By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, November 22, 2024
If anybody ever gets around to making those Remnant bingo cards
that Jonah Goldberg keeps promising us, one of the items will be his repeated
reminder—and I am grateful to him for repeating it—that financial crises such
as the one the United States (and much of the rest of the world) experienced in
2008-09 tend to pull long, enduring populist episodes in their wakes. One of
the things that turbocharged populism does, or can do, is speed up the usual
pendulum swings between parties as electorates grow quickly frustrated or bored
with the incumbents and then throw them out—only to turn around and throw out
the new guys the next time around.
The U.S. election just (almost) concluded is an example
of that, but the anti-incumbent wave has been nearly universal: The British rejected
the Conservatives and Rishi Sunak for the left-wing Keir Starmer and his
Labour Party; the French delivered
a beating to Emmanuel Macron and his allies in elections for the European
Parliament and then in the National Assembly election; the Dutch saw off their
longest-serving prime minister and replaced him with a government that will
include the party of anti-immigrant demagogue Geert Wilders; the Australians
went from right to left, as did the Brazilians; in South Korea, the opposition
won a landslide; Italians gave the boot to the technocratic Mario Draghi
and put their boot-shaped
country under the uncomfortable
high heel of Giorgia Meloni; etc. Americans threw out Donald Trump for Joe
Biden in 2020 and then threw out Joe Biden’s proxy in 2024 for Donald
Trump.
And so it goes.
There’s a fair bit of triumphalism in the Trump faction
right now, as one might expect from a group of people led by an ignoramus who
cannot remember more than five minutes into the past or imagine more than five
minutes into the future. Somewhere, Democrats are filling out a Mad Libs
version of the impeachment documents they plan to file after the midterm
congressional landslide they expect (not without some reason) to win. In spite
of their nostalgia and their cheap talk about family and community, populists
are always the wrong kind of “men
with neither ancestors nor progeny; they alone compose their whole race.”
The revolution eats its children, and populists—who like to talk about
revolution but also like to sleep in their own beds at night—just chew up the
children of their ersatz revolution and spit them out.
Populists also talk a great deal about unity—and
unity, as any specimen of Homo even half sapiens knows, is the
gateway to tyranny. To paraphrase
Yuval Levin (check those bingo cards!), democracy is about disagreement,
not unanimity. Liberalism, constitutions, enumerated powers, checks and
balances, bills of rights—all of those are about division, not unity.
Addition may be how you win an election, but the basic arithmetic operation for
building a free society is division. Don’t take my word for it—ask
John Adams:
In the present state of society and
manners in America, with a people living chiefly by agriculture, in small
numbers, sprinkled over large tracts of land, they are not subject to those
panics and transports, those contagions of madness and folly, which are seen in
countries where large numbers live in small places, in daily fear of perishing
for want. We know, therefore, that the people can live and increase under
almost any kind of government, or without any government at all. But it is of
great importance to begin well; misarrangements now made, will have great,
extensive, and distant consequences; and we are now employed, how little soever
we may think of it, in making establishments which will affect the happiness of
a hundred millions of inhabitants at a time, in a period not very distant. All
nations, under all governments, must have parties; the great secret is to
control them. There are but two ways, either by a monarchy and standing army,
or by a balance in the constitution. Where the people have a voice, and there
is no balance, there will be everlasting fluctuations, revolutions, and
horrors, until a standing army, with a general at its head, commands the peace,
or the necessity of an equilibrium is made appear to all, and is adopted by
all.
In truth, it is impossible that
divisions, in any form of simple government, should ever end in the public
good, or in any thing but faction. The government itself is a faction, and an
absolute power in a party, which, being without fear and restraint, is as giddy
in one of these forms as in any other. “De l’absolu pouvoir, vous ignorez
l’ivresse.” It must, therefore, divide, if it is not restrained by another
faction; when that is the case, as soon as the other faction prevails, they
divide, and so on; but when the three natural orders in society, the high, the
middle, and the low, are all represented in the government, and
constitutionally placed to watch each other, and restrain each other mutually
by the laws, it is then only, that an emulation takes place for the public
good, and divisions turn to the advantage of the nation.
