The Seven Broken Guardrails of Democracy

Here’s the part of the 2016 story that will be hardest to explain after it’s all over: Trump did not deceive anyone. Unlike, say, Sarah Palin in 2008, Trump appeared before the electorate in his own clothes, speaking his own words. When he issued a promise, he instantly contradicted it. If you chose to accept the promise anyway, you did so with abundant notice of its worthlessness. For all the times Trump said believe me and trust me in his salesman patter, he communicated constantly and in every medium that there was only thing you could believe and trust: If you voted for Donald Trump, you’d get Donald Trump, in all his Trumpery and Trumpiness.

The television networks that promoted Trump; the primary voters who elevated him; the politicians who eventually surrendered to him; the intellectuals who argued for him, and the donors who, however grudgingly, wrote checks to him—all of them knew, by the time they made their decisions, that Trump lied all the time, about everything. They knew that Trump was ignorant, and coarse, and boastful, and cruel. They knew he habitually sympathized with dictators and kleptocrats—and that his instinct when confronted with criticism of himself was to attack, vilify, and suppress. They knew his disrespect for women, the disabled, and ethnic and religious minorities. They knew that he wished to unravel NATO and other U.S.-led alliances, and that he speculated aloud about partial default on American financial obligations. None of that dissuaded or deterred them.

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Whatever the outcome in November, conservatives and Republicans will have brought a catastrophe upon themselves, in violation of their own stated principles and best judgment.

