Book review: One Nation After Trump

The Washington Post published the following review of One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported by Beverly Gage, a teacher of U.S. political history at Yale. The book is authored by E.J. Dionne (liberal - Washington Post columnist), Norman J. Ornstein (conservative - American Enterprise Institute) Thomas E. Mann (non-partisan - Brookings Institute).

Gage writes:

“President Trump is not forever. At some point in the not-too-distant future, he will no longer be president, and it will be time to assess the post-storm damage and begin the recovery process. We don’t know when this will happen: this year or next, in 2021 or 2025. . . . . But it will happen, and the people in the best position to take advantage of that moment will be those who are already thinking about where we ought to go next.

. . . . Their [the author's] bipartisan — or, perhaps, tripartisan — work seems intended to send the rest of us a message: It’s time to find some common ground before obstructionism, demagoguery, fake news and racial resentment become the dominant features of our national politics. . . . .

The book begins with an assessment of the 2016 election, asking how on earth we ended up with our reality-star “Normless President.” Its emphasis is less on Trump, however, than on the long-term structural and cultural changes that made his election possible. The authors have no patience for a “both sides” argument about the degradation of our political culture. They lay the blame firmly within the Republican Party, where a process of “radicalization” that began in the 1980s has now resulted in a “Jurassic Park”-style disaster, with the creators of that change unable to control their own monster.

. . . . .

So what is to be done? If the book’s first half focuses on the sorry state of things today, the second half focuses on how to not make the same mistakes in the future. The authors claim to be genuinely — if tentatively — hopeful about what Trump’s election may ultimately yield for American civic life. “We believe that the popular mobilization and national soul-searching he has aroused could be the occasion for an era of democratic renewal,” they write. But that will happen only if Trump’s opponents across the political spectrum come up with “a hopeful and unifying alternative.”

The authors present an impressive list of policy ideas designed to do just that and perhaps even to dispel some of Trump’s allure within the MAGA base. They make a distinction between the “legitimate” (read: economic) grievances of Trump voters and the illegitimate expression of those grievances in the politics of racial and nativist resentment. They chastise Democrats for paying insufficient attention to the real pain of working-class voters, sidelined for decades by deindustrialization and now by an incomplete recovery from the financial crisis. But they insist — rightly — that any attempt to address those problems cannot come at the expense of other social justice movements.

. . . . .

It is hard to object to much about these plans, with their emphasis on fairness and comity and partisan goodwill. And yet there is something incongruous about the authors’ belief that good policy, judiciously presented, will yield the desired political transformation. As the authors note, one of the more depressing lessons of the 2016 election was that policy simply didn’t matter much. Nobody, including his own voters, thought Trump had much policy expertise. On the campaign trail, however, his abuse of wonks and elites and bureaucrats seemed to work in his favor.

In this context, a book that draws upon the best research of Harvard political scientists, Atlantic writers and think-tank staffers seems like a leap of faith as much as a matter of hard-nosed analysis. Some of the authors’ calls for unity have a similar wishful-thinking quality. “The imperative of turning back Trump and Trumpism will require unusual forms of discipline and commitment,” they write. “It will mean not allowing the ideological and tactical battles with the Democratic Party between factions loosely defined as Clinton and Sanders Democrats to tear it asunder.” Great! But how, exactly, will that happen?”

In an interview on today's To The Point program broadcast by KCRW, host Warren Olney did a 10 minute interview with Ornstein.[1] Ornstein pointed out poll data showing that voters who felt unfair treatment compared to other racial groups tended to be a solid base of Trump's core supporters. The MAGA mindset comes with a list of fairly common traits that include protectionism and xenophobia, sometimes tinged with racism.

Questions: Is it fair to lay most of the blame for incivility, extremism, a non-compromise mindset and a dysfunctional federal government on republicans? Does the plan that Doinne, Ornstein and Mann lay out seem plausible, or is partisan distrust and animosity too much to fix in anything short of a sustained multi-generational effort?

Footnote:
1. Ornstein and Mann wrote the 2012 book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With The New Politics of Extremism. In it they write: “One of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

B&B orig: 9/29/17