It’s Trump’s revolution
In 1804, the Corsican upstart Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself as France’s emperor. His mother, born Letizia Ramolino, did not attend the coronation. Informed of her son’s self-elevation, she is said to have remarked coolly: “Let’s hope it lasts.”
In conversations with conservative friends about the Trump presidency these last three years, I often found myself thinking about Mother Bonaparte. Before Donald Trump’s election I made a lot of dire predictions about how his mix of demagoguery and incompetence would interact with real world threats: I envisioned economic turmoil, foreign policy crises, sustained domestic unrest. Having lived through the failed end of the last Republican presidency, I assumed Trump’s administration would be a second, swifter failure, with dire consequences for both the country and the right.
In 2017, 2018, 2019, those predictions didn’t come to pass. Trump was bad in many ways, but the consequences weren’t what I anticipated. The economy surged; the world was relatively stable; the country was mad online but otherwise relatively calm. And as the Democrats shifted leftward and Trump delivered on his promised judicial appointments, many conservatives who had shared my apprehensions would tell me that, simply as a shield against the left, the president was doing enough to merit their support in 2020.
To which I often murmured something like, “let’s hope it lasts.”
It hasn’t. Now we are in the retreat-from-Moscow phase of the Trump presidency, with crises arriving all together — pandemic, recession, mass protests — and the president incapable of coping. If the election were held today, the result could easily resemble 2008, the closest thing to a landslide our divided system has recently produced. Meanwhile across corporate and journalistic and academic America, a 1968-ish spirit is pulling liberalism toward an uncertain destination, with what remains of conservatism turtled for safety or extinct.
In this environment, few conservatives outside the MAGA core would declare Trump’s presidency a ringing success. But many will stand by him out of a sense of self-protection, hoping a miracle keeps him in the White House as a firewall against post2020 liberalism.
This is a natural impulse, but they should consider another possibility: That so long as he remains in office, Trump will be an accelerant of the right’s erasure, an agent of its marginalization and defeat, no matter how many of his appointees occupy the federal bench.
In situations of crisis or grave difficulty, Trump displays three qualities, three spirits, that all redound against the movement that he leads. His spirit of authoritarianism creates a sense of perpetual crisis among his opponents, uniting left-wingers and liberals despite their differences. His spirit of chaos, the sense that nothing is planed or under control, turns moderates and normies against him.
You can see the convergence of these spirits in the disaster at Lafayette Park, where an authoritarian instinct led to a chaotic and violent police intervention, a massive media freakout, blowback from the military — and left the president with a photo op and control of six blocks around the White House to show for it.
That last image, the president as a dictator of an island and impotent beyond it, seems like a foretaste of what would await conservatives if Trump somehow slipped through to a second term. Maybe he would get to replace another Supreme Court justice — maybe. (In a Democratic Senate, not.) But everything else would slip further out of reach.
Conservatism needs a response to the current movement for social justice that answers just claims and rejects destructive ones. Trump delivers a conservatism of Confederate war memorials that vindicates the left.
Conservatism needs new ideas about how to use power, a better theory of the relationship between state, economy and culture than the decadent Reaganism that Trump half-overthrew. Trump offers only a daily lesson in how to let power go to waste.
Above all, conservatism, now a worldview for old people and contrarians in a country trending leftward, needs a mix of converts and sympathizers to be something other than a rump.
What we are seeing right now in America, an accelerated leftward shift, probably won’t continue at this pace through 2024. But it’s likely to continue in some form so long as Trump is conservatism, and conservatism is Trump — and four more years of trying to use him as a defensive salient is not a strategy of survival, but defeat.