Back in May, in fact, exactly a year ago tomorrow, Andrew Sullivan wrote an article in New York Magazine titled “Democracies End when They Are Too Democratic,” with the subtitle “America Has Never Been So Ripe for tyranny.” It was a long and erudite piece that was hailed in some circles as a masterpiece, one of the most important articles to be written about the election season thus far. His thesis, as far as I was able to determine, was that when a country becomes splintered into special-interest groups and there is no national unity behind the values of the country that a strongman,
or would-be strongman, would arise to take control, and that he, Sullivan, was very much afraid that this man was Donald Trump. It was a very dark, pessimistic piece.
Now, at the 100 Days mark of the Trump administration, Sullivan has written another piece that has to be parsed carefully. Its title is, “Maybe the American People Weren’t Crazy to Elect Trump.” He’s cheered by the fact that the courts, the Constitution, and Congress have so far managed to rein the President in. Our system has weathered the storm—so far. There is room for cautious optimism.
Here’s where it gets interesting: Sullivan’s view of what the Trump Presidency will accomplish is exactly the same as the NeverTrump conservative view, except that Sullivan, as a liberal, is happy about it. He points out, as we pointed out, that Hillary Clinton would be a weak, unpopular President, probably only lasting for one term. As George Will said when he left the Republican Party, “Grit your teeth, get through four years of a Clinton Presidency, and then elect someone decent.” But now we can’t do that. We’ve lost that chance.
Sullivan says:
All the right’s political power, we can now see, depended on being in permanent opposition, and never having to actually implement something. Their tax cuts for the very wealthy are tone-deaf; their resuscitation of the Laffer curve surreal. They’ve got nothing on health care but a return to the highly unpopular status quo ante. And they are caught between Trump’s desire to borrow even more to finance his tax cuts and the GOP’s resolute insistence throughout the Obama years that the debt was an existential threat. It’s quite amazing to watch this unfold and unravel in real time.
And here’s the thing: My suspicion is that if Clinton had become president, the fever would not have broken at all; it would have intensified. Her incompetence and indecision would have given the GOP even more political oxygen; a Republican House would have stymied her even more effectively than it did Obama; her unfavorables would have gone through the roof; and it could have been an ugly death spiral for the Democrats. (The latest polls showing considerable dissatisfaction with Trump nonetheless show that in a rematch, he would actually do better today against Clinton than he did last November.)
Instead, we have a manifest and brutal exposure of the stark promises Trump made, and of the incoherence and shallowness of so much of the Republican agenda. I still would never have risked putting this menacing clown into the Oval Office. But in the long run, if catastrophe doesn’t strike, it might even be better for the future health of our politics that Clinton is not president. Maybe the American people are not so crazy after all.
You can read the article by following the link below; be advised that only the first half is about the Trump administration and the second about Sullivan’s personal life as a gay man and can safely be skipped.
“Maybe America Wasn’t Crazy to Elect Donald Trump”