2023: A Year in Defiance of Political Reality
From Trump’s political resilience to Biden's struggles with subjective economic “vibes” to Hamas’ move to overturn the status quo in the Middle East, bold, reality-defying acts are paying off
I’m worried. Maybe you are, too.
A year-end post seems like the perfect occasion to try to explore the sources of the anxiety—because I feel like it’s emerging from a change in the character of our collective lives. The change didn’t start in 2023, but it reached a new level of intensity this year. I fear it may soon intensify further to engulf politics the world over.
Trump Contra Political Reality—Act 1
I’m referring to a change that played a significant role in the class I taught this semester at Penn on “The 2024 Republican Primaries.” Despite the title, the class was really a history of the Republican Party from the 1960s down to the present. As one might expect, we noted antecedents to Donald Trump: George Wallace, Pat Buchanan, Sarah Palin—the right-wing populists and paleoconservatives who often went along with and deferred to the Reaganite leadership of the GOP but also sometimes rebelled against that leadership, demanding concessions or recognition by the center-right candidates for high office anointed by the institutional party.
Trump should have been the latest Buchanan, or Palin, or Michele Bachmann, or Herman Cain, or Rick Santorum—a flash-in-the-pan novelty candidate capable of stirring up a faction of Republican voters who would eventually move on to a more viable, mainstream option. But that isn’t what happened.
As Tim Alberta’s American Carnage helped to remind me (and to teach my students for the first time), Trump did everything wrong in 2015 and 2016. By “wrong,” I mean the diametric opposite of what a seasoned candidate or an experienced campaign consultant would advise. Don’t attack one’s own party. Don’t insult former Republican presidents. Don’t denigrate veterans. Don’t defy what the professionals say. If you do these things, you will self-immolate. Your campaign will be over before it gets started. There are rules you must obey, laws of political gravity that set the parameters of the possible. Ignore or seek to transgress them at your peril.
But Trump did transgress them, and he flourished. He ignored all the expert advice. He attacked George W. Bush for September 11 and the “disaster” of the Iraq War. He mocked John McCain, not just for losing to Barack Obama in 2008 but for his record of military service. Once Mitt Romney directly attacked Trump, Trump launched a counter-attack against the party’s standard-bearer from just four years in the past—and surged in the polls in the weeks following the conflagration. He defied the 2013 Republican “autopsy,” which advocated a softer line on immigration and a more welcoming rhetoric to attract minority voters. He refused to endorse the cuts to entitlements his party had long been itching to make.
All the smartest Republicans said it couldn’t work—that Trump winning the nomination, let alone the presidency, was an impossibility. As we’re all well aware, they were wrong.
But I wonder if we’ve really absorbed the implications. Over and over again in the years since 2016, members of the political establishment have acted as if the old, normal rules apply to Trump. And over and over again, he’s demonstrated a capacity to thrive by refusing to abide by those rules—and in so doing, he’s managed to rewrite those rules.
He’s not the only one. All around us in 2023, we see evidence that we’re entering a reality much more fluid and manipulable than the one many of us took for granted throughout the preceding decades. This is a world in which bold acts of political defiance get rewarded in ways that could well incentivize even bolder acts of radicalism in the future.
Trump Contra Political Reality—Act 2
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Notes from the Middleground to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.