Trump won’t play it safe
“The time for empty talk is over,” the new American president said near the end of his relatively brief Inaugural Address. And if he actually makes good on that promise, if the speech wasn’t just talk but a blueprint for effective presidential action, then we just watched an epochal moment: the last rites of Reaganite conservatism, and the birth of a populist and nationalist new American right.
The speech was, as predicted, “Jacksonian” — populist, combative, anti-Washington, thick with promises to eradicate America’s enemies and favour the forgotten man over globalist elites. But if it was anti-Washington, it was not remotely anti-government: just as he did on the campaign trail, Donald Trump eschewed the rhetoric of liberty in favour of expansive promises of “protection” and rhapsodic paeans to infrastructure spending.
Will his rhetoric actually define the policy that gets made in the halls of Congress, where a more Reaganite conservatism still theoretically holds sway? Or will his words be a Buchananite patina on an agenda mostly written by supply- siders and Goldman Sachs appointees? Or will the conflict between the two tendencies simply make his administration less epochal than incoherent, less transformative than simply ineffective?
During the Trump transition, observers on both the right and left cited the political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s theory of “disjunctive” presidents who straddle transitions between old orders and emerging ones. 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 couldn’t blend the old and new.
Right now Trump looks like he might be similarly disjunctive. Like Carter with the 1970s-era Democrats, he has grasped that Republican policy desperately needs to be reinvented. But his populistnationalist 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. But on the evidence of this speech, Trump will either remake conservatism in his image, or see his presidency fail.