End of politics as we know it

The prize for the most important book with the most misleading title might go to “The End of Liberalism,” published in 1969 by Theodore J. Lowi, who died less than three months ago.

In the second edition of that book, published 10 years after it first was released, the Cornell political scientist sets forth in 11 enigmatic words why he once was named by his peers as the most influential political scientist in the country:

“The most fundamental political problem of our time is our politics.”

That sentence — actually, it is the back end of a sentence — was written in the Jimmy Carter years, a reminder to liberals that their remarks about recent failed presidencies ought not to include only Richard Nixon, who is enjoying a mini rehabilitation, and George W. Bush, whose rehabilitation may be a decade or so off. The Democrats have presidencies — James Buchanan, for example — they’d rather forget, too.

One of the tenets of Lowi’s book is that the two parties are the captives of their respective interest groups.

That notion may still be true in certain corners of the Capitol, but may no longer be true in the White House, for whose call exactly does Donald J. Trump respond to?

Not, except marginally, to the austerity tradition of the Republican Party of Robert Taft and Robert Dole; Trump is girding to spend billions on an infrastructure initiative.

But when, early last week, he broached the notion that he might entertain raising the gasoline tax to pay for this spending, he made it clear he wasn’t a doctrinaire tax-cutter in the Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp tradition.

Trump would be the first to say he is a force without precedent in American politics, and it isn’t only his innovative interpretation of the origins of the Civil War that suggests he is right.

If Lowi was right that the most fundamental political problem of our time is our politics, did Trump cause that problem, or did he reflect it?

Did the Freedom Caucus of the contemporary Republican Party cause it, or did it reflect it? Is the increasingly leftist Democratic Party a cause or a reflection of that crisis?

The short answer to all three: Yes.

In a few decades, historians will have a longer answer, just as they did in the decades after the Civil War, when some regarded it as an inevitable conflict, or the result of a “blundering generation,” or that it was, variously, about the preservation of the Union, or the stain of slavery, or even a collision of rural and urban, the old agrarian way of life and the new urban way of life.

But right now, in the middle of the muddle, we can only try to see through a glass, darkly. And what we see is that nothing is quite as it appears — and nothing is as it was in the past.

The Republicans aren’t close to being in charge of the so-called Republican Congress.

But more than that, the new Republicans are conducting themselves as no rump group has behaved before.

There have been substantial rifts in parties before; in the 1950s and 1960s, conservative Democrats collided with liberal Democrats, and conservative Democrats often voted with conservative Republicans while liberal Democrats voted with moderate and liberal Republicans.

But those permutations no longer exist, and as a result the Freedom Caucus is not like ideological factions that came before.

At the same time, Trump may not really be the populist that commentators sometimes say he is.

“Like anything — liberalism, fascism — these kinds of definitions are broad,” said Sheri Berman, a Barnard College political scientist specializing in American populism.

“There is a difference between Trump’s rhetoric, which is classic populism, and his policies. He’s governed in a fairly traditional way.”

So in all this confusion, perhaps only two things are clear.

The first is that we no longer have the language to describe our politics.

The second is that the most fundamental political problem is our politics.