Daniel McCarthy

To understand what’s wrong with the American left and the Democratic party – two different but entwined things, to be sure – look to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Look also to the work of the historian Sean McMeekin, including his latest book, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. Earlier this spring I emceed an event in McMeekin’s honor, as he received the award for “Conservative Book of the Year” from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. It gave me the opportunity to chat with him about Lenin’s doctrine of “revolutionary defeatism” and much else, including the fairy tale the West tells itself about how communism ended.

Donald Trump is the world’s largest landlord — not in his own capacity, perhaps, but in his role as leader of the most powerful nation on earth. He’s the CEO of America, and his development corporation owns the Western hemisphere. It also owns property in Europe, where the tenants are troublesome and are always behind on their rent. There are just a few other landlords on the planet, notably Vladimir Putin, who isn’t a rival, and Xi Jinping, who is. This might sound like a perspective on world politics for someone who rose to prominence in the cutthroat environs of New York real estate. Yet the truth is that government is always about who’s the landlord and who’s the tenant.

Weeks into his second term, it’s clear President Trump intends to be the most transformative force our politics has seen in a century. He seems equally determined to change the course of the world — and perhaps its map, too. Trump’s enemies can blame themselves for making this possible. They showed him that impeachment is nothing to fear: securing conviction in the Senate is nigh impossible and whatever damage impeachment might do to a president’s reputation has already been inflicted on Trump. Two impeachments and a welter of post-presidential criminal prosecutions and even convictions failed to stain Trump in voters’ eyes. On the contrary, they left him more popular than ever and discredited the institutions his opponents employed as weapons of their “lawfare.

Donald Trump didn’t just win an election last year, he performed an exorcism. He cast out spirits that have directed Western politics for a generation, not least the ghosts of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Those particular left-liberal leaders haven’t been in power for many years, of course. But the style of politics they pioneered on both sides of the Atlantic didn’t end with their terms as president or prime minister. The world before Trump was still very much the world that Clinton and Blair had made. For decades Republicans and Conservatives found themselves having to accept the terms of what might be called the Clinton Blair settlement.

Donald Trump’s triumphal return to the White House is the end of more than just the Joe Biden era. Since Bill Clinton’s presidency, Democrats had adhered to a formula they thought unbeatable: They would be socially progressive, economically centrist and staunchly internationalist. Republicans, they thought, had staked their future on demographics that were in decline — whites and the most conservative Christians. Democrats were the party of twenty-first-century America, an ethnically diverse and more secular, or at least religiously liberal, land. What went wrong? When Trump won in 2016, Democrats dismissed it as a fluke.

One sign of moral panic is that when the facts change, the fears remain the same. In the 1970s, the Washington Post, TIME and Newsweek stoked fears of “a new ice age.” As soon as scientists updated their models to show a trend in the other direction, “global warming” became as threatening as global cooling. And when winters stubbornly kept happening and the direst predictions of new-age prophets like Al Gore failed to come to pass, the whole thing was rebranded as “climate change.” Whatever the label, and whatever the underlying phenomenon was thought to be, the moral implication remained the same — human beings were ruining the earth and must curtail their comforts to save the planet. Bad weather used to be God’s punishment for human sinfulness.

Hillary Clinton has a simple but bitter lesson to teach Donald Trump’s supporters in 2024: the best way to lose an election is to assume you’ve already won it a week before it happens.  ​The MAGA movement ­– aiming to Make America Great Again, namely by Making Trump President Again – has never been more confident. Opinion polls have Trump faring much better against Kamala Harris than he ever did against Clinton in 2016 or Joe Biden in 2020. Indeed, the polling averages actually place Trump ahead, which wasn’t the case at this point in either of his earlier elections.  And since the polls underestimated his share of vote the last two times, maybe they’re underestimating him again – in which case Trump will not only win re-election, he’ll win handily.

Niall Ferguson is far from the first intellectual to compare the United States today to the Soviet Union of old. But Ferguson’s Free Press essay “We’re All Soviets Now” stirred up more discussion, and outrage, than earlier forays by others on the same theme. (Ferguson himself credits the Princeton professor Harold James with originating the phrase “Late Soviet America.”) Joe Biden already seemed like America’s analogue to the superannuated Soviet premiers of the 1980s even before his disastrous June 27 debate with Donald Trump — who is himself older in 2024 than Brezhnev, Andropov or Chernenko were when they died.