By Nick Catoggio
Wednesday, December 27, 2023
On Christmas Eve I watched Tucker Carlson interview actor
Kevin Spacey, inexplicably in character as the sleazy politician he portrayed
on House of Cards.
Spacey had no reason to reprise the role, and Carlson—a
semi-serious political commentator who may or may not become
vice president—seemed to have no reason to offer him a platform. The
segment wasn’t even played for obvious laughs, as one would expect if it were a
holiday goof. The two appear to have nothing in common apart from the fact that
they’ve each faced some, ah, professional hiccups in recent years after
being accused of misconduct.
It made no sense. Even so, as I watched I thought, “Yeah,
that scans.”
On Christmas Day I was tooling around online when the
presumptive Republican nominee for president posted his yuletide greetings on
Truth Social. If ever there were a moment for a candidate for office to play it
safe and stick to basic well wishes, Christmas is it. Flashing some Christian
bona fides by reminding readers of the reason for the season would also be
sensible, knowing how religious voters might appreciate it.
Instead he used the occasion to hope that his
enemies “rot
in hell.” And as I read that I thought, “Yeah, that scans.”
Trump’s message and Tucker’s interview were fitting ways
to wind down 2023, the year America finally gave up on normal politics.
In both cases, flouting expectations of normalcy was the
point. Trump felt no need to feign normal emotions like piety or goodwill with
his Christmas message because he knows he’ll pay no price among his admirers
for failing to do so. “Christians tend not to hope other people rot in hell on
Christmas Day,” radio host Erick Erickson sniffed
afterward, which read like a non sequitur in context. Why would Trump care
whether people think he’s a good Christian? And how confident should we be at
this point about which sentiments are and aren’t condoned by politically
engaged members of the faith? Erickson’s grasp of what’s
normal and what isn’t for American Christians may not be as firm as
he, and I, might wish.
Carlson’s video, trivial though it is, was also designed
to challenge what we regard as normal. That’s been his political project for
years. Tucker understands that illiberalism won’t go mainstream in America
unless Americans learn to distrust “the system” more than they do those who
have run afoul of it, which is why he’s forever trying to normalize the latter.
Russia isn’t evil, the January 6 defendants are innocent, manosphere influencer
and accused rapist Andrew Tate is
worth listening to: Rehabbing Kevin Spacey after the film industry ostracized
him and prosecutors came after him (although, in fairness, without convicting
him) is another small nudge in that direction. If the Joker were a real person,
Carlson would have interviewed him respectfully half a dozen times already and
treated him like some countercultural sage because that’s what an all-out (and
I do mean all-out)
assault on received wisdom requires.
We’d all better get used to it, though. The lesson of
2023 is that abnormality is here to stay.
***
On Tuesday pollster Kristen
Soltis Anderson flagged a great irony of the coming presidential
campaign. The guy who’s been cracked up to be a dictator in the making is,
arguably, the “normalcy candidate” in the race.
I’ve noticed
that irony before myself.
Trump got elected in 2016 because he promised chaos,
Anderson pointed out, a candidate so far outside the political norm that he’d
necessarily change the way government functioned once in office. (Which turned
out to be sort of true!) If he wins in 2024 he’ll do so by promising order,
returned to power by an electorate desperate to address crises that seem beyond
the Biden White House’s control.
This year has been the one in which Americans truly gave
up on the incumbent president’s ability to restore the sense of normalcy his
election in 2020 promised.
The year he took office—2021—began auspiciously just two
weeks after January 6 and with news from the CDC about the new vaccines potentially
snuffing out COVID. But that turned out to be fool’s gold; another terrible
wave of the disease arrived that summer, then another that winter. In August,
Biden’s old-pro reputation for competence was shattered when he ordered U.S.
troops to withdraw from Afghanistan and that country’s government promptly
collapsed. By fall, supply-chain issues and exorbitant COVID relief spending
had triggered the worst inflation in 40 years.
Still, he’d only been in office for one year. The next,
2022, would be his chance to right the ship—but inflation, which had been
dismissed at first as “transitory,” persisted. In February Russia attacked
Ukraine, touching off the biggest war in Europe since World War II. The Federal
Reserve began raising interest rates aggressively to try to cool off rising
prices, making mortgages too burdensome for many aspiring home-buyers.
