A Trump loss could stabilise US politics for a generation
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There is such a thing as an unimportant US presidential election. Had Bill Clinton lost to Bob Dole in 1996, or George W Bush to John Kerry the other side of the millennium, there is no reason to believe we would now inhabit a greatly different world. So when I suggest that November 5 2024 is a hinge moment in history, don’t murmur: “Journalists say this every damn time.”
What is the case for this election’s singular importance? If Donald Trump loses, there is an underrated chance that America and its politics will stabilise for a generation. “Stabilise” doesn’t mean “become Luxembourg”. Polarisation will endure. But the received wisdom that Trumpism will outlast Trump — that he is just the face and voice of deeper societal forces, liable to rock the republic for decades — is shakier than it was four years ago.
The lesson of 2024 so far is that American populism will find Trump hideously difficult to replace. In January, Ron DeSantis, who combined the gist of the Trump platform with executive competence, dropped out of the Republican primaries, having not done well enough to even state his case for 2028. In July, JD Vance clinched the title not just of running mate but of heir to the Maga movement. Nothing since then has suggested that he is up to it. Vivek Ramaswamy is another who might wonder if the high summer of his public career is already past.
Others who have a go in the years to come (Tucker Carlson, perhaps) will run into the same problem, which is that Trump has political superpowers almost unique to him. I count three.
The most obvious is star quality. In any country, one or two and sometimes zero politicians per generation have it. Forced to stand on its own terms, without the distracting presence of a charismatic leader, the hard-right agenda is too sharp-edged. Then there is what we might call emotional sunk cost. For voters who committed to Trump circa 2016, and who paid a toll for it among friends, relatives or social media sparring partners, abandoning him is a personal defeat. A new leader, however faithful to his ideas, can’t just inherit that support, hence the vibe of “you’re not my real dad” whenever someone tries to succeed him.
The last and most counter-logical of Trump’s advantages is his perceived incompetence. Some Republicans tell themselves he is too idle and chaotic to do irreparable harm. (And, until January 6 2021, had half a case.) A politician who pairs Trumpist views with operational grip would lose as well as gain support, would frighten as well as impress.
Note the connecting theme here: the near-irrelevance of ideas. The shocking thing about Trump was never that he could “shoot somebody” on the street without losing supporters. Lots of demagogues in the past might have claimed the same. If Trump represents something novel, it is that he can take almost any line on almost any issue — immigration might be the one exception — without losing them. (Which of his anti-vaccine fans minds that he recommended the Covid-19 jab?) Dictatorship in the 1930s, always the wrong lens through which to analyse Trump, was about something: communism, irredentism, and so on. The Trump phenomenon is much less doctrinal, and so much less transferable to another leader.
One cannot raise the prospect of post-Trump stabilisation in polite company without seeming unintellectual. Western elites aren’t Marxist, if that means eager for the end of capitalism, but are Marxian, in that their view of what makes the world go round tends to de-emphasise individuals. Larger forces are meant to be in charge. A culture in which it is normal to refer to the “wrong side of history” or the “arc of history” implicitly believes that events have been half-scripted already.
Was Trump’s rise to power a personal feat or historically ordained by decades of deindustrialisation, porous borders and other provocations that were due an electoral revolt? “Both”, no doubt: it takes a remarkable individual to capitalise on structural trends. The breakthrough of populism in other democracies suggests something deep is at work. In the end, though, especially in a presidential system, the individual is the catalyser, and American populists don’t have one on the horizon.
Lots of Trump-loathing conservatives are reluctant to vote for Kamala Harris. Rather than sell them on a woman who is, it is true, laughably under-scrutinised right now, Democrats should argue that the prize is not just four years of respite for the republic, but conceivably much longer. Perhaps another Trump is inevitable. But voters can oblige history to go find one.