By Charles C. W. Cooke
Wednesday, April 09, 2025
The story of the last 20 or so years of American
political life is the story of two minority parties, which, having been handed
the keys to the government after the other one fell out of favor, have each set
about remaking the world at the urging of their most eschatological champions,
and each been crushed by the attempt forthwith. It is by this point rather a
cliché to observe that, if either the Democrats or the Republicans could just
be normal for a while, they might have a shot at a period of dominance.
But the notion has become bromidic for good reason. Scarcely has a new
president been ushered into the Oval Office before he has overinterpreted his
win. George W. Bush mistook his victory for a mandate to privatize Social
Security; Barack Obama was convinced that the hostility toward his health care
plan was a mirage; Joe Biden became persuaded that he had been sent to
Pennsylvania Avenue as the second coming of FDR; and, in his second go-round,
Donald Trump seems to believe that he is expected to reorder international
trade. None of these assumptions were correct, and the electoral consequences
to date speak for themselves.
It is perhaps a slight exaggeration to contend that, in
every case, those presidents would have been better off doing literally nothing
than to have embarked on the courses that they did. But it is only a slight
one. For Joe Biden, that claim is almost certainly literally true. Had Biden
achieved nothing in his term save the slow restoration of normalcy and the
appointment of a single Supreme Court justice, he might well have left office
quite popular. Because Joe Biden declined to take that path, the Do-Nothing
option was unavailable to Donald Trump — who, as the polls clearly show, was
elected to fix a set of concrete ills. But those ills, while important, were
still limited in scope. By their own admission, Americans wanted to see a
reduction in the cost of consumer goods, stricter enforcement at the southern
border, and a reversal of the progressive cultural hegemony that had reached
such an irritating fever pitch in recent years. Summed up, Trump’s task was to
re-create the conditions that obtained in 2019 — before the worst inflation in
40 years, before the technocratic madness of the Covid years, and before the
oppressive ubiquity of “wokeness” permeated all that the sun touched.
Instead, Trump plunged the country into an
unconstitutional, ill-considered, chaotically justified trade war. Again, the
siren’s call of revolution proved more seductive than the charms of a
slow-and-steady advance.
Since the Civil War, the United States has enjoyed a
remarkably stable two-party system. Pick a year since 1860 — any year — and you
will find that the president is either a Republican or a Democrat and that
Congress, too, is run by either one of those brands. But that the Democrats and
the Republicans have a duopoly does not mean that everyone in America is either
a Democrat or a Republican, or even that they vote reliably for the same party
every time. As a matter of fact, around 40 percent of the present electorate considers itself
“independent.” One would have thought that this would focus the minds of the
two parties, which, by mathematical definition, can neither win nor retain
power without pleasing this group. Astonishingly, the opposite has happened.
And lo the pendulum swings.
The dirty little secret of contemporary American politics
is that, for all the cultural warfare that dominates the headlines, absolutely
everything that is contended between the two sides is contingent upon the state
of the economy. If a party can produce — or, often, simply exist coincidentally
with — a good economy, its other ambitions have a shot of coming to fruition.
If it cannot, those ambitions are dead in the water. Naturally, there are some
diehards on both sides of the aisle who will cast their ballot for their team
irrespective of the circumstances at hand, but the Great Middle that currently
determines the result behaves in precisely the opposite manner to this and
cannot be cowed by appeals to purity, loyalty, or fealty to a broader cause.
Voters in the middle are not especially ideological, which inoculates them
against invitations to sacrifice themselves for other people’s aims; they are
not especially partisan, which renders them uninterested in the fortunes of
particular politicians; and, while they may follow it loosely, they are not
obsessed with politics, which they regard as being subordinate to civil society
rather than its primary driver. Lose them, and you lose power — and, with it,
all the aspirations it empowers.
Watching the Trump administration this week — not to
mention the legion of Too Online acolytes that its November victory has
encouraged — one cannot help but conclude that the White House has forgotten
that its narrow political base and the United States of America are not even
close to being the same thing. In the entreaties to trust the president
implicitly, or to suffer financially for his utopian vision, or even to impoverish
ourselves for our own good, I have been reminded of a quip from Blackadder
Goes Forth, in which, having been called to the Army’s HQ, the titular
character sardonically explains how thrilled he is that “that idiot General
Melchett is about to offer me some attractive new opportunities to have my
brains blown out for Britain.” At some point, one of our two storied parties
will cease to deliver such invitations to the American public — and, as is only
right and proper, it will be richly rewarded for that choice.
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