Politics Will Return, Part 2

Editor’s Note: Part 1 of “Politics Will Return” was published on Wednesday, November 20.

If anybody ever gets around to making those Remnant bingo cards that Jonah Goldberg keeps promising us, one of the items will be his repeated reminder—and I am grateful to him for repeating it—that financial crises such as the one the United States (and much of the rest of the world) experienced in 2008-09 tend to pull long, enduring populist episodes in their wakes. One of the things that turbocharged populism does, or can do, is speed up the usual pendulum swings between parties as electorates grow quickly frustrated or bored with the incumbents and then throw them out—only to turn around and throw out the new guys the next time around.

The U.S. election just (almost) concluded is an example of that, but the anti-incumbent wave has been nearly universal: The British rejected the Conservatives and Rishi Sunak for the left-wing Keir Starmer and his Labour Party; the French delivered a beating to Emmanuel Macron and his allies in elections for the European Parliament and then in the National Assembly election; the Dutch saw off their longest-serving prime minister and replaced him with a government that will include the party of anti-immigrant demagogue Geert Wilders; the Australians went from right to left, as did the Brazilians; in South Korea, the opposition won a landslide; Italians gave the boot to the technocratic Mario Draghi and put their boot-shaped country under the uncomfortable high heel of Giorgia Meloni; etc. Americans threw out Donald Trump for Joe Biden in 2020 and then threw out Joe Biden’s proxy in 2024 for Donald Trump. 

And so it goes.

There’s a fair bit of triumphalism in the Trump faction right now, as one might expect from a group of people led by an ignoramus who cannot remember more than five minutes into the past or imagine more than five minutes into the future. Somewhere, Democrats are filling out a Mad Libs version of the impeachment documents they plan to file after the midterm congressional landslide they expect (not without some reason) to win. In spite of their nostalgia and their cheap talk about family and community, populists are always the wrong kind of “men with neither ancestors nor progeny; they alone compose their whole race.” The revolution eats its children, and populists—who like to talk about revolution but also like to sleep in their own beds at night—just chew  up the children of their ersatz revolution and spit them out. 

Populists also talk a great deal about unity—and unity, as any specimen of Homo even half sapiens knows, is the gateway to tyranny. To paraphrase Yuval Levin (check those bingo cards!), democracy is about disagreement, not unanimity. Liberalism, constitutions, enumerated powers, checks and balances, bills of rights—all of those are about division, not unity. Addition may be how you win an election, but the basic arithmetic operation for building a free society is division. Don’t take my word for it—ask John Adams:

In the present state of society and manners in America, with a people living chiefly by agriculture, in small numbers, sprinkled over large tracts of land, they are not subject to those panics and transports, those contagions of madness and folly, which are seen in countries where large numbers live in small places, in daily fear of perishing for want. We know, therefore, that the people can live and increase under almost any kind of government, or without any government at all. But it is of great importance to begin well; misarrangements now made, will have great, extensive, and distant consequences; and we are now employed, how little soever we may think of it, in making establishments which will affect the happiness of a hundred millions of inhabitants at a time, in a period not very distant. All nations, under all governments, must have parties; the great secret is to control them. There are but two ways, either by a monarchy and standing army, or by a balance in the constitution. Where the people have a voice, and there is no balance, there will be everlasting fluctuations, revolutions, and horrors, until a standing army, with a general at its head, commands the peace, or the necessity of an equilibrium is made appear to all, and is adopted by all.

In truth, it is impossible that divisions, in any form of simple government, should ever end in the public good, or in any thing but faction. The government itself is a faction, and an absolute power in a party, which, being without fear and restraint, is as giddy in one of these forms as in any other. “De l’absolu pouvoir, vous ignorez l’ivresse.” It must, therefore, divide, if it is not restrained by another faction; when that is the case, as soon as the other faction prevails, they divide, and so on; but when the three natural orders in society, the high, the middle, and the low, are all represented in the government, and constitutionally placed to watch each other, and restrain each other mutually by the laws, it is then only, that an emulation takes place for the public good, and divisions turn to the advantage of the nation.

(The French is from Jean Racine, loosely: “You don’t know the intoxication of absolute power.”) 

While their usage varied from writer to writer and from occasion to occasion, what the founders often meant by “faction” was something like our current understanding of the word and something like what we now would call a “party.” The story of the founders’ fear and dread of political parties is relatively well-known—it is worth reiterating here that some of them hated the idea of political parties so much that they considered trying to prohibit them under law—and Adams wasn’t very different in that way. But as with his approach to class interests—the high, the middle, and the low—Adams assumed that the spirit of faction would always be with us, and he believed that a well-designed government would harness that spirit to some public good. If one cannot eliminate the phenomenon in question, one can at least give the energy it produces some convenient place to go.

The Trump faction within the Republican Party held together well through the 2016 primaries, when it was fused together not by its detestation of Democrats or the left by but its loathing of the so-called establishment of the Republican Party as personified by Jeb Bush … or whoever happened to be convenient at the moment, even a Tea Party rabble rouser such as Sen. Ted Cruz. (I’m a little tired right now, but, hand on the Bible, I almost typed “Sen. Ted Trump.” Which, you know, ain’t entirely wrong.) And it held together throughout the 2016 general thanks to  Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose rage-glum face slowly set over the American political horizon like a hypertensive moon.

Once in power, the Trump faction held itself together through purges and defenestrations. Trump, who boasted endlessly of his ability to find “the best people,” was constantly having to fire senior figures in his administration or raging at them after they left, denouncing him as soon as they crossed the threshold. Right now, the Trump faction doesn’t have a Republican establishment to provide its members and sub-factions with a common enemy—because the Trump element is the Republican establishment now—and, having thoroughly bested proven election-loser Kamala Harris and her would-be congressional allies, the Trump gang is at the top of the heap. 