In 2023 inflation slowed down. Dark forecasts of a
recession caused by interest-rate hikes began to brighten; the economy
continued to grow. As the year ends, the so-called “misery index” has dropped
to its
lowest point since the start of the pandemic. Yet the sense of Biden
having lost control lingers. A new war in the Middle East between Israel and
Hamas will soon enter its third month. Encounters between migrants and U.S.
agents at the southern border, which had eased earlier this year, have lately
reached new monthly
highs.
Mingled throughout all of this chaos is the inescapable
fact that Joe Biden is the oldest person to hold the office of president, a
record he sets anew each day. Within his own party, 69
percent say he’s too old to serve another term effectively. In
September, fully
two-thirds of Democrats and “leaners” said they’d prefer someone else
as their presidential nominee. Despite the good economic news, his net job
approval in the RealClearPolitics average over
the past month has been among the worst of his tenure. He now trails Trump
routinely in
head-to-head polling.
Put all of that together and I fear 2023 was the year the
country swallowed the hard reality that normalcy isn’t coming back on Grandpa
Joe’s watch. Either he lacks the political acumen to make it happen or he lacks
the physical and mental wherewithal needed to stay on top of events. Anderson
writes:
Whatever advantage Mr. Biden held
over Mr. Trump on the issue of who would be more likely to bring about order,
stability and calm, it has surely been erased at this point. Indeed, many
voters have begun to look back longingly at the Trump era. While, according to
a recent Wall
Street Journal poll, voters said by a 30-point margin that Mr. Biden’s
policies have hurt them personally more than helped, by a 12-point margin, the
same voters were more likely to say that Mr. Trump’s policies helped them. …
This is why, already, Trump is
beginning to work to portray himself as the safer, more stable pick and to go
to great — even misleading — lengths to claim that Mr.
Biden actually wants chaos and has created a world filled with
more terror.
He has already produced
ads suggesting that Mr. Biden’s inability to lead is directly
responsible for the global disorder that threatens American security, and it is
a message voters have begun
to echo in polling.
This has also been the year that Democrats, and American
voters generally, confronted the startling fact that this very old and
unpopular politician not only intended to run for another term but that he
would face no serious opposition from within his own party in doing so. Never
in my life (and I’m pretty old!) has a party nominated a candidate for
president so reluctantly, with so many misgivings about his ability to do the
job. In a democracy, where voters are supposed to have their way, that’s as abnormal
as abnormal gets.
The good news for Democrats is that, one way or another,
in 2028 their nominating process should look far more normal. But for the next
five years, they and we will need to endure the bizarre spectacle of a man in
his mid-80s trying to simply get through the day while doing the most important
job in the world.
And that’s the best-case scenario for the outcome of the
coming election. There’s another.
***
I have a theory that Nikki Haley’s modestly rising
support in the Republican primary is based mainly on nostalgia. Which is
ironic, as there’s never been a candidate whose agenda is more blatantly
nostalgic than the guy running on a platform of making America great again.
There’s more to Haley’s support, of course. Traditional
conservatives prefer a candidate who hopes to shrink government at home and
exercise American power abroad. They like her on the policy merits.
But it really can’t be said enough: Nikki Haley is
a disciplined politician.
And discipline is a far less common trait among Republican candidates in 2023
than it used to be.
The frontrunner in the GOP primary must be the single
most undisciplined national figure in the history of the party. “Chaos follows
him,” Haley likes to say of Trump, ever so carefully. But chaos follows a lot
of Republicans nowadays. Trump’s most formidable rival successor, Ron DeSantis,
blew through more than $100 million in fundraising in this year’s race (partly
because he couldn’t shake his fondness
for flying on private jets), recently saw his
super PAC implode, and somehow ended up employing people who thought it’d
be a good idea to stick white-supremacist
iconography into promotional videos.
In a very abnormal party, Haley’s an abnormally normal
candidate. Many of us are nostalgic for that.
Many, but not enough. Despite her admirable discipline,
she’s about to get smoked in most of the early states and will likely be out of
the race before Super Tuesday.
That’s because 2023 will be remembered as the year
Republican voters leaned into abnormalcy to a degree unprecedented in American
history. It marks the completion of the GOP’s transformation from a party,
which concerns itself primarily with policy, to a vessel dominated by a
personality cult.
I don’t need to tell that story at length because I tell
it in one form or another in this newsletter every day. Having absorbed a coup
plot, an insurrection at the Capitol, two impeachments, and 91 criminal counts
in federal and state courts, the American right has decided that the figure at
the center of all of that abnormality is the person they want for president
again in 2024.
