Patrick Lawrence: Notes of a Non-Voter
Oh my, the elites of the Democratic Party, their clerks in media and “the donor class” began gasping as election night wore on and it came clear that they had once again mistaken what we call liberal America for America. America has shifted rightward, The New York Times reported Wednesday with evident surprise. We are “normalizing” Trumpism, one read elsewhere. And from Perry Bacon, a political columnist at The Washington Post, a piece headlined, “The second resistance to Trump must start right now.”
Being ever grateful for small things, I am relieved we are skipping the capital “R” in “resistance” this time.
I read this stuff, nonstop since Trump defeated Kamala Harris, and every column inch of it confirms my conviction the Democrats deserved not merely to have lost, but to have suffered an unequivocal trounce. America did not shift rightward this week or at any other time lately. Trumpism—whatever this may mean, and I can’t help you with this one—has not been “normalized,” and I am not sure about this term, either.
Think about these various utterances, and there are lots and lots of them in this line.
America is now what it has been for a long time. To suggest there was some great shift this week is simply to demonstrate the extent to which one has stood at a distance from what America is. To assert that Trumpism has been normalized is to tell roughly 75 million Americans, not quite 51% of those who voted, that they have not heretofore been normal, and that they will now undergo a process of normalization. This normalization is not, by plain implication, a desirable thing. America would be better off if these people remained not-normal.
As to our advocate for a new resistance, Mr. Bacon has just asserted that the above-noted number of Americans are not to be looked upon squarely, asked questions, spoken to, understood or any other such thing: They are to be objectified, countered, and, in effect, dehumanized to the extent they have not already been dehumanized.
This is simply the sound of people who do not know what America is made of, have not been interested for some time in understanding what America is made of, or maybe they know what America is made of and wish to pretend it is something else but claim the right to govern it as it is because they are made of superior stuff.
■
Amid all this repellant drivel, so unconscious of its own meanings, an excellent column by Carlos Lozada, a New York Times opinion writer, under the headline, “Stop Pretending Trump Is Not Who We Are.” Here is part of Lozada’s opening litany:
I remember when Donald Trump was not normal.
I remember when Trump was a fever that would break.
I remember when Trump was running as a joke.
I remember when Trump was best covered in the entertainment section.
I remember when Trump would never become the Republican nominee.
I remember when Trump couldn’t win the general election….
I remember when Trump was James Comey’s fault.
I remember when Trump was the news media’s fault.
I remember when Trump won because Hillary Clinton was unlikable.
I remember when 2016 was a fluke.
I remember when the office of the presidency would temper Trump.
I remember when the adults in the room would contain him….
And then Lozada sets out for his conclusions:
There have been so many attempts to explain away Trump’s hold on the nation’s politics and cultural imagination, to reinterpret him as aberrant and temporary. “Normalizing” Trump became an affront to good taste, to norms, to the American experiment….
We can now let go of such illusions. Trump is very much part of who we are….
Carlos Lozada is Peruvian by birth, a native of Lima, and became an American citizen just 10 years ago. I cannot but think that this personal background, a stranger in another country for a long time, imparts the gift of seeing others not as they purport to be, or as they delude themselves into thinking they are, but just as they are.
■
Four more years of Donald Trump in the White House is a high price to pay to humiliate the liberal authoritarians. While I have made my contempt for Kamala Harris plain, toward the end I secretly hoped she would win. With such an outcome, I figured, the Democratic Party would self-humiliate. Americans would have four years to see the party’s indifference to them, its deceits, its cynical abuse of their aspirations, its corruption, its greed. This would be far more instructive than a one-off humiliation.
But humiliation at the hands of the Dealmaker it is.
Complacency, arrogance, hubris, a certain kind of mistreatment, the political blackmail of “lesser evilism”: These things are bound to provoke a desire to see the complacent and arrogant knocked off their mounts. But there is more to the matter than mere schadenfreude. As the better scholars will surely tell us, what happened last Tuesday is the denouement of a story that goes back nearly six decades.
To pencil-sketch it, this story began in the post-civil rights years, the late 1960s, when a new generation of party elites took control and recast the party in their own image. These were educated professionals who came out of the knowledge economy—technology, financial services, the defense industries, and so on—and dwelt in the suburbs of fashionable cities such as Boston, New York and San Francisco.
