Daniel McCarthy

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.

As Donald Trump marches to the Republican nomination a third time, Americans are divided into two radically opposed camps. On one side are Trump supporters who believe Democrats stole the 2020 election. On the other are Trump detractors — Democrats and homeless NeverTrumpers — who say that denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election amounts to a desire to overthrow democracy itself. The country is not on the brink of a civil war, and deep partisan divisions are nothing new. But reality itself is contested today in a way that goes beyond anything in earlier US history. The split over the 2020 election is one intensely political manifestation of a wider rift.

A few years ago a Marine turned novelist, G. Michael Hopf, captured a classic truth in a pithy formula. Inspired by cyclical theories of history — in particular the generational “turnings” of William Strauss and Neil Howe — Hopf wrote in his novel Those Who Remain, “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” One need not put much stock in Strauss and Howe to appreciate the maxim. It could just as well be derived from Sallust or other classical sources. Or from Machiavelli: in his Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy, the Florentine philosopher considers where best to build a city.

The 2024 election will be a referendum on Joe Biden, but it’s also a referendum on a regime. This is how both sides see it. Liberal democracy itself is at stake according to progressives. For Trump supporters, the question at issue is legitimacy of the Deep State. These are different names for the same thing: a leadership caste and its ideology of government. In practice, liberal democracy means a democracy in which liberals never lose power.