Make Politics Great Again
In contemplating the likelihood of a second Trump administration, Daniel McCarthy’s fine contribution to this symposium leaves little on the table for others to chew, although the feast he has laid before us looks delicious. From his thoughts on immigration to his sensible commentary about why, in the wake of Dobbs, we cannot expect (nor should we want) to effect social conservatism through the courts, McCarthy earns the compliments of his diners.
Indeed, if a second Trump term transpired exactly as McCarthy has drawn up the menu, I should be delighted. But I would be pleased even with less. In fact, I would settle for just the main course: a restoration of politics to American public life.
As John Marini explained in 2016 when writing about the crisis to which Trump’s candidacy was a response, “Bureaucratic rule has become so pervasive that it is no longer clear that government is legitimized by the consent of the governed.” This means that before we can even begin to think about making America great again, we must first make politics possible again.
Making politics possible again means we must be able to see some connection between our deliberations and the laws that ultimately govern our lives. The policies that prevail must be understood to have our consent. We need to know that, in important ways, we are governing ourselves and that a legitimately obtained majority of the people is responsible for the direction of the United States of America. That is what we mean by politics.
Today the people’s active participation in politics has been replaced by the dictates of an administrative state, populated by bureaucrats no one elected who think they know America’s interests better than we do. Politicians are largely ornamental operatives who do the bidding of donors while blaming their inability to satisfy voters on the machinations of the bureaucracy and, of course, the evergreen excuse of needing “a bigger majority.” For decades now, these forces have worked together to choke off our ability to engage in meaningful self-government.
Americans now seem on the cusp of an important victory in this fight for self-government with a second Trump administration and, probably, a Republican controlled House and Senate. But that victory, if it comes, is only the beginning. If we can’t accomplish a restoration of meaningful politics in the next four years, America—understood as the regime based on the consent of the governed—may be irretrievably lost.
Given that danger, inspiring Americans to demand a government where politics is possible again needs to be the first (and I don’t even care if it is the only) priority of the coming Trump administration. If this is all Donald Trump accomplishes in the next four years, then his will be the most consequential political victory in American history. He has already done much to expose the ways the current regime undermines our politics. In a second term, he must make Americans understand that it is ultimately up to them to restore it. He can show us the rot, but the restoration is up to us.
“The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For”
The tribulations of the last eight years have had at least one beneficial side effect in all of this. We don’t require much in the way of abstract theorizing anymore to understand that our way of life is under assault. We can just recall the recent past and remember how, and why, it played out as it did.
In 2016 when Trump sought the presidency against Hillary Clinton, America’s ruling class (by which I mean the partisans of government) recoiled. The reaction was visceral—and not limited to Democrats. It was something more than just an expression of personal distaste for Trump’s policies or even for the man himself. It was almost as though the ruling class was more put off by who Trump stood for than by what he stood for. The notion that these dirty unwashed masses ought to have some meaningful say about the direction of their country appeared to shake these elites to their core and fill them with rage. Indeed, the ruling class’s disgust has always been most apparent when they discuss his supporters—the “deplorables” as Hillary famously called them or “garbage” as Joe Biden most recently described them.
To understand this impulse—this hatred—we must remember that in 2016, the ruling class was riding high. Barack Obama and his progressive reimagining of the meaning of America—his “fundamental transformation”—was pursued throughout the eight years of his presidency without damaging his personal popularity. Importantly, the elites in government and in Obama’s immediate orbit understood that his leftward tilt was about something more fundamental than mere policy direction: It was about the very purposes and structure of American government.
Feeling sure Obama’s enduring appeal meant that his revolution of advocating naked progressive administration might become permanent, the smart set got comfortable discussing the details of their rule openly, as though they had obtained their status by divine right. Whereas other progressive presidents had felt compelled to cloak their progressivism in the language of American constitutionalism, Obama and his exuberant confederates were buoyed by their certainty that Americans were now past caring about the Constitution or quaint eighteenth century notions like the consent of the governed. Politics no longer involved antiquated ideas like ambition counteracting ambition or competing and counter-balancing interests. Instead, the members of our ruling class would happily volunteer to serve as enlightened statesmen at the helm of a ship they could steer away from popular superstition and prejudice and in the direction of scientific progress.
