Facing the Future

 From 1949, when President Truman appointed my father to be Assistant Secretary of Labor for International Labor Affairs, to 1981, when my father retired, his career depended upon the whims of the American electorate.  When a Democrat won (Kennedy, Johnson, Carter), he received a diplomatic appointment; when a Republican won he had to find something else to do.  That understandably gave him an all-consuming interest in the outcome of the next election, and being who he was, he identified his own fortunes with those of the nation as a whole.  A Republican victory was, by definition, catastrophic both for him and for the nation. and our whole family accepted that view.  

My father's view has now been adopted by the whole intellectual elite of the Democratic Party, which had convinced itself by 2000 that it was the repository of all wisdom and virtue.  I still have never voted for any Republican presidential candidate and have no plans to do so, but I realized a long time ago that I could count on my fellow citizens to share my views.  I have also concluded over the last sixteen years or so that the Democratic Party is now beholden to certain constituencies that have advanced policies that are not only unpopular but disastrous, and that it includes woke elements that essentially reject fundamental ideas of our civilization and think they can replace it with something better.  I have explored that problem in many posts here.  For that reason I cannot regard our current political struggle as a simple battle between good and evil.  It reflects a much broader decline in our political, intellectual and cultural life--one which no one could stop. 

In the current climate anyone who--like me--is trying to accept certain imminent developments as inevitable provokes an immediate backlash.  A good liberal or progressive is supposed to believe not only that everything Trump wants to do is wrong, but that it cannot possibly succeed.  For the moment our leading newspapers are printing story after story about the insuperable obstacles that Trump is bound to confront.  No respectable historian, however--an endangered species, to be sure--can believe any such thing.  History frequently goes wrong for long periods of time.  Humanity has good and bad impulses, neither of which ever completely prevails.  The relationship between reason and emotion changes over time, and emotion has been gaining ground for the last sixty years.  Writing on the eve of a worse catastrophe than anything we have in store--the Second World War--William Butler Yeats kept his sanity by taking a very long view in one of my very favorite poems.  It is in that spirit that I now try to get a handle on what to expect in the next year or so.

Trump and his coalition, it seems to me, are poised to have a first year in office that could only be compared in recent history to FDR in 1933 and LBJ in 1964-65.  This Trump administration will be nothing like the first one, in which he tried to make use of establishment Republicans and senior military leaders.  Eight years later he has a cadre of totally devoted supporters with whom he is staffing the federal government--and make no mistake, some of them are formidable individuals. Watching some of Attorney General-designate Pam Bondi's confirmation hearing, I wondered if we would have been better off with Matt Gaetz.  Bondi is smart, attractive, charismatic, and clearly devoted to Trump.  She is not alone.  Trump's press office runs very smoothly, in sharp contrast to 2017.  And he has used a cadre of Republican intellectuals to plan his first year in great detail, as we shall discover, it seems, on Monday afternoon, as soon as he has been sworn in.  That by the way is not unique.  Biden in 2021 issued an immediate round of executive orders focusing mainly on the two issues that probably brought Trump back into the White House: immigration and DEI programs.   The New York Times also reports today that Trump has planned a massive raid designed to apprehend illegal immigrants in Chicago during his first week.  Meanwhile, Trump also is working with leaders of the tech industry, led by Elon Musk, who have their own plans for reshaping America.  They include drastic cuts in the federal work force, and the elimination of their job protections.

Trump does not, of course, dispose of Congressional majorities as large as FDR and LBJ did, but he may not need them.  Because of his role in the evolution of the Republican Party he has the absolute loyalty of just about every Republican in the House and Senate, who are just as eager as he to set the United States on a completely different path.  And few of them care, in all probability, that majorities of the national electorate oppose much of what they want to do.  Curiously enough, the election victory that may resemble Trump's most closely is John F. Kennedy's in 1960.  Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon with 303 electoral votes to 219 (and 11 for Virginia Senator Harry Byrd, unpledged electors from Mississippi and Alabama.)  A number of key swing states, including Illinois, New Jersey, Minnesota, Texas, and California, were decided by very narrow margins.  Kennedy won 49.7 to 49.6 percent.  This was recognized as one of the closest elections in US history.  Trump  just defeated Harris in the Electoral College, 312-226.  All seven swing states were decided by very close margins.  He won the popular vote, 49.8 to 48.3.  Last week, however, I heard Senator John Cornyn, while questioning Pam Bondi, describe this victory as a "landslide."  It wasn't, but the slim Republican majorities are going to act as if it was.  I won't be surprised if they at least find exceptions to the filibuster rule to get some legislation through the Senate--just as Democratic leaders were suggesting they should do to pass a law codifying Roe v. Wade.  Since Newt Gingrich, more and more Republicans have adopted opposition to the status quo as their fundamental principle, and no respect for existing practices and institutions will hold them back now.

I predict that the immigration issue will create the biggest crisis of the next four years, a crisis in federal-state relations.   States like California and Illinois are prepared to do whatever they can to block large-scale deportations of illegal immigrants.  The Trump administration may use this as attempt to destroy much of their authority and discredit them completely.  I don't understand exactly how or why the Democratic Party decided to defend the millions of people who have entered the country illegally.  I certainly agree that the United States needs most of those people and that our immigration laws should be changed, but I don't think that acting as if our laws were irrelevant was the way to handle the situation--and it is clear that the Democrats have paid a huge price for that move.  Deportations may not be popular, but active state resistance to them, I suspect, will not be popular either.  The failure of the establishments of both parties to deal with the issue has led us to this point.

This administration will on some fronts do some good.  The elimination of DEI bureaucracies and programs from the federal government is not merely desirable, but necessary.  Some major corporations have begun doing this as well, and even colleges and universities may be forced to do so.  DEI wastes money promoting destructive ideologies.  Similarly, in the first Trump administration, the Department of Education rewrote the guidelines on sexual assault proceedings in colleges and universities to give the accused their basic American rights. The Biden administration rolled back those changes.  Nor do I think that DEI programs are doing anything but harm within the US military--although I cannot say of my own knowledge exactly how far they have gone there.

I cannot predict what will happen in foreign policy.  We will know one thing within a couple of months.  Pressure from Trump, which shocked many Israelis, has in fact led to the cease-fire agreement in Gaza--but the key moment will come in 40 days when stage one of the agreement is over and the Israeli government has the option to resume the war.  Trump might tell them that they cannot do so--while agreeing in return to a joint strike against the Iranian nuclear program.  There is some evidence, too, that the Russians and Ukrainians both expect to be forced into a cease-fire shortly.  What will come of Trump's blustering about the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland, remains very unclear.  And a new crisis could arise at almost any moment: China continues to escalate its military pressure on Taiwan, and Xi has just declared that reunification must take place.

The administration will try to get the government out of the business of regulating the economy--especially its newest and fastest growing sectors. That could be catastrophic.  Cryptocurrencies are likely to boom, and a bust could send us into another severe recession.  We don't know what the effect of tariffs might be.  There are areas, such as chip production, where the Biden administration took major steps down the Trumpian road towards self-sufficiency, and these will probably continue.  In short, there are serious constituencies for much of what Trump wants to do.  He has provided the emotional demagoguery and leadership--yes--to bring them into a powerful coalition, and it is already changing the United States.