They lost interest in the working class, especially the Southern working class, because they had no relationship with it. They lost interest in Black Americans, too, but figured they would keep the Black vote because there was no alternative. At the other end of this line you get Biden’s remark, in May 2020, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.”
I will miss Biden’s artless vulgarity, I have to say. On the other hand, a variant is likely to be in plentiful supply these next four years.
I view Tuesday’s result as the interesting end of the movie. The working class was drifting Republican for years, of course, but the Democratic elites took no interest: Let them go, they are not we—deplorable Others as they are. As many have noted, Black Americans have at last gotten off the bus—the bus to nowhere. And the polls showed that the party elites miscalculated when they thought the educated classes, the the suburb-dwellers, and those aspiring to this status and these places would be enough at the polls.
In this connection, forcing a candidate as plainly unqualified and incapable as Harris—Joy? Vibes? Say what?—was simply too extravagantly complacent—an insult too far, let’s say. And it is injury atop insult, in my estimation, to display shock on discovering that working Americans—Yes, Virginia, there is a working class in America—identify as working class and are not much taken up with the pronoun wars and all the other signifiers of identity politics.
Can the Democrats recover themselves? This is the question now. But it is not so interesting because of course they can. Will they is the better line of inquiry. I don’t see this. What just happened has too much to do with character, and those running the Democratic Party have too little. A recovery, a new direction: This would require an acceptance of failure and humiliation that seems to me beyond these people. There are not enough Mack trucks in America to haul away their hubris.
At this point, as the Perry Bacons among us make plain, the Democrats, as they now are, rely for their appeal on animosity and all the related fears and anxieties. Let us not forget: If working Americans just voted as a class, those running the Democratic Party, descendants of those first party elites who refashioned it 60 years ago, act in the cause of theirs.
■
Ishaan Tharoor, who does an honorable job a lot of the time as the Washington Post’s World View columnist—well, some of the time; well, as good as can be expected at The Post a lot of the time—published a piece Nov. 8 headlined, “Trump’s victory cements the triumph of the illiberal West.” The defenders of liberalism manning the ramparts as the illiberal hordes charge forward: This is the trope.
It is time to draw a line under this stuff, especially in the American case.
On the eastern side of the Atlantic, Keir Starmer poses as a Labourite and turns the Labour Party into something resembling the Tories’ centrist factions; Emmanuel Macron loses elections, refuses to name a premier for two months, then appoints a neoliberal at odds with the parties that won the elections; the Scholz government in Germany—if it survives, which is unlikely as of this week—proposes to keep ascendant parties out of government by outlawing them. The approval ratings in all these cases could scarcely be lower. But this is what we call the liberal order these days.
The American case resembles Germany’s: Democracy must be defended against those who win the electorate’s support. You see how far this just got the Democrats.
What is called “the center” in the Western post-democracies is not holding but is fighting to do so even as it has no claim, if ever it did, to be the center of anything. In the course of this struggle, which I view as the defining feature of American politics, leaving the Europeans aside, it will be best if we come to recognize that there is nothing liberal about American liberalism. America, indeed, has never been other than profoundly illiberal. This goes back to John Winthrop’s arrival in Salem in 1630.
■
I have wondered for years why liberal Americans, to stay with the accepted term, nurse so visceral a hatred of Donald Trump. From the moment he glided down the golden escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, the animus has extended magnitudes beyond questions of policy. It has consumed many a liberal, indeed.
I draw on Otto Rank, one of the early figures in Viennese psychoanalysis, and a little from Freud, to reach tentative conclusions. In others from which we recoil we see reflections of ourselves, if I am not oversimplifying Rank’s thesis in “The Double,” his 1914 book. At the most profound level of their contempt, liberals cannot abide Trump because they recognize in him what they cannot admit they are—intolerant, given to violence, ungenerous toward others, incapable of complexity and prone to simplification, and so on. They see in Trump an American, and they cannot bear it. He is one of them and they, so to say, have Trump within themselves.
■
There was an old political adage to the effect that Democrats care about domestic matters and the commonweal and are not much good with foreign policy, while Republicans care about overseas markets and are very good with foreign policy. When I say “old” I mean very old, as in pre–World War II old, when one could make the distinction. It hasn’t held well since the 1945 victories, when the policy cliques got their first taste of global primacy. The imperium that now blights the world is nothing if not a bipartisan affair.
