The Sunday Review in today’s New York Times features essays by all the paper’s op-ed columnists on the subject of “What We’ve Lost” over the course of Donald Trump’s presidency. The answers range from “Frayed Connections” between the left and the right (Nicholas Kristof) and “Faith in One Another” (David Brooks) to “Our Allies” (Thomas Friedman) and “Principled Conservatism” (Brett Stephens). But while I found each piece insightful and well-articulated, the one that struck me as most prescient was the one by the right-of-center never-Trumper, Ross Douthat, who suggested that what America may have lost is “A Reckoning.” By that he means we may miss the chance to address the lessons that Trump’s victory in 2016 could teach us. He writes that the 2016 election “was a moment when all kinds of uncomfortable truths about American life were suddenly exposed, when the hidden realities of our country and our coalitions were suddenly dragged up into the light, when the failures in both parties and every faction were laid bare.”
For the right, for example, Douthat asserts that Trump’s “birtherism and race-baiting revealed that white-identity politics had more potency, more support within the larger right, than many conservative intellectuals had ever wanted to admit. And the success of his America First arguments on economics and foreign policy exposed the gulf between the actual sentiments of Republican voters and the hawkish, limited-government orthodoxies of Reaganite conservatism in its decadent phase.”
For the center, he writes, “the revelations of 2016 were about policy failures that had been mostly invisible until Trump came along — above all, the way that center-left and center-right visions of post-Cold War ‘openness,’ to free trade or low-skilled immigration or ever-greater-integration with the People’s Republic of China, simultaneously failed to achieve their geopolitical goals and hollowed out communities across the American heartland, creating a deadly, demagogy-ready vacuum where work and church and family used to be.
And for the left, “the revelations were about how its own victories within the Democratic coalition, the triumph of social liberalism over cultural conservatism, had forged a party that no longer connected with a lot of white, working-class voters (and more than a few Hispanics) no matter how much new federal spending it promised.”
Douthat then proceeds to describe how each of the political factions have responded to those revelations: “Sometimes with recognition and adaptations,” he suggests, “but more often with denial.”
I won’t try to recreate the entire column, but I do want to underscore Duthat’s perspective on the ways in which the political center and left may miss the teachable moment that the Trump presidency represents. Douthat asserts that “the major centrist project of the Trump era wasn’t a sustained reassessment of where its leaders had gone wrong,” it was the vilification of Donald Trump. And on the left, while “there were some attempts, via the Bernie Sanders movement, to build a left-wing politics responsive to the appeals of right-wing populism, . . . the gravitational pull of the cultural left was the stronger force,” and is likely to result in the ascendency of identity politics at the expense of class politics and a prioritization of racial justice over economic equity.
This, in my view, is a huge risk. Until the Democratic Party once again becomes the party of the working stiff, as it was in FDR’s day, it will be leaving the door open to another populist demagogue. And unlike Trump, the next one may be not only malignant but competent.
I agree with Douthat’s analysis. The center and left have not really learned the lessons from Trump’s election four years ago. The longer we’re in denial, the more likely we will get another right wing demagogue.