Which is, of course, when the knives come out.

The Trump mob has already lost its first major fight, abandoning the nomination of (incredible words to write!) Matt Gaetz as attorney general before the fight even got under way. (So much for, “He fights!” Which, of course, he really doesn’t. He tweets, which isn’t the same thing; I’ve been angrily tweeted at by 10,000 people at a time, and I’ve been punched in the face, and the experiences were distinct.) Believe it or not, there is a pro-Gaetz faction in MAGA world, the adversarial counterculture of which is practically Mansonite in its mindlessly reactionary conviction that whatever the so-called elites disdain must be worthy.

The recriminations are flying: Trump sent J.D. Vance over to the Senate to whip votes for Gaetz, apparently without considering the possibility that Vance’s reputation in the Senate isn’t entirely different from Gaetz’s reputation in the House—not that Vance is thought to be a potential child-sex trafficker but that he is thought of as a man without a moral core who would sell his beloved Mamaw to the highest bidder on a Saudi slave market if he thought it would help him to advance in the world. Trump, the (unconfirmed, obviously) whispers insist, is disappointed with his beardy sidekick.

It’ll be a lot of fun—and edifying—to watch these maniacally moronic malefactors tear each other to pieces. But it will also be, I hope, reassuring in its own way. Ours is a gigantic, sprawling, bewilderingly complex society, the national government of which is only one small component of the organic whole. That’s one of the reasons the conspiracy theories are always, always, always wrong—you can’t get all these people on the same page at the same time, marching in the same direction to the same drummer. These are American people we’re talking about—barely governable at all at their most placid. Put 10 Republicans in a room, and you’ll end up with 11 factions, all of them railing against the others and insisting that they are the “establishment.” 

Populists always run against their party “establishments,” of course, though there is a long tradition in American populism of disdaining and opposing political parties per se—from time to time, some authoritarian measure to get rid of parties altogether will catch someone’s imagination. (My mother, an FDR Democrat who would, I suspect, have loved Trump, thought political parties should be abolished.) Thomas Jefferson took a different view: There are two-party realities around the world, he thought, because there are two kinds of people. Jefferson, the partisan, naturally understood this in partisan terms:

Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties. 1. those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2^dly those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them cherish and consider them as the most honest & safe, altho’ not the most wise depository of the public interests. In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. call them therefore liberals and serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, whigs and tories, republicans and federalists, aristocrats and democrats or by whatever name you please; they are the same parties still and pursue the same object. The last appellation of aristocrats and democrats is the true one expressing the essence of all.

The Republicans are, at the moment, the democratic party, as Jefferson would have understood it—the populists, the party of those who valorize agrarian life and distrust big business. While there remains a lefty current of anti-business sentiment in the Democratic Party, the Democrats are the party of big business—of most of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, etc., though not without the obvious exceptions you’re already thinking of—because they are the party of upper- and upper-middle class college-educated urban and suburban professionals, a socioeconomic caste you are a lot more likely to end up in if you work at McKinsey or Meta than if you work on a sorghum farm or a John Deere dealership. Progressive populists insist that Republican populism is phony, Republican populists throw the same charge back at them, and both are, to a certain extent, correct.

The insistent ignorance of the voters back home is a pebble in the sensible shoe of every populist in D.C. and in the Gucci loafer of every lobbyist working to direct that populism in a direction profitable to his clients. But there is a strain of genuine populism in both parties, too, and it is a big part of what drives factional division and subdivision. Every grassroots activist knows the proverb: Our guys, once elected, cease to be our guys. One of the things that comes into play is Williamson’s First Law: “Everything is really simple, provided you don’t know a f—ing thing about it.”

Everything is simple to the populist except his own issue and his own business, which are full of nuance and complexity. Throwing a bunch of tariffs on Chinese imports may sound like a good idea to a lot of people in Nebraska, but it gets more complicated for those who make their living in the state’s $3.4 billion-a-year soybean industry, which is export-dependent. Trump’s trade war the last time around crushed U.S. soybean producers so thoroughly that the administration was obliged to spend billions of dollars bribing them into pacification. The U.S. government ended up spending more money buying off farmers in the service of Trump’s political interests than it spent on, say, maintaining the nuclear arsenal. Priorities!

You can buy a lot of political cohesion with the resources made readily accessible from the U.S. Treasury by means of congressional cowardice. But it is never enough, because factionalism is not ultimately about competition for resources—it is about competition for status. The guy five chairs down from the president wants to move up to the No. 4 chair. The Republican “strategist” without clients or a portfolio who appears on Fox News twice a month wants to be on twice a week. The “establishment” is whomever is standing in the way of these ambitions, inconveniently occupying coveted status real estate.

My guess is that J.D. Vance will be the first to take it in the neck: He wasn’t Trump’s first choice, apparently, and he is not universally loved by those whom he has surpassed—and being in the crossfire of downward-aimed contempt and upward-flowing resentment at the same time is always a dangerous place. But, if it isn’t Vance, it will be someone else. Knocking off Matt Gaetz’s AG ambitions will not be enough to satisfy Democrats’ appetite for vengeance or Republicans’ for brush-clearing—Gaetz did not take up enough space for his disintegration to create very much opportunity. 

If there is a Williamson bingo card, it has a lot of T.S. Eliot quotes on it, and so: I do not suspect that Trump is much of an Eliot man, or that he is surrounded by very many of them, but the Trumpists who think they have won simply because the election went their way are profoundly mistaken: “If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.” Politics will return, and the fact that the Democrats are on their heels only gives the Republicans a good reason—and a good opportunity—to hunt for the kind of enemy they most cherish: other Republicans.

As Trump’s favorite serial killer might have put it: L’appetit vient en mangeant.