When the president’s lawyer is getting his office raided by the FBI, and his former national security adviser has pleaded guilty to felonies, and his former campaign chair faces up to 305 years in prison, and both a federal special counsel and a state attorney general are conducting ever-widening criminal probes into the president’s business partners, and rumors abound that the vice president and the ambassador to the United Nations are planning to run together in the next presidential race — it’s reasonable for opponents and critics of the current regime to get their hopes up.
In the New Yorker, Adam Davidson compares the present moment to the beginning of the Iraq occupation in 2003 and the start of the subprime mortgage crisis in 2007 — both times that marked the beginning of a calamitous disaster, which one could see coming if one knew where to look. “This is the week we know, with increasing certainty, that we are entering the last phase of the Trump Presidency,” he writes. “This doesn’t feel like a prophecy; it feels like a simple statement of the apparent truth.”
I don’t want to argue with Davidson’s prediction of a dramatic demise for the Trump presidency; Jim Newell and Jeet Heer have thoughtful responses noting that the path is trickier than Davidson suggests. I don’t know who’s right, and I don’t want to make an overly confident prediction only to be proven wrong in a couple months or years.
What I want to argue with, instead, is the broader intellectual tendency — a yearning, really — of which Davidson’s piece is a part. This yearning is for something, anything, to end the death loop that American democracy appears to be trapped in, for a big, dramatic blowup to fix the system’s ills. In the liberal imagination, that blowup typically takes the form of Trump’s removal from office, an event that sets us back to a path of normalcy and sane politics.
This yearning is understandable — but it is both dangerous and misplaced. Ending the Trump presidency will not fix, or even substantially ameliorate, most of the problems plaguing the American political system. They were mounting for years before he took office — indeed, they made him possible — and they will continue to plague us for years after he leaves.
What’s more, the desire for a dramatic explosion of the Trump presidency at times seems to blend into a desire for the dramatic blowup of the American political system altogether, a sense that we need some apocalyptic event that will wipe the slate clean and revitalize our democracy in one big revolutionary motion. It’s no accident that the rise of Trump has coincided with fearful but titillated worries about coups d’état, collapses into tyranny, and even a second American civil war or secession. These concerns are partially specific to Trump. But they reflect worries that transcend him too.
The reality is that Trump’s removal or resignation from office, while desirable, would not do much to change the trajectory of America’s political institutions. And the mounting desire for something cataclysmic that could change their trajectory strikes me as dangerous. The best we can do, I fear, is to muddle along and try our best to keep things from getting worse. And the less we accept that, and the more we escape into fantasias of collapse and redemption, the harder making those modest incremental improvements will be.
End the presidency, save the world
Most observers acknowledge that American democracy is in a pretty bad way.
The sheer number of hurdles that reform legislation must pass through, from filibusters to holds to committee votes, have turned the federal government into a vetocracy that stands paralyzed and incapable of adapting in the face of new challenges. Gerrymandering, nonproportional representation in Congress, and the Electoral College lead to a representative government that isn’t very representative at all.
Polarization — particularly negative polarization rooted more in hatred of the other party’s members than loyalty to one’s own party — makes compromise and bipartisanship harder to achieve with each passing year.
Until 2015, these problems were mounting but largely faceless. Donald Trump gave them a human form. He illustrates the US’s susceptibility to demagoguery and to the influence of billionaires seeking to deregulate their own businesses and cut their own taxes. He won with the assistance of one of America’s most broken and anti-majoritarian institutions (the Electoral College) with a congressional majority bolstered by gerrymandering and the underrepresentation of left-leaning urban areas.
He shows how America’s thermostatic electorate, constantly responding to one party’s electoral success with a dramatic swing to the other side, can undermine democratic responsiveness by catapulting a party with a deeply unpopular agenda into office. And he shows how dangerous the presidency’s extraordinary war powers can be in the wrong hands.
So it’s no wonder that his presidency has proven a breeding ground for fantasies of his regime’s demise that range from the responsible — see my colleague Ezra Klein’s case that Trump should be impeached for being ridiculously bad at his job — to the conspiratorial and preposterous (see Louise Mensch’s claims that Trump’s impeachment and arrest are imminent and that the “Marshal of the Supreme Court” had informed the president his impeachment was coming; or Jamie Kirchick, who even before Trump’s presidency was musing about a military coup unseating him).
Those are the optimistic scenarios in which Trump’s presidency and the forces it represents are turned back. But dystopian thought has been on the rise too. We’ve seen a surge of concern and scenario building premised around Trump’s erosion of American political institutions.
It’s fair to worry about the threat Trump poses to the rule of law and certain democratic norms, but unhinged and wacky dystopias have arisen as well, where the concern is less a gradual erosion of important norms and more a palpable fear that Trump is preparing an Alberto Fujimori-style auto-coup where he seizes full-on dictatorial powers. (Yale historian Timothy Snyder, whose book On Tyranny was one of the first big best-sellers of the Trump era, has declared it “pretty much inevitable” that Trump will attempt a dictatorial seizure of power.)
Concerns about presidential authoritarianism are nothing new, just as desires for a presidency to reach an early end are nothing new. But they’ve taken on new potency in the Trump era. That’s partially because Trump is historically awful. But it’s also because we have a sense that things just can’t go on like this, that the intense dysfunction and corruption of the American system of government has to come to an end eventually, in a big and dramatic and permanent fashion.
