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What Happens After the Election?
Assume because it’s a safe bet that Hillary Clinton wins the presidency by a wide margin. Assume a double-digit disaster in down-ticket races, perhaps with the GOP narrowly keeping the House. (I assume it will because there are few real swing seats; filing deadlines have passed, and many seats don’t have a strong Democratic challenger.) Odds look better-than-even that the Democrats will gain four seats and take back the Senate. It’s possible, if less likely, that they pick up a filibuster-proof majority.
We the People are already nearly at each other’s throats. I don’t see what could happen between now and the election that could reduce America’s political, social, and economic polarization. Hillary Clinton will be the most unpopular president ever to be elected. Trump’s supporters will be embittered. Given Trump’s enthusiasm for conspiracy theories, I can readily imagine him claiming voter fraud or otherwise challenging the legitimacy of the election. Congress will be close to gridlock from Day 1.
No matter who’s elected, the next four years are apt to be tough. Our infrastructure is crumbling and the consequences of this will increasingly be obvious. We’re on the edge of several geopolitical precipices. It’s highly likely that America will either be forced into a humiliating retreat, internationally, or war. There will be more terrorist attacks, certainly, and more mass shootings. In the best scenario, there will only be a normal cyclical recession, but in the worst, there will be another big economic shock. And we’re out of tools to deal with it. No one is going to get the economic security they’re longing for in the coming four years.
This would all be true even if Lincoln were about to enter the Oval Office. But it won’t be Lincoln. It will be Hillary Clinton, who is despised and distrusted by a large part of the electorate. To her left is a large minority who despises and distrusts her just as much as the right does. (Read the comments here, for example.) She won’t be entering office with a large reservoir of public hope and good will to draw upon.
The ugliness and bitterness of this campaign won’t end. No matter who takes office in November, the first thing the rest of the world will do is test the president’s resolve. Right now, the election is sucking up so much media oxygen that Americans aren’t paying much attention to the warning signs of dangerous confrontations to come. But the global balance of power has been so destabilized that no one should hope otherwise.
So what will happen when the things that have created a groundswell of support for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders get worse?
In 1994, Edward Luttwak wrote Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future. I wish it didn’t seem prophetic, but it does.
He concludes:
… Thus neither the moderate Right nor the moderate Left even recognises, let alone offers any solution for, the central problem of our days: the completely unprecedented personal economic insecurity of working people, from industrial workers and white-collar clerks to medium-high managers. None of them are poor and they therefore cannot benefit from the more generous welfare payments that the moderate Left is inclined to offer. Nor are they particularly envious of the rich, and they therefore tend to be uninterested in redistribution. Few of them are actually unemployed, and they are therefore unmoved by Republican/Tory promises of more growth and more jobs through the magic of the unfettered market: what they want is security in the jobs they already have – i.e. precisely what unfettered markets threaten.
A vast political space is thus left vacant by the Republican/Tory non-sequitur, on the one hand, and moderate Left particularism and assistentialism, on the other. That was the space briefly occupied in the USA by the 1992 election-year caprices of Ross Perot, and which Zhirinovsky’s bizarre excesses are now occupying in the peculiar conditions of Russia, where personal economic insecurity is the only problem that counts for most people … And that is the space that remains wide open for a product-improved Fascist party, dedicated to the enhancement of the personal economic security of the broad masses of (mainly) white-collar working people. Such a party could even be as free of racism as Mussolini’s original was until the alliance with Hitler, because its real stock in trade would be corporativist restraints on corporate Darwinism, and delaying if not blocking barriers against globalisation. It is not necessary to know how to spell Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to recognise the Fascist predisposition engendered by today’s turbocharged capitalism.
Is he wrong?
Published in General
The GOP leadership feared that this would backfire, and they’d lose control of Congress. Maybe they were wrong.
Point is, they had a strategy, it hinged on holding Congress and winning the White House in 2016. It might have worked if the base had been willing to wait just one more year.
Just because you might be hoping that Trump will do badly does not mean that that will happen.
Trump’s election map looks almost the same as Romney’s election map.
Trump is +11 in Colorado! Romney lost Colorado by 5 points. However, there has only been one Colorado poll.
Trump is even ahead is the latest Oregon poll 44% to 42%!
Clinton is ahead of Trump by 7 points in Connecticut, but Romney lost the state by over 17 points!
Similarly, Clinton is ahead of Trump by 9 points in New Jersey, but Romney lost this state also by about 17 points!
Clinton is up +1 in Arizona with Trump +4 in the last poll.
Clinton is up 1.6 in Florida which Romney lost by less than one point.
