting
Republican into an act of cultural rebellion — which may be one reason the
Obama years, so good for liberalism in the culture, have seen sharp G.O.P.
gains at every level of the country’s government. . . .
. . . It remains an advantage for
the G.O.P., and a liability for the Democratic Party, that the new cultural
orthodoxy is sufficiently stifling to leave many Americans looking to the
voting booth as a way to register dissent.
I say “somewhat prescient” only because Douthat’s
observations were qualified with a then-reasonable belief that Trump’s unique
flaws would make it hard for him to capitalize on the latent sentiment Douthat
identified. As it turned out, Trump went farther despite his flaws than anyone
had thought possible, even if in the end they just barely did catch up to him.
In the aftermath of Biden’s victory, progressives would do well to ask
themselves why that is — why the 2020 election was not the decisive
despoliation of the Republican Party that they’d hoped for.
One answer is that the insulated bubble of elite liberal
opinion within the institutions of our would-be hegemons makes those inside of
it both less willing and less able to gauge whether their views remain outside
of the cultural mainstream. Calling Latinos “Latinx,” a term popularized by
academics and used by a vanishingly small number of actual Latinos, did not
enable Democrats to win Florida. Talk of socialism and defunding the police may
excite Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fans, but it angered
swing-district Democrats struggling to hold their seats, and the party’s
House majority shrank when it had been expected to grow. Even Hamilton
itself has come under criticism from the far left as an attempt to honor the
legacy and extend the appeal of a history that many progressives have come to
see as fundamentally problematic. If left-wingers continue to push leftward
while castigating those who won’t come along for the ride, then their power
could fade even as their control over many institutions lingers.
This is all worth keeping in mind as a man best known for
playing King George III tries to tell Americans for whom they should vote.
Georgia voters have a chance to deny our would-be hegemons the joint
political-cultural control they seem to crave. Perhaps they’ll get it; perhaps
they won’t. But whether they do or not, if they continue to brandish their
power incompetently and without regard for the country as whole, then they are
unlikely to brandish it for very long. Five years ago, voters found it intolerable
enough that they elected Donald Trump as “the only middle finger available.”
Trump himself may now deserve to be a spent political force. But the sentiment
that propelled him to the White House in the first place is likely to remain a
potent political force waiting to be tapped by others.
One thing almost as common to stories as bookends is
sequels.
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