By Yuval Levin
Monday, January 04, 2021
For many years now, an important segment of the Republican
electorate has been increasingly frustrated with the elites who lead our core
institutions. The political outlook of these voters has come to be defined by
that frustration — a sense that people with power and privilege in American
life routinely abuse that power and privilege for personal gain and ideological
advantage, that they lie to the public, look down on everybody else’s ways of
life, and actively threaten the religious and cultural foundations of American
society. Calling out that elite corruption and fighting back against it has
become for this growing group of voters the most important purpose of their
political engagement, and so their first and foremost demand from people
seeking their vote. These aren’t the only Republican voters, and their concerns
aren’t all the party cares about, but they have become more and more important.
Their frustration is justified in many respects. Wealth
and status in modern America are often distributed in accordance with a system
that, among other examples of its obnoxious self-regard, calls itself a
meritocracy. It admits people to elite institutions of higher education on the
basis of dubious and increasingly manipulated measures of aptitude, then forms
those people in accordance with a progressive worldview, and then empowers them
in a host of elite institutions without also imposing on them respectable
standards of responsibility or character. There are worse ways to make elites,
of course, but this one has serious problems and perhaps above all it tends to
create a leadership class implicitly hostile to the character and culture of
the bulk of the larger society and blind to the weakness of its own claims to
legitimacy. Combatting the causes, elements, and implications of this system of
elite formation and corruption is an important and valuable cause, especially
if it is done in the name of a reasonably well articulated ideal of the
traditional American way of life. It can make for a plausible organizing
principle for a political movement at home among the factions of the American
Right.
But as is often the case with populist movements, the
frustration at the heart of this enterprise is rooted in a mix of reality and
fantasy. Some of its complaints — economic, cultural, political, intellectual,
historical, and otherwise — reflect genuine abuses, inequalities, and policy
mistakes that have exacted serious costs in the middle and lower educational
and economic tiers of our society while mostly advantaging the upper tiers.
These are the kinds of things that a political program could try to redress in
various ways. But some of its complaints are based in an excessively sinister
set of assumptions about the motives of American elites, in unfounded
assertions about the actions of those elites, or in fevered conspiracies of
abuses of power without a basis in fact. These kinds of complaints can’t be
redressed through acts of governance because the problems they describe aren’t
real, and so politics can only take them up rhetorically — by voicing them or
somehow acting them out. These two sorts of complaints are often intertwined in
complicated and confusing ways.
It is the task of leaders in populist eras, and
especially leaders within populist movements, to distinguish these different
kinds of complaints from one another as clearly as possible. They need to offer
ways to use political power effectively to address those complaints that are
rooted in reality. And they need to push to the side or disperse the power of
those complaints that are rooted in fantasy, so that they don’t render populist
movements pointless, ridiculous, or dangerous.
But such leaders always confront the temptation to do the
opposite: to elevate and champion fundamentally imaginary complaints while
ignoring concerns that reflect difficult societal realities. You get credit
just for talking about the conspiracies when other politicians won’t, you don’t
really have to do anything about them (indeed, you can’t do anything about
them), and you can always fan even greater frustration when others deny or
ignore them. This is easier than governing, which is inherently unsatisfying.
This is a characteristic failing of populist movements.
In government (although not always in politics of course), a failure to deal
with reality is debilitating and self-destructive. In some important respects,
dealing with reality is what governing consists of. Choosing to live in a
fantasy world often means giving up on having real influence over the course of
the real world. You can use powerful institutions as stages upon which to
perform for an audience that wants to see an act, but you cannot use them as
means of governing if you are not willing to separate fact from fiction.
For this reason, populists are often not very good at
using power, even if they are good at obtaining it. This has obviously been
true of Donald Trump. Most of the failures of his administration can be
understood as forms of choosing fantasy over reality and so failing to use the
power at his disposal in a constructive way or using it instead in a
destructive or corrosive way. In the wake of the Trump era, the Republican
Party will need to find better ways to address the concerns of its populist
voters (along with ways of broadening its appeal beyond those voters), and so
it faces the challenge of separating fact from fiction and using power
effectively.
Some early signs on this front are obviously worrisome.
The post-election political spectacle has put the question of reality and
fantasy front and center. A meaningful number of Republican voters are
frustrated because they believe widespread fraud in key states stole the
election for Joe Biden. They are wrong about this. In fact, the election was
relatively close and yielded a mixed result without much evidence of serious
fraud. Trump lost fairly narrowly but clearly in a series of swing states and
so lost the presidency, but Republicans improved their standing in the House of
Representatives and lost just a few seats in the Senate in a year when they had
more seats at risk. No inquiry into fraud has turned up anything of note, and claims
to the contrary have all melted away under scrutiny; most were never even made
in court because they couldn’t even reach the level of assertions. The election
therefore leaves Republicans with some major opportunities to pursue, but also
with a Democratic president to deal with.