Trump was tied with Clinton in this month’s Pennsylvania poll and 1 point behind in the last Pennsylvania poll. Romney lost Pennsylvania by over 5 points.
Clinton is up 1.4 in Ohio which Romney lost by 3 points.
Clinton is up 4 points in Iowa which Romney lost by 6 points.
Clinton is apparently up 4 points in Michigan, a Romney home state that Mitt lost by almost 10 points!
Trump isn’t doing well in Wisconsin, but if Romney couldn’t win Wisconsin with Paul Ryan, it’s difficult to see how Trump could unless Wisconsin dislikes Paul Ryan as much as Florida dislikes Marco Rubio who only won one Florida county in that recent primary.
I thought that was a weak strategy then.
If their calculus was correct I fail to see how this is worse.
How, exactly? The Marshall Court no longer exists, nor anything like it.
How will governors “finesse it” with a Supreme Court containing six Justices each of whom agrees with Bader Ginsburg that the Constitution is a living document and subject to “interpretation” and amendment from the bench?
Eric Hines
For one thing, more local control of our lives. The bigger a nation (or empire) gets, the less responsive it is to its people. We may well be better off as 4 or 5 distinct nations. I don’t have much in common with a socialist pothead in Seattle that fights for $15 and thinks the Lenin Statue is a really cool idea, nor with a Chicago alderman that thinks an ideal world involves forced union membership and seizing private firearms. We’re not only politically different, we’re culturally different too. Ask a Texan. Immoral centralization of power is an inevitable consequence of a country or Empire that’s gotten too big. Big empires are also unwieldy and either fall apart naturally or are held together too forcefully. Once you get too big, your future is either Imperial Rome or Austria-Hungary.
If I’m going to have a country, I want countrymen. I have no interest in a “gorgeous mosaic”, as the former NYC mayor called it, that have people that share none of MY culture or values. If America doesn’t become more Jefferson and less Hapsburg, then I’d just as soon it break up. And I think we’re just about at the point of no return.
Axiom Strategies and Remington Research Group have studied election results in seven battleground states to identify Battleground Counties. These counties historically reflect statewide results, so monitoring them will be key in analyzing the 2016 presidential race.
Trump leads in Florida, NC, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Nevada
http://axiomstrategies.com/abc/
One option for a governor with a spine of steel would be to simply say “the Supreme Court has made its decision, now let’s see them enforce it in my state.” How far would an unpopular President Clinton be willing to go to force a governor to implement an unpopular law if the people of his state were squarely behind him? Send in the army, declare martial law, arrest the governor and try him for treason?
Why do so many 21st century conservatives believe in utopia more than they believe in the Constitutional power of the purse?
We will be forever doomed with that thinking. This is war!
If Republicans had acted to cut off funding, a few might have been voted out of office, but I feel confident that Trump would not have caught fire (although there still would have been the immigration/trade issue).
Congressional Republicans picked their poison, and they decided that not funding Obamacare was the greater risk — to themselves. I doubt that I can vote for Trump, but congressional Republicans are getting what they deserve.
I will repeat this quote again. “…what I tell people at home is think we can get 85% of (Obamacare) for sure repealed through reconciliation.” — Paul Ryan, 2012
Their self-interest in staying in office aligns with the interests of conservatives who want to win that war.
Suppose after 2010 the GOP had refused to fund Obamacare, resulting in a standoff and a government shutdown. Suppose as a result enough of them were voted out of office so that the Democrats regained control of Congress in 2012 alongside Obama’s re-election. They could quickly restore full funding for Obamacare, plus who knows what else would have passed? Instead of resorting to a dodgy partial amnesty by executive decree, perhaps a Democrat-controlled Congress would have passed (and Obama signed) a legitimate sweeping amnesty which would have been impossible for Trump or anyone else to undo.
And so the risk of gunfire, which is what Skyler–and I–would like to avoid.
Relying on the force of law, the rule of law, under a lawless administration is unlikely have a favorable outcome.
Eric Hines
First of all, I always, always appreciate your posts. It seems when everyone else is caught up in the media hysteria, you are able to keep a view of the bigger picture, keeping an eye on broader developments, and remember critical aspects of the reality on the ground, which often includes remembering the impact of things for the vulnerable. Thanks so much for the excellent perspective you consistently bring.