Empire was not an “issue” on Nov. 5, to state the obvious. There was no voting against it in all its awful manifestations: genocide, interventions of all kinds, proxy wars, sabotage operations, the usual menu of coups, starvation sanctions, “civil society” subterfuge, infinite varieties of coercion—altogether the disorder wreaked in the name of the “rules-based international order.” There was not even any talking about what America has made of itself and what it does beyond its shores.
But the archaic distinction remains in faint outline.
Democrats prefer to say they conduct the imperial business in the name of high, humane ideals. It is all for the good of all, just as the Wilsonian universalists have had it since they decided the world must be made safe for democracy as righteous old Woodrow, the Presbyterian elder from Princeton, led America into the First World War. The Republicans are still perfectly pleased to tell you they want this, that, or the other market or resource and nobody is going to “eat America’s lunch.”
President Biden and Vice–President Harris went on incessantly about “values,” to put this point another way. The foreign policy of the new Trump administration will be just as it was the first time around: It will be “transactional.” Or as Peter Feaver, a poli sci professor at Duke, put it in a Nov. 6 Foreign Affairs piece: “The essence of Trump’s approach to foreign policy—naked transactionalism—remains unchanged.” Trump, in short, stands accused of an “idiosyncratic form of dealmaking.”
What you think of this kind of talk depends on how dependent you are on The Great American Delusion.
There is a difference between naked transactionalism and all-dressed-up transactionalism, certainly. The one involves—but precisely—making deals, as in negotiating with others, even those marked down as adversaries. The other sort of transacting tends to that list of activities noted above—coups, sanctions, sabotage ops, corrupt proxies, coercion, and so on.
Trump’s givenness to dealmaking is idiosyncratic, I will give Feaver this much. But making deals with the rest of the world, right out in the open, seems to me a good idea if America is to climb down from its great white steed and find its way in the 21st century. My mind goes to the neo-détente with Moscow Trump favored during his first term. Think about how different our world would be had the Deep State not subverted him. Or his talks with Kim Jong-un when, in February 2019, the two met for the second time at a hotel in Hanoi. Peace on the Korean Peninsula appeared within reach until John Bolton cynically misled Trump even as the two leaders spoke.
■
There are three very big things Trump can do on the foreign side that could stand as significant turns in U.S. policy. Actually two, and one thing that will stand as significant because Trump will do nothing.
I have no faith in Trump’s declaration that he will end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. That is mere campaign-trail bluster, more or less harmless. But I have no doubt his intent remains as stated: He has said, humanely enough, he wants to see people stop killing themselves. When Trump said just before the election that Liz Cheney ought to stand “with nine gun barrels shooting at her,” the Democrats feigned more shock and horror: He is so violent, so misogynistic. Either the Dems and their running dogs in media are stupid or cynical or both, and I would say both. Trump was merely suggesting a hardened warmonger, one of the neocons’ worst, would think differently if she were on a front line. It is a fair point.
Until recently I would have said Trump stood little chance of delivering on his end-the-war promise: The Deep State would surely sink his boat on this question. But the talk in Washington and the reporting in the media has changed. We—you and I, “the public”—are being drip-drip-drip prepared for a sort of undeclared capitulation in the form of a signaled openness to a negotiated settlement. Russia’s advances are now reported in detail. So are the Kiev regime’s weaknesses—poorly trained troops, not enough of them, low morale, exhaustion, desertions. More Western weapons will not do it, we can now read.
A Russian commentator remarked recently that what is needed now is “a Minsk III,” meaning a return to the terms Russia negotiated with Germany and France in late–2014 and again in early–2015. Nothing could be more sensible. Those accords called for a federated Ukraine that recognized the different valences between the western and eastern provinces and wrote regional autonomy into a proposed new constitution. But the Western powers covertly sabotaged Minsk I and II, so betraying the Russians. I don’t see either Paris or Berlin, to say nothing of Washington or London, repairing this breach of trust. Any thought of a Minsk III is mere fantasy.
This suggests strongly that negotiations, when they begin, are most likely to proceed in some large measure on Russia’s terms. Don’t give me a lot of infantile junk to the effect that Trump or J.D. Vance, as Kremlin stooges, are talking about a deal that matches Moscow’s terms. But exactly. I do not see how anyone with a clear-eyed view of the Ukraine mess can proceed any differently. The Western powers have made a 30–year mess of their relations with post–Soviet Russia, and the game is up.