Republican politicians could deal with these facts, and
so look for ways to use the power they possess to pursue the opportunities they
have to advance their voters’ interests and expand their future electoral
appeal. Or they could pretend the lies too many of their voters have accepted
are true and put on a show for those voters, to both justify and intensify
their frustration and outrage. And some Republicans in Congress have clearly
chosen the latter course — an easy but corrosive populism, rather than a hard
but constructive populism.
President Trump himself has obviously encouraged them in
this course. He is deeply fluent in the fraud conspiracies, and seems genuinely
to believe them — as he has often shown himself incapable of separating fact
from fiction too. We now also know that he has tried to get state officials to
steal votes for him even as he claims the Democrats stole them away. He is
intent on talking a different reality into being and demands that others accept
it. To abide and encourage the election-fraud conspiracies is to affirm the web
of lies he has been spinning, and the Republican politicians who have chosen to
do that know full well that this is what it means.
To knowingly pretend a lie is true is, simply put, to
lie. Doing that carefully enough to let you claim you’re only raising questions
only makes it even clearer that you know you’re lying. Lying to people is no
way to speak for them or represent them. It is a way of showing contempt for
them, and of using them rather than being useful to them. This is what too many
Republican politicians have chosen to do in the wake of the election. They have
decided to feign anger at a problem that cannot be solved because it does not
exist, and this cannot help but make them less capable of taking up real
problems on behalf of their voters. And in any case, it makes them cynical
liars.
Pointing to Democrats who have done the same in the past
is incriminating, not exonerating. “Barbara Boxer did it too” is not an
argument for very much worth doing. And the notion that they’re only doing it
to make sure their voters’ voices are heard is an admission of derelict
leadership.
Political leaders have a role to play in our system of
government that is not simply an expressive or even representative role. Our
system does not trust leaders, but it also does not trust the public. It looks
to each to restrain and direct the other. Political leaders have an obligation
to be honest with their voters and to serve those voters’ interests by
connecting their legitimate grievances with the hard realities of governing.
They need to choose to address real problems and ignore fake problems. By
choosing not to do that, too many Republicans are choosing to fail their
voters.
The cost Republicans will pay for this failure will not
necessarily be a political or electoral cost. This kind of cynical performance
art is not bad politics right now. And Republicans are pretty well positioned
to prosper electorally in the coming decade. Our system grants some modest but
meaningful structural advantages to the country party (which for now is the
Republican Party) over the city party, demographic changes don’t seem to be
playing out politically as the Left imagined they would, and the Democratic
Party risks doubling down on a nasty combination of radicalism and elitism that
isn’t likely to sell well in American politics. Our parties will probably stay
pretty evenly matched, but close calls are likely to break for the GOP for a
while.
For that very reason, however, it is important that
Republicans learn how to govern more effectively and use political power. If
the Right is likely to continue to do well in politics, it should get better at
governing, and that cannot help but mean getting better at dealing with
reality, including those realities that some voters don’t want to face.
The election was not stolen, and the vice president
doesn’t get to choose the next president. There isn’t anything Congress can do
to change that. But Congress could do some things to protect religious liberty,
to lift some of the burdens weighing on Americans struggling to raise children,
to push back against the radicalization of higher education, to take the threat
of Chinese power more seriously, to help Americans yearning for meaningful
economic security or more stable employment, to make more opportunities
available to Americans who don’t go to college, to secure our borders and
improve the immigration system, and in other ways to help more Americans lead dignified
lives in a decent and prosperous free society. Legislative action can’t simply
achieve any of these things, but it could meaningfully help, even while a
Democrat is president. And politicians who knew how to operate as legislators
and (when a Republican is elected president again) executives could also more
effectively restrain and reverse some of the worst excesses of the Left.
Working toward those ends would make for a stronger electoral argument, too,
with the potential to broaden the Republican coalition in the coming decade.
But as long as Republican politicians choose to spend their time acting out
futile fantasies while letting their capacity for governing atrophy, they are
failing the voters they say they want to serve.
And they are failing their voters in a more fundamental
way, too. By lying to these voters in order to benefit from their outrage,
Republican politicians are living down to the view these voters have of our
country’s leaders — precisely the view those politicians claim to channel and
share. They are affirming too many voters in their low opinion of American
politics, and they are leaving them doubtful that the incoming president is
legitimate and that our larger system of government is too.
No amount of macho fighting talk can cover up this simple fact: To play along with the president’s lies about the election is a profound failure of leadership, a dereliction of responsibility, and a disgrace.
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