Lucky Ducky Democrats

Q: Why is the Trump-Putin relationship like the Rapanui heads? A: Nobody's been able to figure out how it was done! Image news.com.au.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, has a take with an insight-producing wrinkle ("The Luck of the Democrats"):

One of the interesting features of this election cycle has been the gulf, often vast, between the hysteria of liberals who write about politics for a living and the relative calm of Democrats who practice it.

In the leftward reaches of my Twitter feed the hour is late, the end of democracy nigh, the Senate and the Supreme Court illegitimate, and every Trump provocation a potential Reichstag fire. But on the campaign trail, with some exceptions and variations, Democrats are being upbeat and talking about health care and taxes and various ambitious policy ideas, as though this is still America and not Weimar, a normal time and not a terrifying one.

Weimar was an abnormal time, but not necessarily terrifying. It was a thrilling time, after the end of the sclerotic Second Reich, full of possibilities. Nobody knew enough to be terrified about the political situation, when it was the economics that seemed to be the problem. Angry, no doubt, but terrified? What's frightening so many of us at the moment is that unlike the Germans of 90 years ago we do know what happened to them. To me it still looks very much like a second-time-as-farce case, in that our American would-be fascists are really too inept to do the worst, and the legal dispensations too strong to allow them—as we've seen with the failure to dissolve Obamacare or halt the Paris Accord and now with the crazed but fortunately impotent response to the migrant caravan. They can do a lot of harm, I mean, but it's on a much smaller scale than Nazis.


But it's interesting how Douthat sees this as a dichotomy between two kinds of Democrats, the at-the-keyboard whiners and the on-the-street campaigners. It's as if he can't imagine that any of us could be holding both sets of ideas in our minds at the same time, the fear that it's a dark time and little Reichstag fires really are being set all over the place, and the hope that voters will respond to a message of what the party can do. When he divides his description into one group of people kvetching about the end of civilization and the other group talking up health care, it doesn't occur to him that these are to any extent the same people.

In fact, he can imagine it, on consideration, as a purely tactical question. We might really believe the nation is in danger of falling apart but be reluctant to say so, and pretend in public that we're not thinking about it:

One way to look at this gulf is to argue the pundits are saying what the politicians can’t — that alarmed liberals grasp the truth of things but swing voters don’t, so Democratic politicians have no choice but to carry on as normal even if inside they’re screaming too.

But he can't go with that, because the thing that really stands out for him, on the matter of what a terrible president Trump is, is that it's good for Democrats, so Democrats ought to be happy!

Another way to look at it, though, is that the politicians grasp an essential fact about the Trump era, which is that while they were obviously unlucky in their disastrous 2016 defeat, in most respects liberalism and the Democratic Party have been very lucky since. So their optimism isn’t just a gritted-teeth pose; it’s an appropriate reaction to a landscape that’s more favorable than it easily might have been.

Of course all this is predicated on the assumption that nothing is, in fact, going wrong in America. The collapse of our foreign relations with every country other than Israel and Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia is looking kind of dicy at the moment, the trillion-dollar–plus deficits going out as far as the eye can see are going to serve as an excuse for gutting the social safety net we have while the corporations whose tax bills have been cut by a third have invested approximately zero dollars in production and used all the money for stock buybacks instead to boost their share prices and make the market look great—although that greatness may have come to an end in recent weeks— our crumbling national infrastructure and worsening housing crisis even as the housing market seems to be collapsing, but these are trivialities!

Because everybody who wants a shitty job for $10-$15 an hour can get one! Unemployment is at 3.7% (in the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers that Donald J. Trump said were fake until January 20 2017, when they magically became real)! So it's inconceivable that anyone should be sincerely worried about the condition of the country. The only problem is Trump, the tweeting, avoiding of the press, "cruelties and insults" (note how this makes an equation between, say, separating 3000 children from their parents and calling Stormy Daniels "Horseface", as traditional morality melts into a plasma where every sin is the same), and "weird behavior around Vladimir Putin".

I love that last. When you—an old connection from my days in the beauty contest business—are the head of state of a hostile power and you steal confidential documents from my political opponent and arrange to have them published at strategic moments and set an entire agency to calumniating her on Facebook and all my closest associates have repeatedly met with your closest associates and lied about it until forced to acknowledge and after I'm president I do everything I can to ignore the laws that say I have to punish you even as Congress keeps passing new ones, and arrange lengthy dates with you in international meetings where nobody knows what was said (except the Russian press often seems to know something), Ross is going to call that "weird behavior"! It's a mystery! It's totally inexplicable! There's no possible interpretation of what it could mean!

Anyway, the Monsignor goes on, if Trump had only kept his hands off the twitterphone and the Russian president and generally been a less unattractive person, the Republicans would be in much better political shape now, and if he'd gone all the way and done what the Monsignor wants him to do—

followed through on the populism that he promised in 2016, dragging his party toward the economic center and ditching the G.O.P.’s most unpopular ideas. Imagine that he followed through on Steve Bannon’s boasts about a big infrastructure bill instead of trying for Obamacare repeal; imagine that he listened to Marco Rubio and his daughter and tilted his tax cut more toward middle-class families; imagine that he spent more time bullying Silicon Valley into inshoring factory jobs than whining about Fake News; imagine that he made lower Medicare drug prices a signature issue rather than a last-minute pre-election gambit

—he'd have cut those darn Democrats off at the knees!

It would have given Trump a chance to expand his support among minorities while holding working-class whites, and to claim the kind of decisive power that many nationalist leaders around the world enjoy.

Like Viktor Orbán with his exuberant minority constituency, or almost-victorious Boris Johnson.

So excuse me, in the first place he was doing the Twitter and the Putin adoration during the campaign, and it didn't stop him from getting elected. In the second place he's not to blame for the failure of the infrastructure bill (which was a piece of shit anyway and would have done no good), Ryan and McConnell are, and I assume it's their bad judgment that inclined them to focus on the hopeless ACA repeal effort in the first place. I wouldn't give Trump any credit if it had been done. The Marco-Ivanka tax proposal doubling the nonrefundable child tax credit from $1000 to $2000 passed, whether Trump was listening or not. The Republican Congress will never in a million years permit government negotiation on drug prices. What world is he even talking about?

It's just nonsense. Trump didn't win the Republican nomination in spite of his personality defects but because of them, and because he was signally different from Bush and Christie, Rubio and Cruz, and all other previous candidates, and none of those gents would have won the presidential contest either. Trump was the only possible winner among the Republican candidates, because he called out a group of nonvoters that nobody else could get, which brought together not a Republican majority, the days for that are gone, but a big enough coalition to take the Electoral College (perhaps with some Facebook finessing from Russia and/or Cambridge Analytica). He won because of the Deplorables, and the reason the Republicans are losing now is that they (like some Obama voters in 2014) are surprised but annoyed to hear they're expected to come out and vote a second time.

And Democrats aren't lucky. We're just getting assigned to clean up the wreckage, as usual, after the Republicans pull some incomprehensible stupidity, and get the blame for it afterwards. It may turn out a bit better than that, as I'm always ready to hope, but in the meantime, Ross, please read a little political science (it's always considered good campaign practice to have an optimistic message, not some kind of anomaly you need to account for, and we do sincerely believe if our policy ideas were implemented it would be good for the country, having a policy isn't just an electoral gimmick) and shut up.