It will be bitter indeed for those who have overseen Ukraine’s ruination to accept the consequences of their indifference and deceit, but however long this takes, they will eventually be forced to do so. The alternative is another 38th Parallel, or another Wall, that consigns Ukrainians to years or decades of militarized, knife’s-edge existence. The winds blow in Trump’s direction on the Ukraine question. May they be strong enough for him to get through the deal that will have to be done.
As to Israel, Trump has made his condemnable sympathy for the Israeli cause very plain. So he will change nothing in the matter of material, diplomatic and political support for the Zionist regime. And by changing nothing he will change something of potentially great significance. Trump’s blessing—“Do what you have to do”—will remove all impediments for the Israeli military machine to take Benjamin Netanyahu’s “seven-front war” straight through West Asia all the way to Tehran.
What we live with now we may live with for years, in other words. State barbarity is normalized as a feature of our time. Bloodshed of Biblical proportions will stain we who live and witness this.
It has been ideologues-in-command across the Pacific the whole of Biden’s years in office. Secretary of State Blinken and Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, have made an utter mess of the China relationship. The Biden regime reversed nothing Trump put in place during his first term and added a dangerous risk of military confrontation. What will Trump do now that he takes on a stew with some ingredients he put in the pot?
Trump has always been interested in the economic and trade relationship more than the security relationship. In this the idiosyncratic dealmaker could turn down the temperature by rebalancing Sino–U.S. ties. Blinken and Sullivan had this nonsensical notion of competition in some spheres, cooperation in others, and confrontation in yet others. Beijing never took this seriously.
Trump could give substance to what it means to have a properly competitive relationship with the People’s Republic and, while the Pentagon will surely proceed with its huge new buildup in the western Pacific and Biden’s design of alliances, will make economic, technological, and trade rivalry the main event. In my read this is exactly what Beijing hopes for, to the extent it hopes for anything anymore in its relations with Washington.
As to the extravagant tariff regime Trump proposes, I am with Richard Wolff, the noted economist: It is simply too crazy, too stupid and too ruinous of the American economy and American lives for Trump to go through with this threat. On the other hand, crazy, stupid, and ruinous have often figured in U.S. foreign policy. Wolff thinks neither Trump nor his people actually have much of an idea what to do about China. Given Trump’s reckless bluster, this would be cold comfort at this early moment, but comfort of an odd kind nonetheless.
■
Who will Trump’s people be? This is plainly a key question, maybe the key question given Trump’s limitations and his habit of relying on others.
There are some names floating around, and people are writing up lists. One hears he is thinking of Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas and for my money among the most dangerously stupid people on Capitol Hill, for secretary of state. And I read Mike Pompeo, a disaster as Trump’s Bible-thumping secretary of state, spent time with the Trump campaign in its later days. The thought of either taking a cabinet position curdles the blood. But it is too early for this kind of speculation.
To me, the question now concerns the Deep State. Not to put the point morbidly, but the president’s relationship with the national-security apparatus has been, let’s say, essential since Nov. 22, 1963. Kamala Harris, would have served these people like a waiter taking orders. In my view this was part of her appeal to the unseen powers that run the American government. What about Trump?
Trump went down from New York to Washington eight years ago intent on “draining the swamp,” a foolishly quixotic ambition. The swamp drained him, if I can put it this way. A lot of the people who served in his White House— H.R. McMaster, Jim Mattis, the aforementioned Bolton, and on down a long list—were wholly out of phase with his professed plans. Why did he appoint them, many of those watching the Trump circus wondered.
I never did. He didn’t appoint these people: They were imposed upon him. I have ever since argued that Trump’s White House was the most opaque in my lifetime. Understanding it required one to distinguish between what Trump did or proposed and what those around him did to undermine him when his plans ran counter to the Deep State’s interests. I mentioned the North Korea talks. Bolton’s subterfuge in Hanoi is a singularly graphic case in point.
We cannot know just yet who Trump will have around him, and it will be interesting as appointments are announced. I hope it is not a case of either people who have no idea what they are doing—Tom Cotton, et al.—or people who know well what they are doing—Pompeo, et al.—and you wish they weren’t doing it.