Politics no longer would require these elites to make themselves palatable and persuasive to ordinary Americans. America’s national sovereign—the people—would just have to catch up with their wisdom. In other words, they were in charge. Politics from then on was just to be a matter of implementing policies about which “the science was settled.” Consent, if you could get it, might be useful but was never important or necessary in the way that the Founders understood it. In fact, it could always be manufactured after the fact if it was deemed necessary to keep our rulers in power.
To be fair, consent hadn’t seemed all that important or necessary to “the Decider” George W. Bush and his administration, either. But Obama and company were much better at remaining popular while simultaneously disregarding the opinions of the people. The primary concern of the ruling class in both instances was getting, consolidating, and maintaining power. And this helps explain why, despite surface disagreement on domestic policy issues, the people in the party of government very quickly joined forces when Trump became popular. Trusting ordinary people to govern themselves was beyond imagination. After all, these people might be the sort who cling to their God and their guns or who do not trust the elites to tell them who should be their friends and enemies at home and, especially, abroad.
Once Obama was elected, the ruling class assumed that disagreement and deliberation about broad policy goals should also be over. Questioning things like whether mass immigration is good for the country, whether we should use the U.S.’s power and might to effect regime change in far-flung parts of the globe, and whether we should maintain an absolutist approach to free trade were now considered out of bounds for anyone who expected to belong to polite society. The science of politics, as far as they were concerned, had settled these things. You either accepted their answers, or you were an ignorant object of mockery. The effort of real policymaking, after all, required the skills and expertise of people like themselves.
Moreover, the ruling class considered itself indispensable now that the objectives of the progressive administrative state were going to be carried out in perpetuity. They believed Obama had cracked the code on that pesky matter of engineering electoral victories for the party of government (note, I do not say just the Democrats). Though progressives since the time of Woodrow Wilson had resented the American Constitution for requiring them to take their grand ideas before the people, Obama had finally identified a way to harness that instrument’s requirement of popular consent without appearing to change it. To that end, identity politics and narrative building were perfected to keep the plebes occupied while the partisans of the ruling class were busy crafting policy that served their interests. Americans were expected to understand that these questions were off the kids’ table, where they sat, and instead pick up their crayons and content themselves with demented fairy tales about their past, racial resentments, genital fixations, and Hitler memes.
The power of the ruling class seemed unstoppable because the squabbles of all other partisans—the ones who occupied the media and the popular imagination—were mere distractions from the real energy of government.
Bringing Politics Back, ’76-Style
Donald Trump changed all of that when he arrived on the scene as a serious candidate in the party that at least pretended to want to reduce the size and scope of government. It rocked the world of the ruling class because this man was bold, brash, and every bit as, if not more charismatic than Obama while rejecting all their assumptions and mocking everything about them. Rich, but never part of their club, his ideas about American politics, and particularly the idea that there ought to be American politics, struck them with both terror and disbelief.
Trump did not make the fundamental error of campaigning like a traditional Republican, or even like one of the Tea Party—droning on and on about the need for small government. Can anyone imagine Trump being fool enough to try inspiring people by singing the praises of something he called “small”? He cut through that awkwardness of Republicans, made Americans feel their own strength again, and cut to the heart of the matter.
Instead of talking about anodyne questions like the government’s size Trump started bluntly asking what government should do, for whom it ought to do it, and who should decide what it does. In other words, what powers does this government have and whose interests ought to be driving its actions? Trump had fundamentally different answers to these questions than the assumptions driving the elites and, importantly, he was willing to absorb their insults as they demanded he stop asking and answering these questions.
In the years that followed, of course, he was asked to absorb quite a lot more than mere insults.
As we are in the final week of the 2024 campaign, it is time for Americans to come to terms with the contempt the ruling class has for them and to stand up and demand self-government for ourselves. It is time for us to be willing to absorb the insults and injuries that may come our way for defying those who believe they have a fundamental right to rule us. Instead, we must stand firm as we ask them, in the immortal words of Angelo Codevilla, “Who the hell do they think they are?”
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