Answer to Trumpism is centrist bloc; question is how to build it
As the scale of Donald Trump’s likely criminality becomes evident, and with his comeback seeming less than inevitable, it is worth asking: What kind of political coalition will it take to defeat Trumpism in American political life?
One model has emerged in Utah, where a once-promising conservative leader, Sen. Mike Lee, begrimed his character in sycophantic service to Trump. (Text messages to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows show Lee to have been neck deep in the plot to overturn the 2020 election.) An impressive centerright challenger, Evan McMullin, is running as an independent against Lee. McMullin has gained the endorsement of the Utah Democratic Party, which is not fielding its own candidate.
The challenger is making a serious run, measured by polling, competence and cash raised.
The Utah model — a centrist, anti-Trump coalition led by a center-right candidate — is unlikely to prevail in most places. More common will probably be Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election model: a centrist coalition led by a center-left candidate, campaigning to restore political decency and democratic values.
Much about the United States’ political future depends on the answer to this question: Can liberals rally the country to the defense of democratic liberalism?
There are considerable obstacles. The unreconstructed left of the Democratic Party ignores a stark reality: In much of the United States, a candidate perceived as a woke socialist will generally lose to a candidate perceived as an authoritarian nationalist.
When it comes to gun control, the provocations have been almost beyond bearing: the murder of schoolchildren, the violation of a civic celebration, the targeting of Black people, gay people and Jews. There is clearly a connection between the easy availability of high-powered weaponry, the internet mythologizing of nihilistic violence, the immense gaps in our mental health system, and the normalization of racial prejudice and political violence.
My natural reaction to such events is to support federal policies bordering on the confiscatory. But Sen. Chris Murphy, DConn., took a wiser course. He pursued a useful incrementalism that allowed Second Amendment conservatives such as Sen. John Cornyn, R-Tex., to embrace reform, resulting in the first major gun control legislation in 30 years. This preserved the possibility that Democrats could lead a political coalition against Trump extremists that includes some gun-rights Republicans.
The same cannot be said of the abortion issue. The debate begun by Roe’s repeal has enabled maximalists on both sides — those who deny that a nascent human life has any value, and those who deny that the tragic cases of rape, incest, medical complications or child pregnancy present difficult moral choices. Few public officials have staked out the political ground where many Americans already stand.
A recent survey of polling related to abortion by the American Enterprise Institute’s Karlyn Bowman and Samantha Goldstein found general stability over the last half-century. In Gallup polls, they conclude, opinion “bulks in the middle, with 54% saying abortion should be legal only under certain circumstances in 1975 and 48% giving that response in its latest poll from May 2021. Of the remainder, 21% in 1975 and 32% in 2021 said it should be legal under all circumstances. Twenty-two percent said it should be illegal in all circumstances in 1975; 19% gave that response in Gallup’s 2021 question.”
Abortion rights are central to many Democrats’ political worldview. But would Biden have won the 2020 election if he had campaigned as a pro-choice crusader? Biden — who seldom mentioned the topic at campaign events, and who didn’t do so once during his convention speech — clearly didn’t think so.
Has the fall of Roe changed that calculation? I don’t see how. In many circumstances, including a national election, a Democrat who takes an extreme view on abortion won’t be able to lead a coalition that includes many center-right voters. And when commentators supposedly dedicated to Trump’s defeat abuse antiabortion advocates as intentionally cruel enemies of women, they are helping to ensure that Trump and Trumpism remain clear and present dangers to the republic.