Overwhelmingly, too. Even during his best period of
polling, DeSantis was never within 10 points of Trump in the national
average. As I write this, he’s 51 points behind.
There’s no way to view Trump’s
runaway victory this year except as enthusiastic collective
ratification of his misconduct, civic and otherwise. This is the year that his
famous statement about being able to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without
losing a vote proved to be an understatement. Given how his polling rose following
his first indictment, it’d be more accurate to say that shooting someone on
Fifth Avenue would gain him votes within the Republican Party.
I didn’t see it coming. As cynical as I am, I couldn’t
conceive that GOP voters would reward him for the trouble he’s brought America
when they had a perfectly satisfactory Trumpy replacement available in
DeSantis. Last year’s midterms cemented that conviction: After Trump’s
candidates underperformed while DeSantis overperformed (wildly), it seemed like
sheer electability would tip the balance between them. Normal political
logic—voting for the most right-wing and non-insane candidate
who can win a general election—would reassert itself at last.
It did not. It turns out that quite
literally nothing could have torn them away from Trump. In lieu of
normal political logic, Republican voters soon will have chosen to put
themselves and the country through a series of destabilizing civic crises that
could have been averted simply by choosing a different nominee.
Crisis: Either Trump, with his autocratic
pretensions, will be back in power in 14 months or we’ll endure the trauma
of another “rigged election” propaganda campaign next fall. (Or next month,
even.) States may struggle to agree on
matters as basic as how many electoral votes each candidate won. If he loses,
his supporters will insist that his defeat was unfair because of the lawfare
that hobbled him during the campaign. Whatever happens, America will be on a
knife’s edge.
Crisis: Trump is unlikely to be acquitted of all 91
criminal charges against him before the election, which means he’ll either be a
convicted felon on Election Day or he’ll short-circuit the pending prosecutions
against him once he returns to office. (Or both, perhaps.) Whichever it is,
respect for the law will crumble. The spectacle of electing an accused or actual criminal
will disillusion many millions of Americans about their country allegedly being
the greatest in the world.
Crisis: Either Trump will be reinstated on Colorado’s
presidential ballot or he’ll be disqualified as a candidate by a majority of
nine unelected justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Denying the people their
right to elect him would be the heaviest blow to democratic legitimacy in the
history of the United States. Reinstating him on the ballot would reek of a
political outcome engineered by a court that leans his way ideologically.
Whichever it is, esteem for the court as an institution will sink.
If any of these crises are met with violence, that’ll be
a crisis in itself.
We are plunging into something terrible and are doing
so voluntarily, despite the fact that the terrible things to come
are foreseeable and avoidable. I don’t think there’s been a civic catastrophe
of that scale in my lifetime. The character of the people has changed; national
elections are now a matter not of excitement or suspense but dread.
The year 2020 was the same way. One might call it a new
normal.
***
In 2024 we’ll find out how many Americans are comfortable
with that new normal.
The last great irony of this campaign is how heavily
Trump, the avatar of abnormality, will end up depending on swing voters who
prefer him for traditionally normal reasons. They’re the people Anderson has in
mind when she writes of “exhausted” America, the ones who have it in their
heads that reelecting him will somehow push prices back down to what they were
in 2019 and magically intimidate the planet’s malefactors into not starting any
new wars. He’s counting on them to set aside the prospects of domestic upheaval
if he’s reelected as fanciful or grossly overstated.
Most of Nikki Haley’s voters will end up backing him in
the general election for an even more anodyne “normal” reason: They’re
Republicans, and Republicans vote for Republicans, period.
If America rewards him with another term in spite of
everything, the GOP will have no electoral incentive in 2028 and beyond to
prefer less destabilizing nominees. On the contrary, Trump’s authoritarian
politics will be read as an asset in hindsight, helping him appeal to voters
exasperated with the more familiar forms of chaos the country experienced
during Biden’s presidency. Once that happens, Democrats might themselves
conclude that there’s less electoral risk than they thought in nominating
radicals. In 2020 their voters rallied behind Joe Biden after Bernie Sanders
won several early primaries, believing that nominating a more “normal” liberal
would give them an advantage against Trump. And it did …
… but if Trump, thoroughly disgraced, ends up defeating
Biden in 2024, what’s left of that alleged advantage? If you’re a Democrat, why
not be bold with your choice of nominee the way Republicans have?
It could be many years before American politics is “normal” again, I fear. This year has raised the possibility; the outcome in 2024 could cinch it. Perpetual dread is not a good advertisement for democracy.
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