Trump won, think of that. The last I saw, he nabbed 274 electoral college votes, which should surely be enough to withstand a few defectors, rogue electors. . . .
The Republicans maintained control of the Senate and the House. GOP insiders are rubbing their hands in unexpected glee: united government!
Do you fear united government? Well, you should. It was terrible in the Bush years. It was what led to the repudiation of Republicans in 2006 and 2008, and to the eight years of the Barack Obama disaster. The Republicans were punished. American voters punished them.
Yesterday, it was The Democracy’s turn, turnabout being rough, but a sort of poetic justice. Call it doggerel-eat-doggerel justice. And no better candidate for repudiation could be imagined than Mrs. Hillary Clinton. I gloat and glory in her defeat. Her agony. Driving home from town, after the night’s big turn went from the West Coast States’ blue board results, and the red began racking up, my fellow traveler chortled along with me: To be defeated by the most hated man in America! What a blow. What a slap, what a thwacking. None dare call it comeuppance?
And yet, and yet . . .
America works better with divided government. A certain amount of checks and balances in the opposing parties vying for supremacy in House, Senate, and the White House.
But take heart! If I have been right, we will have divided government, despite Democratic dashed hopes.
Republicans have retained congressional majorities, sure. But another Democrat will enter the White House.
The devil, you say.
Well, yes. You see, Trump is, at the very least, not a conservative. His speech last night was all about spending increases, when not making vague promises of getting America “back to work.” If he gets his way, deficits will increase, as they did under Bush; and debt will increase, as it did under all presidents in my lifetime. Bigly.
My past prediction was that Trump will rule as an old-time moderate Democrat, a sort of vulgar Jimmy Carter with a propensity for super-Gephardtian trade barriers.
When will Democrats realize they won? When will Republicans realize they lost?
Mundus vult decipi. The world wills deception; the world wants to be deceived.
twv
To identify a Republican or a Democrat, we must know what the Hell it means to be either. I don’t think that it’s a matter of ideology as we ordinarily understand it, nor of policy as we ordinarily understand it. It’s a matter of identifying with a group, being accepted by that group, and working in a way expected to preserve or to contribute to the power of that group.
The Democrats have invested too much in vilifying Trump ever to embrace him, though his need for approval is such that, if they offered to take him into their collective bosom, he would be thrilled, and he might be suckered. (The Democrats have something of a track-record of betraying those politicians who have reached across the aisle or crossed the divide.)
How Republican politicians respond to Trump will largely be a matter of whether they learned the underlying lesson of their neoconservative episode. Neoconservatism seemed to allow them to represent themselves as conservative yet profit from an expansive state; Trump’s fascism offers the same temptation. Neoconservatism led the Republicans to political ruin, from which a rank-and-file rebellion largely rescued them, exactly by advancing Republicans who seemed more genuinely conservative; but the leadership and many other Republican politicians have resisted this more genuine conservatism; it is alien to them.
As to the rank-and-file, I think that they will at best be very slow to see — and slower still to admit openly — that Trump’s policy instincts are much closer to those of the Democratic establishment than even to those of establishment Republicans. That the mainstream of the media and a huge share of Democrats will almost surely continue to vilify him will only impede such realization. Note, by way of analogy, that the rank-and-file of Democrats still imagine Barack Obama as a peacemaker.