How reason got fired

Government is for the people, even conservative people. The Republicans forgot it, and Trump is the consequence that they will now have to live with, whether he loses—or wins...

SAM TANENHAUS

Politicians are famous for their memories, which are remarkably detailed, especially when it comes to names and faces, places and dates. But that gift necessitates another, just as important: the gift of forgetting. How much our politicians would rather not remember—defeats, mistakes, embarrassments, not to mention crimes and misdemeanours, malfeasances great and small. Ask Hillary Clinton (the private email server!) or Donald Trump (the “birther” controversy! the tax returns!) Rather, don’t ask them. And please, don’t ask the two parties stuck with these two battered candidates till the Doomsday moment on 8th November, which could well lead to even darker days.

If Clinton wins and Republicans hold onto the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate, Republican legislators, embittered by a third straight presidential defeat, may well announce a formal investigation of Clinton regarding her private email server usage even before she takes the oath of office, the first step in a long siege whose goal will be 2020. And if Trump wins?

The prospect has pitched Republicans into the most ambitious programme of forgetting in modern political history. Victory in November would make their party his, but it could also make him captive to its agenda, since he has no viable programme of his own. A Republican fail-safe agenda is already in place. Since the spring, House Speaker Paul Ryan—the party’s highest ranking official— has been trying on the role of legislative proconsul. The two would be decidedly awkward partners in the new Republican era.

They have little in common. Steeped in numbers and policy minutiae, Ryan is a celebrated budget hawk. As such, he is the type of Republican who has done most to reduce the capacity of the Federal government, and arguably the governability of America. The long years of penny-pinching and gridlock in Washington have created the impression that it is impotent on the home front, provoking that great sense of frustration and abandonment, which made candidate Trump possible. For his own part, Trump is legendarily bored by budgets and any other policy detail. This is part of his appeal. “Republican maths” has aroused suspicion for many years now, especially when it’s attached to the supply-side doctrine Ryan espouses: tax cuts for the wealthy, reduced spending on the “entitlements” much of the country, including the Republican base, depends on in hard times. The consequences are contributing to the rage of the hour. Add to that Trump’s instinctive feel (possibly the surest since Bill Clinton’s) for what the public wants, and the conflict with Ryan could be titanic, an intra-party battle of the kind not seen in many years.

SamTanenhausis Prospect’s US writer-at-large. His next book will be a biography of William F Buckley Jr

“Obstructionism has rendered Washington impotent, provoking frustration and a sense of abandonment”

There are precedents: the 1950s, when the internationalist Republican Dwight Eisenhower struggled against isolationists within his own party; the 1960s, when the Democrat Lyndon Johnson first took on Southern segregationists and then anti-Vietnam doves; the 1970s, when Richard Nixon lost control of the Republicans during Watergate. Generally, the “right side” prevailed, but the cost was always steep. The Democrats remained a weakened party until 1992, when the “New Democrat” Bill Clinton broke through. For Republicans, intra-party strife locked in the rise of “movement conservatism,” still the right’s dominant ideology, though Trump has dealt it a blow—how severe is as yet unclear.

So many are caught up in the “horse race”—the polls, the gaffes, even, Lord help us, the tweets—that the true import of Trumpism is being missed. While he is anomalous, the politics he represents is not. “America First” nationalism—distrustful of allies, indulgent of dictators, protectionist—has a long history on the right, dating back to the Gilded Age of robber barons, whose company Trump belongs to, in his misshapen way. That politics thrived in the 1920s boom years and was kept alive in the 1930s and 1940s, when the “Old Guard” in the Midwest denounced the New Deal and warned against America’s entry into the Second World War, before Pearl Harbor. It flared up again in the Cold War, opposing the Marshall Plan Nato, and the United Nations— rubbishing these innovations as “world government.” In 1952 the “Old Guard” lost an epic ugly intra-party war against East Coast internationalists and moderates, when Eisenhower—who as the former Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe, had a CV that defined him as an internationalist—won the nomination, and then the presidency.