Could This Really Be The End?

Denouement or Delay

The only prediction I dared venture about the mid-terms was that they would be “weirdly normal” and I am going to claim now that I nailed it. Consider: On the one hand, they were extraordinary: by precedent, Republicans should have absolutely cleaned up. On the other, the election represented a partial rejection of the GOP’s psychosis politics and therefore perhaps a return to normal after long last. You can always be sure pundits and journalists will get it wrong, so once they started to cluck-cluck about Biden’s “defending democracy” rhetoric we should’ve known that something special was in the offing. I’m not going to talk about the polls, because that’s boring and I don’t really understand math. I made a commitment from the start that I’d never put a chart or graph on Unpopular Front: the logo of the newsletter is Dante holding up a book to the city of Florence; the governing ideology here is fundamentalist humanism governed by Auden’s commandments: “Thou shalt not sit With statisticians nor commit A social science.”

It will actually take a lot of parsing of number to figure out what really happened in this election, but I think we can safely propose that Trumpism, both the charismatic appeal of the individual and the style of semi-fascist politics, may be losing some of its magic. Republican elites were uncomfortable with it from the beginning, adapted to it out of necessity and fear, but always knew it was always potentially directed against them and their control of the party as much as liberals. Now that he’s a two-time loser they are starting to crawl out of their holes and venture an intifada against Trump, who they can reasonably make the case is sinking their party’s prospects. But Trumpism is not a product of reason: it represents the id of the Republican party and the will of its primary voters. The establishment will not get rid of him so easily. As we know, he doesn’t like to concede.

In those nearly psychotic moments after election day in 2016, I thought the answer to Trump was to fully embrace dangerously corny levels of American liberal patriotism and Aaron-Sorkinism to create a kind of left-Reaganism. Over the next few months, I regained sanity and a healthier sense of irony, became moderately cynical and disillusioned again, but the moment of insanity was correct in its basic outlines: That was basically what #Resistance liberalism turned out to be. In 2020, cringe won. In 2022, it has won again. It’s easy to roll ones one’s eyes at the “battle for the soul of America” stuff and assume voters care more about their pocketbooks, but there’s a good reason Biden kicked off his campaign in Charlotesville. Now waving the Bloody Shirt of January 6th apparently still works. And truly thank God for that. If this stuff had no appeal to voters and they lost any kind of patriotic hopes for the country, we’d be in really bad shape.

With all this in mind, I’m in the mood to engage in the basest clichés of my profession and quote Winston Churchill, on the occasion the evacuation of Dunkirk no less: “We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory.” Maybe it “can’t happen here,” but the pattern of American history has always been of tyranny at the state and local levels, and the post-Trump Republicans are likely to return to that pattern. They already are on the road to establishing one-party rule in Florida, where they rode the coattails of would-be caudillo DeSantis. The Florida governor is actually much more of an Orbán than Trump ever was: he actually commands majorities, he is a bit of a thug but a much more low key, stable, and methodical one, and he can appear like just a plain ol’ conservative while actually standing for a tougher form of domination. The more bookish side of the reactionary elite already prefers him to Trump as someone more effective and reliable. But, again, I just don’t think he has the raw charisma to rival Trump in the hearts of Republican voters.

I’m going to quote Churchill again now: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” I still think the way Trumpism probably ends is with the destruction of either the country itself or the Republican party. It looks now like latter is the more likely scenario. There is just no way he becomes a lovable old statesman figure, wheeled out for campaigns and to give a teary-eyed nostalgic speech about the good old days at the convention. He’s gonna go down swinging. Chaos is part of the appeal. And you know what? I kinda get it now: I too now want to see what kind of havoc he can wreak. Have at ’em, Donald.

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Correction: I wrote, “…there’s a good reason Biden kicked off his campaign in Charlotesville.” That’s incorrect: he kicked off campaign with a speech about Charlotesville, not in Charlotesville.