(The French is from Jean Racine, loosely: “You don’t know
the intoxication of absolute power.”)
While their usage varied from writer to writer and from
occasion to occasion, what the founders often meant by “faction” was something
like our current understanding of the word and something like what we now would
call a “party.” The story of the founders’ fear
and dread of political parties is relatively well-known—it is worth
reiterating here that some of them hated the idea of political parties so much
that they considered trying to prohibit them under law—and Adams wasn’t very
different in that way. But as with his approach to class interests—the high,
the middle, and the low—Adams assumed that the spirit of faction would always
be with us, and he believed that a well-designed government would harness that
spirit to some public good. If one cannot eliminate the phenomenon in question,
one can at least give the energy it produces some convenient place to go.
The Trump faction within the Republican Party held
together well through the 2016 primaries, when it was fused together not by its
detestation of Democrats or the left by but its loathing of the so-called
establishment of the Republican Party as personified by Jeb Bush … or whoever
happened to be convenient at the moment, even a Tea Party rabble rouser such as
Sen. Ted Cruz. (I’m a little tired right now, but, hand on the Bible, I almost
typed “Sen. Ted Trump.” Which, you know, ain’t entirely wrong.) And it
held together throughout the 2016 general thanks to Hillary Rodham Clinton,
whose rage-glum face slowly set over the American political horizon like a hypertensive
moon.
Once in power, the Trump faction held itself together
through purges and defenestrations. Trump, who boasted endlessly of his ability
to find “the best people,” was constantly having to fire senior figures in his
administration or raging at them after they left, denouncing him as soon as
they crossed the threshold. Right now, the Trump faction doesn’t have a
Republican establishment to provide its members and sub-factions with a common
enemy—because the Trump element is the Republican establishment now—and,
having thoroughly bested proven
election-loser Kamala Harris and her would-be congressional allies, the
Trump gang is at the top of the heap.
Which is, of course, when the knives come out.
The Trump mob has already lost its first major fight,
abandoning the nomination of (incredible words to write!) Matt Gaetz as
attorney general before the fight even got under way. (So much for, “He
fights!” Which, of course, he really doesn’t. He tweets, which isn’t the same
thing; I’ve been angrily tweeted at by 10,000 people at a time, and I’ve been
punched in the face, and the experiences were distinct.) Believe it or not,
there is a pro-Gaetz faction in MAGA world, the adversarial counterculture of which
is practically Mansonite in its mindlessly reactionary conviction that whatever
the so-called elites disdain must be worthy.
The recriminations are flying: Trump sent
J.D. Vance over to the Senate to whip votes for Gaetz, apparently without
considering the possibility that Vance’s reputation in the Senate isn’t
entirely different from Gaetz’s reputation in the House—not that Vance is
thought to be a potential child-sex trafficker but that he is thought of as a
man without a moral core who would sell his beloved Mamaw to the highest bidder
on a Saudi slave market if he thought it would help him to advance in the
world. Trump, the (unconfirmed, obviously) whispers insist, is disappointed
with his beardy sidekick.
It’ll be a lot of fun—and edifying—to watch these
maniacally moronic malefactors tear each other to pieces. But it will also be,
I hope, reassuring in its own way. Ours is a gigantic, sprawling, bewilderingly
complex society, the national government of which is only one small component
of the organic whole. That’s one of the reasons the conspiracy theories are
always, always, always wrong—you can’t get all these people on the same page at
the same time, marching in the same direction to the same drummer. These are American
people we’re talking about—barely governable at all at their most placid.
Put 10 Republicans in a room, and you’ll end up with 11 factions, all of them
railing against the others and insisting that they are the
“establishment.”
