Trumpism is the most powerful force in American politics, and it’s not going away | Opinion
As I write this, the election looks like it is going Trump's way in Wisconsin and — most crucially — Pennsylvania. Many votes are left to be counted, but even watching MSDNC, the reality is starting to sink in that the path to a Kamala Harris electoral victory is increasingly narrow.
Regardless of how the next few days of counting go, it is clear that Trump and Trumpism will remain the most powerful force in politics. In many ways, Donald Trump had already won before the first vote was cast on Tuesday. His style of politics has reshaped the culture of politics and government while raising the stakes of political conflict for decades to come.
Here are seven ways Trumpism will remain in command of American politics whether he is in the White House or not.
Republican leadership: There's almost none left that isn't tainted by Trump's lies and extremism untethered to any coherent conservative ideology. Call it the Ted Cruzification of the GOP. Nearly everyone who could once tell the truth about Donald Trump's awfulness has bent the knee and defended indefensible acts such as attempting to overthrow the results of a presidential election or somehow twisted reality to pretend they didn't happen or didn't matter. Even Nikki Haley writes in The Wall Street Journal in support of Trump, betting that will remain the safe position in the party regardless of the election results.
Death of compromise: For the 50 years before Trump, Republicans battled the growth of the federal government, but never managed actually to shrink it. Success looked like keeping government growth to a slower pace than the private economy. Today, even Republicans who have tried to remain independent of Trump, men and women like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have adopted a style of politics that reflects a blow-things-up mentality of political warfare. Half a loaf is no longer on the table.
Democratic extremism: Liberals were pushed to the left by the death of George Floyd and the shock of the COVID-19 plague, but in an even more powerful way, the rise of Trump has made Democratic moderates look too weak to deal with the populist demagogue. What's left is a party turning to one of its most extreme members without the democratic niceties of a primary and little sign that moderates will hold much sway in the party. California's progressivism on steroids is the source and the model of the Democratic Party vision. After an election loss, some Democrats might blame their party's left flank, but it is just as likely that Democrats will seek more extreme ideological purity.
The great sort: The hyperpartisanship of the decadelong Trump era has taken the trend of Americans to move to places populated by people who think like them and moved it into high gear, The New York Times reports in an eye-opening data analysis . As we rub shoulders less and less with people who disagree, research shows that groups of like-minded people become more extreme. There's little hope to turn back the clock to a more moderate and accommodating style of politics found when friends and family regularly crossed the party line.
Killing competence: If 2024 Trump Republicans have a model of governance, it is to strip out the nonpartisan civil service from government replacing the foot soldiers of the bureaucracy with partisan loyalists. If they ever succeed, there's little reason to think competence will take priority over subservience to Trump's agenda. Once that model is in place, it is unlikely that Democrats will miss the chance to put their own toadies in place when they win elections. Even now, the people who run our government put the purity of intentions over the success of policy. Look at the multibillion-dollar programs to build electric car chargers and install high speed internet that have so far failed to do much of that at all.
Fading federalism: Once the genius of America was to let Texas get as red as it wanted, but allow Austin to remain weird. We could have a union-loving blue Illinois right next to a bright red right-to-work Indiana. Federal and state laws were passed with broad local flexibility that allowed the government closest to the people to reflect their values. Missouri's conservative Branson and California's loopy San Francisco could both have their say. Indeed, one-size-fits-all policies like Roe v. Wade's judicial fiat were the destructive exception to the more diversity-friendly rule. Now Republicans and Democrats alike are running on federal preemption of local rule on everything from education and abortion to union rules and corporate regulation.
Crumbling middle: There used to be broadly trusted institutions that mediated the extremes of our politics and moderated the battles between political parties. Under Trump, distrust in institutions from the judiciary and the military to religion and the legacy media have crumbled even faster than in their decades of previous decline. Trump has turned the belief that only one side can be trusted into a shared belief of the left and the right in American politics.
Even if we wake up on Wednesday and somehow Harris pulls a victory out of the red map of defeat, she and her administration will reflect our country's orange cast just as the rest of us will. She might rule from Washington, but her reign will be in Trump's America.
As seems more likely tonight, if Trump takes office in January, the changes to the America that I love are only going to grow deeper and darker over the next four years.