As to this particular blog, yes, there is a strange and almost out of control air to the anger and reactions of both Trump and Sanders supporters that need to be attended to, and this quote really isolates a potential explanation. There is a sense that our current stability is very fragile, and that there are no grownups in the room that will make the hard choices to fix it. So bring in the radicals. 2008 is near enough to remember how painful that can be, yet it wasn’t bad enough for the elite to do the hard things at the time or the necessary things now to make sure it won’t happen again. In some ways, I think the uprising is the honest rejection of political trifling and pettiness, only there is great disagreement about who is being petty and what about. It is hard to imagine there won’t be a day of reckoning.
Yup, two Clinton appointees and Justice Kennedy are in their 70’s, so H may get to replace them. Citizens will no longer legally have guns for protection, central government will run us over: no real freedom, die when they say to. I am staying in NV to do my part by voting non-Hillary, then moving to Oklahoma, and hoping they join Texas.
Thank you.
It’s not going to go away. That segment of the population needs to be brought back into the social compact, and somehow trust needs to be restored among all these groups in America — enough that we’re not sitting here exploring the pros and cons of secession.
Who always make everything better …
Yes, I think that’s accurate: It’s a howl of outrage, but outrage alone isn’t productive and is in fact usually just destructive.
Or maybe if a couple of junior senators hadn’t acted like they were (to quote Blues Brothers) “On a mission from GD”. We had far too many candidates, most of whom were no-hopers, yet still they stayed in (likely to salve their egos and lock in book deals or TV commentariat slots). If they had voluntarily thinned their ranks, unified against Trump, and actually addressed the same people and the same issues he was addressing they might have been able to stop him.
This, I think, has been the wrong mindset in the Republicans’ attempts for the White House for the last few cycles.
The candidates did not need to unite against Trump or anyone in the prior cycles; they did need to aim their fire at the other party’s candidates, talking about how each of their own policy/plan suites were better than anything the other party’s candidates were offering. The clarity of their policies and plans–and several of the candidates were pretty clear early on–would have stood in stark contrast to the policies and plans of others in the field and against the other party’s. They needed, and need, to have the trust in us voters they claim they have.
Too often at this level, the Republican candidates have shown they don’t know who the enemy is.
Eric Hines
All valid too.
What difference at this point does it make?
All true and I think primarily due to the fact that there isn’t a coherent definition of what ‘conservative’ means in the 21st century and policy prescriptions consistent with whatever definition should arrive.
There is no doubt in Democrat circles what progressive means and the policy prescriptions to support it.
Democrats spend their primaries figuring out who best to carry the message to the general.
Republicans spend primaries trying to figure what conservative is and what they stand for. By then the damage is done as you’ve said.
I agree. And once other states see Texas’ success, it won’t be long before several other “red” states secede as well.
I put the odds of one or more states seceding in the next 10-20 years at 50%. 10 years ago I would have told anyone who said there was a non-zero chance of secession a raving maniac. We are living in interesting times.
That’s the beauty of training your fire on the true enemy. While it would be useful to have a coherent–or even a consensus–definition of conservative, if each candidate spent his time saying how his policies are better than Obama/Clinton’s and/or Sanders’ the candidates would better differentiate themselves from those Progressives and Socialists and along the way from each other. Then the voters could decide whom they want with clear information, or at least claims, about the type of conservatism they want.
And those conservative candidates who lost could then better spend their time refining their messages for the next campaign while supporting the winner of the present campaign.
But that requires something any gun owner, much less hunter, understands: target recognition.
The question of what is a conservative could thus be elided for the sake of a successful campaign.
Eric Hines
On the other hand I could imagine many voices on the East Coast in favor of their states’ leaving the Union. My sense is that the secessionists on both sides would prefer to win and dominate the whole. Compromise and federalism to the rescue I hope.
There won’t be any secession. You can’t even get the conservatives on Ricochet to support subsidiarity when it comes to fracking regulation or GMO labeling regulation. If federalism isn’t worth that much to them, they’re not going to go whole hog and secede.
Sure, let them go–our price for letting them, though, is that they have to take California, Oregon, and Washington with them.
Eric Hines
Hasn’t Obama laid the ground work for Fascism? The basic freedoms we had come to assume we had, have been systematically weakened or removed through his policies, sanctioned with the silence of the Republicans at every turn. From healthcare to religion, speech, journalism, trade, gender identity, school lunches, Common Core, bullying the energy sector, ignoring our allies and military’s advice, unrestrained refugee influx, poor border security, abuses by IRS, failures by the EPA, poor protection from hackers, Hillary’s unsecured server, etc..
We the People have put those in charge on notice by these election revolts. As long as we continue to accept the above, it will keep happening. Whoever is elected from the top down must be voted, approved and held accountable.
More: What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man’s laws, not God’s– and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety’s sake.
from A Man for All Seasons
Seawriter