The liberal superego warns that schadenfreude over Mr. Trump’s negative impact on the Republican Party is misplaced because the man’s threat to democratic values is too serious to dismiss. I disagree. Though well-meaning, this warning understates the power of American institutionalism (e.g., Constitutional checks and balances, legal culture, rights-based expectations) to neutralize and, ultimately, absorb the forces mobilized by Mr. Trump.
Instead, I see Trump as a step in the organic restructuring of the Republican Party, along the lines of Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of ‘creative destruction.’. Schumpeter praised capitalism’s ability to – through disruptive ferment – undo status quos to make way for better products and technologies. Sometimes we use market analogies to model public processes (‘market of ideas’) and this one may fit.
President Obama, in particular, has been very clear Trump is merely the fittest vehicle (in a Darwinian sense) for political values nurtured by GOP elites. Cf: except for his politically incorrect views on race and immigration, Trump is easily a moderate Republican given his other views, e.g., support for Planned Parenthood, gay marriage, income taxation, but that would take a separate blog entry; hence moderates like Bill Weld could support him
The President is wrong, though, when he says that he did not cause this process. It seems obvious to me that the Obama administration has been the cause-in-fact (not proximate cause) of the political processes that culminate in Mr. Trump’s Hunger Games march to the Republican nomination.
Obama personifies the cultural threats felt by first the Tea Party backlash and now the Trump circus. And in playing down the catalytic role that he has had in the current state of Republican reaction, Mr. Obama is in danger of not appreciating (maybe it’s intentional) that his presidency is as serious an inflection point as those of Roosevelt and Reagan.
Roosevelt put in the motion the Liberal Establishment and the construction of the administrative/welfare/federal state. From 1933-1981, there were only three Republican presidents (Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford), each of whom would probably be branded too progressive by today’s Republican party. Reagan personified the next shift, the rise of the counter-establishment. (Sidney Blumenthal has a wonderful book about this ).
Probably the most important Reagan-era consequence in the legal academy is the development of the Federalist Society and its remarkable efforts to rebalance the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court. From 1981-2009, Clinton was the only Democratic president, yet even many of his policies reflected the Right-ward shift in discourse and public culture.
Obama is a third inflection point. No New Dealer, he is an administrative wonk in terms of regulation, although he lacks some of the knee-jerk liberal tendencies associated with Democrats. Obama synthesizes strains of the liberal and conservative establishments, but he pivots in some new direction with racialized and multicultural dynamics too complex too parse here. And it’s not clear how this turns out in the history books.
Trump represents how the Republican party adapts to this new phase. He’s not dangerous to our liberal democracy, which could not tolerate a Berlusconi, Perón, or Franco, let alone a Hitler. He’s only dangerous to the current incarnation of the Republican Party. Maybe something has to die for something better to come along.
Posted by Jose Gabilondo on March 13, 2016 at 11:24 AM