Humans, as the late literary critic Frank Kermode argued in his book The Sense of an Ending, crave narrative structure. “We are surrounded by [chaos], and equipped for coexistence with it only by our fictive powers,” he writes. We can’t see the world as a sequence of events, one right after another, with no end or resolution in sight. “To see everything as out of mere succession,” he observes, “is to behave like a man drugged or insane.”
We can’t see what’s happening to American politics as just a succession of events that, in themselves, mean nothing. They have to be leading up to a climactic Götterdämmerung in which our slate is wiped clean. This is the yearning behind bold predictions of the Trump administration’s collapse, or of a dramatic descent into tyranny at Trump’s hand.
We fantasize about an early, dramatic end to the Trump years in part because that signals a return to normalcy and a rejection of all the dysfunctions he symbolizes. For more sophisticated observers who know that the forces that produced Trump will continue after he’s gone, you see either a wallowing into dystopia — musing about an American descent into outright tyranny, of the kind occurring in the formerly democratic Hungary and Poland right now. Or you see fantasies of utopia, as in Bernie Sanders’s characterization of the anti-Trump resistance as a broader “political revolution, something long overdue” that will sweep into power “an agenda that works for the working families of our country and not just the billionaire class.”
Spend less time fantasizing about the system blowing up and more time thinking about how best to muddle through
For the past few months, I’ve been making my way through Mike Duncan’s excellent podcast season on the French Revolution, which begins with a brief explication of the many dysfunctions of the Ancien Régime. Power was somehow both too concentrated in the king — creating problems when someone as ill-suited to the role as Louis XVI ascended to the position — and too diffusely distributed across the nobility, clergy, and judiciary.
The French people ultimately decided to fix their problems by taking to the streets to force, first a constitutional monarchy, and then a revolutionary republic. But a quarter-century and millions of dead strewn across Europe later, the Bourbon dynasty returned and status quo ante prevailed.
As the clichéd, apocryphal Zhou Enlai quote goes, it’s too early to know if the French Revolution was a good idea or not, but it clearly failed at achieving its near- or medium-term goals: achieving a durable, stable political system that was more responsive than the Bourbons and that would stand the test of time.
Now, few people outright argue for revolutionary overthrow of the American system of government. The closest we get to calls for revolution or overthrow are celebrations of the Chinese model of dictatorship from both Chinese and Western admirers who see a nation that, unlike a vetocratic America, can just do things, with the implicit idea being that America could use a turn toward autocracy.
But other than that discourse, revolutionary or extraconstitutional thought is basically absent. Even the newly vibrant American socialist movement is composed almost exclusively of reformist social democrats rather than revolutionary socialists.
In a way, I think there should be more talk of revolution, if only to expand the bounds of debate. The political system is badly defective, and revolution is honestly one of the few proposals to fix it that’s equal to the scale of the problem. It deserves a fair hearing, even if I think it would be a terrible mistake — after all, most revolutions tend to fail, we’ve learned over the past few centuries.
So where does this leave us? Absent a revolutionary shock to create a radically new political order, the best we can do is just muddle along.
What does that look like? An unsatisfying litany of heavy political lifts, most of which will fail, and each of which on its own would only mildly improve matters if adopted. We should abolish the filibuster and Electoral College and eliminate midterm elections by having the House, Senate, and president serve concurrent four-year terms. We should adopt the Fair Representation Act to end gerrymandering and move toward proportional representation. We need a robust right to vote in the Constitution, public financing for elections, and more transparency for corporate and nonprofit political spending.
These seem like ambitious reforms, and in all likelihood most of them will fail, leaving us in a perhaps mildly better version of the morass we’re in now. Even in the extraordinarily unlikely event we make them all happen, a number of core problems in our politics will remain. You can’t legislate negative partisanship away, and you can’t entirely prevent corporations and the wealthy from exerting some degree of oligarchic power without trampling on freedom of speech.
And if those changes are not enough, then getting Trump frogmarched out of the White House certainly won’t be. Ejecting him cannot and will not suddenly cure our political dysfunction. The problems in our democracy don’t suddenly disappear when he’s no longer in the White House, any more than they would’ve disappeared had he narrowly lost in 2016 rather than narrowly won.
“This is increasingly my fear: that there is no principled alternative to muddling through,” the political writer Will Wilkinson mused back in 2010. “But muddle we must.”
I understand the yearning not to muddle, for a big, climactic finish to both the Trump presidency and the American national nightmare. But if muddling through is to lead anywhere, we ought to be prepared for it, and prepared to make the most of it, rather than thinking a deus ex machina like a civil war or revolution or impeachment will blow the whole thing up in a stroke. That kind of conviction can breed complacency or disdain for good incrementalist ideas. And it can breed fatalism about what’s possible in the current system by setting the standard for success impossibly high.
This is not a romantic vision. It doesn’t fill one with hope the way that declarations that the end of the Trump presidency is imminent do. This feels like a big moment, one that deserves a big conclusion, with big stakes.
The truth is the Trump years will likely end with a whimper rather than a bang — just as the conclusion of Watergate did not lead to a cleansed and more ethical politics, and just as the financial crisis did not usher in a new era of ethical banking.
Part of the pain of those crises came from Americans as a people expecting too much out of them, expecting a greater transformation than was actually on offer. If, as Davidson says, the Trump presidency’s collapse is one such moment, we should enter it with a clearer sense of the problems that gave rise to Trump, and the discipline, the vision, and, most importantly, the patience to tackle them.