Populists always run against their party
“establishments,” of course, though there is a long tradition in American
populism of disdaining and opposing political parties per se—from time to time,
some authoritarian measure to get rid of parties altogether will catch
someone’s imagination. (My mother, an FDR Democrat who would, I suspect, have
loved Trump, thought political parties should be abolished.) Thomas Jefferson
took a different view: There are two-party realities around the world, he
thought, because there are two kinds of people. Jefferson, the partisan,
naturally understood
this in partisan terms:
Men by their constitutions are
naturally divided into two parties. 1. those who fear and distrust the people,
and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2dly those
who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them cherish and
consider them as the most honest & safe, altho’ not the most wise
depository of the public interests. In every country these two parties exist,
and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will
declare themselves. call them therefore liberals and serviles, Jacobins and
Ultras, whigs and tories, republicans and federalists, aristocrats and
democrats or by whatever name you please; they are the same parties still and
pursue the same object. The last appellation of aristocrats and democrats is
the true one expressing the essence of all.
The Republicans are, at the moment, the democratic party,
as Jefferson would have understood it—the populists, the party of those who
valorize agrarian life and distrust big business. While there remains a lefty
current of anti-business sentiment in the Democratic Party, the Democrats are
the party of big business—of most of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood,
etc., though not without the obvious exceptions you’re already thinking
of—because they are the party of upper- and upper-middle class college-educated
urban and suburban professionals, a socioeconomic caste you are a lot more
likely to end up in if you work at McKinsey or Meta than if you work on a
sorghum farm or a John Deere dealership. Progressive populists insist that
Republican populism is phony, Republican populists throw the same charge back
at them, and both are, to a certain extent, correct.
The insistent ignorance of the voters back home is a
pebble in the sensible shoe of every populist in D.C. and in the Gucci loafer
of every lobbyist working to direct that populism in a direction profitable to
his clients. But there is a strain of genuine populism in both parties, too,
and it is a big part of what drives factional division and subdivision. Every
grassroots activist knows the proverb: Our guys, once elected, cease to be our
guys. One of the things that comes into play is Williamson’s First Law:
“Everything is really simple, provided you don’t know a f—ing thing about it.”
Everything is simple to the populist except his own issue
and his own business, which are full of nuance and complexity. Throwing a bunch
of tariffs on Chinese imports may sound like a good idea to a lot of people in
Nebraska, but it gets more complicated for those who make their living in the
state’s $3.4
billion-a-year soybean industry, which is export-dependent. Trump’s trade
war the last time around crushed U.S. soybean producers so thoroughly that the
administration was obliged to spend
billions of dollars bribing them into pacification. The U.S. government
ended up spending more money buying off farmers in the service of Trump’s
political interests than it spent on, say, maintaining
the nuclear arsenal. Priorities!
You can buy a lot of political cohesion with the
resources made readily accessible from the U.S. Treasury by means of
congressional cowardice. But it is never enough, because factionalism is not
ultimately about competition for resources—it is about competition for status.
The guy five chairs down from the president wants to move up to the No. 4
chair. The Republican “strategist” without clients or a portfolio who appears
on Fox News twice a month wants to be on twice a week. The “establishment” is
whomever is standing in the way of these ambitions, inconveniently occupying
coveted status real estate.
My guess is that J.D. Vance will be the first to take it
in the neck: He wasn’t Trump’s first choice, apparently, and he is not
universally loved by those whom he has surpassed—and being in the crossfire of
downward-aimed contempt and upward-flowing resentment at the same time is
always a dangerous place. But, if it isn’t Vance, it will be someone else.
Knocking off Matt Gaetz’s AG ambitions will not be enough to satisfy Democrats’
appetite for vengeance or Republicans’ for brush-clearing—Gaetz did not take up
enough space for his disintegration to create very much opportunity.
If there is a Williamson bingo card, it has a lot of T.S.
Eliot quotes on it, and so: I do not suspect that Trump is much of an Eliot
man, or that he is surrounded by very many of them, but the Trumpists who think
they have won simply because the election went their way are profoundly
mistaken: “If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no
such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.”
Politics will return, and the fact that the Democrats are on their heels only
gives the Republicans a good reason—and a good opportunity—to hunt for the kind
of enemy they most cherish: other Republicans.
As Trump’s favorite
serial killer might have put it: L’appetit vient en mangeant.
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