A little horse-race pablum for the junkies

Colonel John C. Frémont, Republican candidate for the presidency in 1856, in a campaign lithograph, via.

So Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, is back on the theory that Donald Trump is Jimmy Carter.

No, really, this has been going on for a couple of years. Just around the time of the inauguration, Julia Azari, Scott Lemieux, and Corey Robin wrote pieces suggesting that the Trump presidency was likely to be what Steven Skowronek called a "disjunctive" presidency, that is one that takes place at the time when an old order or "regime", the long-term ordering of the ideologies and interests on which the politics depends, is falling apart and a new one is not yet clearly emergent; like Buchanan's, before the cataclysms of the Civil War and Reconstruction, or Hoover's, before the New Deal, or Carter's, before the beginning of what you might call the Era of Miniature Government.

Ross, with an authoritarian's inability to grasp a discussion of systemic factors, took this to mean that Trump must be personally like Carter in some respect, as in this from his contribution to the Times inauguration coverage, committed to the proposition that Trump is as smart as Carter was, with a "vision" that is similarly "new", though unlikely to succeed:

One such president was Jimmy Carter, who tried to maintain the creaking New Deal coalition while also grasping at a new vision for liberal governance. He failed because his party simply couldn’t accommodate the tension, and he himself couldn’t effectively blend the old and new.

Right now Trump looks like he might be similarly disjunctive. Like Mr. Carter with the ’70s-era Democrats, he has grasped — correctly — that Republican politics desperately needs to be reinvented. But his populist-nationalist vision has seemed too racially and culturally exclusive to win him majority support, and it’s layered atop a party that still mostly believes in the “populism” of cutting the estate tax.

Combine those brute political facts with Trump’s implausibly expansive promises, and a Carter scenario — gridlock, disappointment, collapse — seems like the most plausible way to bet. 

Which is pretty amusing in retrospect: whatever we may think about Trump's intelligence and vision, he's turned out to have an amazingly firm hold on his party, in spite of the claims to independence of a few crabby pundits. Today, anyway, Ross isn't going for retrospection, but instead prefers to look ahead, toward the question of who's going to play the "reconstructive" Reagan in this remake ("Bernie Sanders, Socialism's Reagan?"):

White House Fool Report: Hoover's on First

Bonus March encampment, 1931. Via Great War Society.

In July 2009, Kevin Baker at Harper's (H/t marie2 at BooMan's place) issued an assessment of Barack Obama's first 100 days in the presidency, comparing him to—well, to Herbert Hoover.

Not in a bad way! Baker pointed out that Hoover was, as Obama is, probably the smartest and best educated person in a position of authority in Washington in his time (definitely better educated than the frat-boy FDR), as well as the one with the most personal experience of hardship, and a truly pragmatic leader impatient with partisan shibboleths; and that what he set out to do in 1929, to use the tools of fiscal management and presidential power to rescue the United States from economic collapse, was something presidents before him and indeed after him (with two very important exceptions) never did.

Nevertheless Hoover did fail (that's usually the only part we remember). Though the titans of industry and finance promised at meeting after meeting to keep employment strong and money loose, they didn't do it; the French and British governments turned down his offers to suspend their loan payments to the US if it meant they'd have to stop collecting blood money from Germany. Congress did little, and he himself began running out of ideas: