Daniel McCarthy

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.

Pat Buchanan recently ended his syndicated column, essentially completing his retirement from public life. Yet it’s hard to think of any writer in his or her prime today whose ideas enjoy the currency that Buchanan’s now do. From trade and foreign policy to immigration and the “culture war” — a term that Buchanan introduced into popular politics — views that once set Buchanan apart from his fellow conservatives are now redefining the right. Buchanan was not the only conservative skeptic of free trade or foreign interventionism in the 1990s, but he was the only one that most newspaper-reading or cable news-watching voters knew about. At the zenith of American power and economic globalization, Buchanan defined the opposition to the spirit of the age.

Cassandra was a Trojan princess with the gift of prophecy — or the curse. For while she could foresee the downfall of her city, she could not make anyone believe her. She wound up enslaved to the conquering Greek Agamemnon, but he too disregarded her warnings and met his own grisly fate when he returned home to find his queen and her lover prepared to kill him. America’s Cassandra was a Frenchman. His fate has been less cruel but more ironic. Alexis de Tocqueville and his family survived the French Revolution, for aristocrats like them an event nearly as calamitous as the sack of Troy. Like Cassandra, Tocqueville could see into the future, in his case through acute reason rather than supernatural gift.

For the last thirty years, the Republican Party has been a battleground between two competing ideologies. One of these is fundamentally liberal, although it is packaged and sold under a variety of brand names: “compassionate conservatism,” neoconservatism, classical liberalism, and — most misleadingly — Reagan conservatism. The other ideology is a rejection of modern liberalism and the post-Cold War elite consensus in American politics. It is skeptical of free trade, large-scale immigration and US involvement in foreign conflicts. Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump are the primary representatives of this view, which is often called populist or nationalist. The two sides are not evenly matched.

A famous passage in the preface to Lionel Trilling’s book The Liberal Imagination is widely quoted and just as widely misunderstood. Trilling, a Columbia University professor and literary critic, wrote that at the time — this was 1950 — that there was no articulate conservative or reactionary thought in America, only conservative or reactionary “impulses” expressed “in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Trilling’s point was not to criticize conservatism but to set up an argument for his work as a literary critic. Liberals, Trilling argued, needed to be challenged; they had grown complacent in the absence of a vigorous conservatism to spotlight liberalism’s deficiencies.

What’s left of the Bush-Cheney wing of the Republican Party doesn’t like Ron DeSantis. But it’s eager to see him run for president anyway. For if DeSantis challenges Trump for the 2024 GOP nomination, the old establishment stands to gain no matter who ultimately gets the nod. The Florida governor certainly seems to be ideologically closer to Trump-style populism than to the neoconservatism that prevailed among elite Republicans from the end of the Reagan era to the defeat of Mitt Romney in 2012. Why, then, would those who pine for the likes of Bush and Romney want to see a choice between Trump and DeSantis, both right-wing populists, two years from now?

Liberalism is dying, and the American right is ascendant. That’s the lesson of the last six or eight years of national politics. Barack Obama should have been the beginning of a generational renewal for the Democratic Party. Instead the Democrats have been prisoners of their past. They looked backward in 2016 and nominated Hillary Clinton. After she failed, they reached even further back to nominate Joe Biden, a man born during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. Biden is not simply old; he’s nostalgia personified. He’s a throwback to a time when Democrats were less radical, when the party of FDR and JFK, and even of Bill Clinton, could lay claim to being an everyman’s party.

Sometime this century, or early in the next, women will no longer have to give birth. Already conception can take place within a test tube, and incubators have pushed back the earliest time when prematurely born infants can survive outside of the womb. We can edit genes and modify animal organs for successful implantation into human beings. We can grow meat from cell cultures, and we can clone vertebrates. For all the talk one hears about a dearth of innovation, the pace of biotechnological innovation has only accelerated since the end of the twentieth century. It will not soon stop. Artificial wombs are a feature of science fiction dating back to Huxley’s Brave New World and no doubt sometime earlier.