He continues, “We called our wing ‘the growth wing,’ and we won for a good twenty years. And now their wing is winning. But it’s cyclical. We beat the paleocons in the early nineties; they’re beating us now.
“The Reagan Republican wing beat the Rockefeller Republican wing,” Ryan shrugs. “And now the Trump wing beat the Reagan wing.”
ELIZABETH WARREN TRIED TO PLAY THE GAME BY THE PRESIDENT’S rules.
Haunted by her past habit of identifying in academia as a Native American and, more recently, by Trump’s jeering cries of “Pocahontas,” the Massachusetts senator hoped to neutralize the issue ahead of her campaign for the presidency. Weeks before the 2018 elections, Warren released the results of a Stanford DNA study revealing that she likely had an indigenous ancestor between six and ten generations back, making her anywhere from 1/64 to 1/1,024 Native American. The carefully choreographed rollout—a sleek web video, an exclusive in the Boston Globe—reflected a confidence among Warren and her political advisers that they would not only squash the controversy but wield it on the offensive against Trump.
That confidence was sorely misplaced. At a moment of hypersensitivity on the American left regarding matters of identity, Warren’s move invited only more skepticism of her past claims—and of her contemporary political judgment. Progressive activists, particularly those of color, hammered her for conflating a genealogist’s statistic with a minority’s life experience. The Cherokee Nation, which Warren did not consult in advance, slammed her stunt as “inappropriate and wrong.” Media outlets that otherwise might have considered the story stale dug deeper; sure enough, days before her February campaign launch, the Washington Post unearthed a State Bar of Texas registration card from 1986 listing “American Indian” as Warren’s race, in her handwriting.
By this point, Warren had already felt compelled to apologize—first to the Cherokee Nation, then to swarming reporters in the Capitol, and then to voters in Iowa on her pre-launch swing through the state. “I am not a person of color,” she said in Sioux City, responding to an irritated caucus-goer who demanded to know why Warren had given Trump “fodder” with the DNA test.
(She wasn’t alone in seeking absolution. The opening act of the Democratic race featured a rotating confessional of candidates declaring their past transgressions: Joe Biden for his touchy-feely interactions and his labeling of Mike Pence as a “decent guy”; Kamala Harris for her tough-on-crime policies as a California prosecutor; Bernie Sanders for the sexual harassment complaints against some of his 2016 campaign staffers; Beto O’Rourke for his white privilege and for joking about his wife raising their kids while he campaigned.)
The entire episode—Warren’s tone-deaf revelation, the backlash, and her apology—demonstrated once more the folly of fighting Trump on his own turf. A veritable graveyard of Republican presidential candidates stands in testament to his supremacy in the realm of the superficial.
But the line between engaging Trump on substance and being sucked into the vulgarly personal is impossibly thin.
Nearly all the Democratic 2020 hopefuls, for example, envision a more ambitious role for the government in health care than what Barack Obama created with the Affordable Care Act. And many of them support the idea of a single-payer system, eliminating the private insurance market entirely, a position that was considered fringe within the Democratic Party a few years ago. Meanwhile, most of the candidates have also embraced some combination of stances—free college, student loan forgiveness, third-trimester abortion access, reparations for slavery, voting rights for incarcerated felons—that are suddenly and controversially animating the Democratic base.
These are signs of dwindling ideological diversity within the party. And it may not matter: Elections in modern America are won principally by mobilizing the base, not persuading the middle. There is ample reason to believe, then, that Democrats can reclaim the White House by pushing unapologetically leftward.
There is also ample reason to believe that this plays right into Trump’s strategy. The president wants nothing more than to “put socialism on trial” in 2020, as Kellyanne Conway says, drawing the brightest possible distinction between the hammer-and-sickle Democrats and the stars-and-stripes Republicans. This isn’t about ideas. It’s about image. Trump is far less skilled at debating policy than he is at denigrating opponents; the more extreme their policies are perceived to be, the less work he has to do to combat them. It’s hard enough to defend a comprehensive government takeover of health care; it’s even harder while being slimed as ugly, dumb, or un-American. Keeping one’s focus is far easier aspired to than accomplished. Just as he lured Hillary Clinton into talking about “deplorables,” just as he baited Warren into releasing a DNA test, just as he provoked Biden into a macho war of words about physical toughness, Trump is planning to make a Democrat beat him at his own game, using the left’s political anger and ideological energy against its nominee. This is tactical but also deeply nihilistic: The president knows that even if he loses such a contest, his opponent does, too.
“Within the Democratic Party, I think there is a big debate about how to deal with Trump because he has no boundaries,” says David Axelrod, Obama’s former chief strategist. “He’s willing to do anything and say anything to promote his interests. It’s a values-free politics; it’s an amoral politics. And so, there is this body of thought that you have to fight fire with fire and so on. But I worry that we’ll all be consumed in the conflagration.”
TRUMPISM CAN BE UNDERSTOOD AS A CAUTIONARY TALE: THE CYNICISM and the belligerence, the political disruption and the societal wreckage, the heightened distrust of government and the lowered expectations among the governed. These are not the symptoms of a healthy governing entity. Given the toxicity of his time presiding over it, Trump may well be remembered as the president who destroyed the Republican Party.
“Or maybe,” says Tony Perkins, the Family Research Council president and onetime Trump skeptic, “he’ll be remembered for saving it.”
If that sounds crazy, consider the principal complaints about the prior iteration of the GOP. It was pacified. It was insular. It was disconnected from the concerns of everyday voters. It was fragile and apathetic and utterly without conviction.
Enter Trump. He spoke in ways that channeled the angst of forgotten Americans. He campaigned in ways that exposed the impotence and indifference of the ruling class. And he governed in ways that were fearless, prioritizing with single-mindedness his commitments to the few rather than modulating in hopes of gaining approval from the many.
“People were getting tired of the promises being broken. The party was damaged goods, and he has restored its credibility,” Perkins says. “Trump is one of the few politicians that I’ve seen who’s actually intent on keeping his promises.”
Loath as Democrats will be to acknowledge it, this may be a blueprint. Over the past half century, progressives have repeatedly failed to effect the sweeping changes reflective of their designation. Even in the case of Obama, who remains enormously popular with the left-of-center electorate, many progressives believe his administration fell woefully short on the issues of immigration, climate change, foreign intervention, and even health care, despite his historic shifting of the public policy debate with the passage of the Affordable Care Act.