Daniel McCarthy

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.

In presidential elections there’s no such thing as a Pyrrhic victory. Winning is everything — and neither party would ever openly admit there could be advantages to losing. Yet the outcome of the 2020 election wasn’t entirely unlucky for the Republican Party or even Donald Trump himself. And as both parties look to next year’s contest, far-sighted strategists can see a bigger picture beyond Trump and Biden. Whoever won in 2020 was going to face the ugly but necessary task of withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan, where twenty years of nation-building had failed to establish a free state that could resist the Taliban. Trump might have executed the withdrawal more successfully than Biden. But if he had, would the media have covered him more favorably? Of course not.

The Republican Party has to come to grips with populism. Donald Trump’s commanding lead in the race for the 2024 presidential nomination makes that clear, as does the fact that the next-most popular candidate, Ron DeSantis, also has a populist streak. In fact, the GOP’s base has subscribed to one flavor of populism or another since at least as far back as the start of the Cold War. In the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-hunting had a pronounced class dimension — elite officials in “striped pants” were a frequent target. By the end of the 1960s, Richard Nixon was appealing to the “silent majority” against a radical campus counterculture. The Moral Majority and other religious right groups of the 1980s and 1990s exhibited a form of Christian populism.

"Negative partisanship” is a notorious feature of American politics. In presidential elections especially, voters don’t vote for the party and candidate they like; they vote against the party and candidate they fear. This is one reason third-party politics is a waste of time. If voters want to prevent the worst outcome, they will always choose the most viable alternative over the best alternative. For Joe Biden in 2020, it was enough that he wasn’t Donald Trump. For Trump in 2016, it was enough that he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Next year, we’ll find out whether the voting public now views Biden as more like Clinton or still considers him better than Trump.

Maybe Niccolò Machiavelli was not the first political consultant, but he remains one of the best. Ron DeSantis might solicit his advice before deciding whether a 2024 campaign for the White House is wise. DeSantis could start with the penultimate chapter of The Prince, “What Fortune can do in human affairs, and how it can be resisted,” which is famous for its imagery. Machiavelli first likens fortune to a raging river, whose flood cannot be met head on but whose fury can be dissipated by dams and dykes built in advance. Later he says Fortune is a woman who yields to a young man who comes on strong, even roughly. The lesson for a forty-four-year-old DeSantis is obvious: seize the moment. She’s yours for the taking — if you’re bold.