The first guardrail to go missing was the old set of expectations about how a candidate for president of the United States should speak and act.
From the founding of the republic, Americans have looked to qualities of personal restraint as one of the first checks on the power of office. “The aim of every political Constitution is or ought to be first to obtain for rulers, men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous, whilst they continue to hold their public trust.” So argued James Madison in Federalist 57.
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President Nixon said in his 1969 eulogy of former President Eisenhower, “He exemplified what millions of parents hoped that their sons would be: strong and courageous and honest and compassionate. And with his own great qualities of heart, he personified the best in America.” Donald Trump, by contrast, former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney lamented, exemplifies what millions of parents would fear in their sons: “the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics.”
The second broken guardrail is the expectation of some measure of trustworthiness in politicians.
The dark arts of politics include dissimulation, evasion, and misdirection. […] Outright lying, however, happens more rarely than you think in politics, especially in high and visible offices like the presidency. Political scientists estimate that presidents keep about three-quarters of their campaign promises. When presidents break their word, the reason is far more likely to be congressional opposition than the president’s own flip-flopping.
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Donald Trump’s dishonesty, however, is qualitatively different than anything before seen from a major-party nominee. The stack of lies teeters so tall that one obscures another […] Trump’s lies weren’t overlooked—and they weren’t believed. They were condoned by Republicans who had come to believe, “everybody does it.” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough spoke for many:
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“Conservatives that have been betrayed by the Washington establishment for 30 years, by Republican candidates that run for office saying they’re going to balance the budget and lie. Republican candidates that run and say they’re going to overturn Obamacare and lie. Republican candidates who say vote for me and I’m going to have a humble foreign policy and lie.”
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But Scarborough’s list of betrayals weren’t “lies.” They were failures, failures made inevitable by the impossibility of the Republican base’s own demands. (How do you balance the budget while cutting taxes, without touching either defense or Medicare?) As one unfriendly critic noted, the Republican rank-and-file weren’t exactly innocent victims of elite deception.
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Cynicism leads to acceptance of the previously unacceptable.
A third broken guardrail is the expectation that a potential president should possess deep—or at least adequate—knowledge of public affairs.
It’s a fair generalization that Republicans demand less policy expertise from their national leaders than Democrats have usually expected from theirs. […] What’s different now is the massive Republican and conservative rejection of the idea that a candidate for president should know anything substantive about governing at all.
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Government is a complex science and a sophisticated art. Its details matter, its trade-offs reverberate into four and five dimensions. Although Republican voters in the aggregate are better informed than Democratic voters in the aggregate, their votes are guided by two more urgent and immediate feelings: bleak pessimism (79 percent of Republicans say they are on the “losing side” of most political debates, versus 52 percent of Democrats) and unyielding refusal to compromise with opponents (while 63 percent of Democrats favor a president who’ll compromise with the other party, only 35 percent of Republicans do so). Despairing yet obdurate, Republicans have come to value willpower over intellect, combativeness over expertise.
One guardrail that Trump’s opponents all assumed would hold fast was the fourth: the guardrail of ideology. Hardline conservatives would surely reject a candidate who barely understood what a principle was! Anti-compromise Republicans would certainly recoil from a candidate who advertised himself as a deal-maker! Wrong and wrong.
As Ross Douthat of The New York Times nicely phrased it, “A party whose leading factions often seemed incapable of budging from 1980s-era dogma suddenly caved completely to a candidate who regards much of the conservative vision with indifference bordering on contempt.”
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The ideology guardrail snapped because so much of the ideology itself had long since ceased to be relevant to the lives of so many Republican primary voters. Instead of a political program, conservatism had become an individual identity. What this meant, for politicians, was that the measure of your “conservatism” stopped being the measures you passed in office—and became much more a matter of style, affect, and manner.
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The party’s once mighty social conservatives collapsed like sodden newsprint before a candidate who treated them with flagrant disrespect.
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Trump may not be much of a conservative by conviction. But he functions as a conservative in silhouette, defined by the animosity of all the groups that revile him.
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As conservatism’s positive program has fallen ever more badly out of date, as it has delivered ever fewer benefits to its supporters and constituents, those supporters have increasingly defined their conservatism not by their beliefs, but by their adversaries.
Donald Trump would have been hemmed in a generation ago by a fifth guardrail: the primacy of national security concerns.
Trump’s foreign policy is predicated upon an apocalyptic vision of the United States as a weak and fading country, no longer able to shoulder the costs and burdens of world leadership. That view aligns with the deeply pessimistic mood of today’s Republican voters.
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Trump’s foreign-policy statements are so careless and so seemingly poorly considered that it’s tempting to dismiss them. If he did become president, wouldn’t he be surrounded by steadier hands, who would draw him back toward the historic norms of American policy? Perhaps. But also very likely … not. Trump’s ramshackle statements do present a coherent point of view. His instinct is always to abandon friends and allies, to smash up alliances that have kept the peace, to leave the world to fend for itself against aggressors and predators.
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Republicans still care that their candidate be “strong.” They thrill to Trump’s rhetoric of massive violence against ISIS. What they seem no longer to care about is the larger architecture of security built since 1941 to keep America and its friends safe, prosperous, and free.
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Despairing and demoralized, they lack the “energy and conviction”—in the phrase of the French Cold War writer Jean-Francois Revel—to sustain American leadership or to defend American interests in the larger world. The guardrail of conservative commitment to U.S. global leadership has smashed, ripping open a danger to the world, and a sinister opportunity to global mischief-makers.
A deep belief in tolerance and non-discrimination for Americans of all faiths, creeds, and origins also once functioned as a guardrail against destructive politics.
Trump has appealed to white identity more explicitly than any national political figure since George Wallace. But whereas Wallace was marginalized first within the Democratic Party, and then within national politics, Trump has increasingly been accommodated. Yes, Trump was often fiercely denounced by rivals and insiders in the earlier part of the campaign. But since effectively securing the nomination by winning the Indiana primary on May 3, that criticism has quieted—when it has not ceased altogether. One-time Trump opponents like former Bush White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer now dismiss criticism of Trump’s slurs and insults as “a Northeastern look down your nose at other people who are different …. That [criticism] is disdain for the voters.”
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…increases in ethnic diversity lead to collapses in civic health. Trust among neighbors declines, as does voting, charitable giving, and volunteering.
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As community cohesion weakens, moral norms change. What would have been unacceptable behavior in a more homogeneous national community becomes tolerable when a formerly ascendant group sees itself at risk from aggressive new claims by new competitors. Trump is running not to be president of all Americans, but to be the clan leader of white Americans. Those white Americans who respond to his message hear his abusive comments, not as evidence of his unfitness for office, but as proof of his commitment to their tribe.
A strong—arguably unprecedentedly strong—loyalty to the nation as a whole.
In a way unknown before, and unfamiliar since, the veterans of World War II routinely voted one way for presidents and governors, and the opposite way for members of Congress or state legislatures. Democrats won majorities of both houses of Congress in nearly every election from 1954 through 1992, with Republicans only holding the Senate for a brief stretch from 1981 to 1987. Yet voters delivered pendulum-swing-style landslide presidential victories, sometimes to Democrats (1964), sometimes to Republicans (1972, 1984).
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In 1972, more than 37 million Americans cast a vote for a Democratic member of the House of Representatives: something over 52 percent of all House votes cast. Only about 29 million Americans voted for Democrat George McGovern for president that year. Ticket splitting in 1984 was only a little less dramatic: House Democrats won a combined 4.25 million more votes than House Republicans, even as Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale by some 17 million votes.
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Partisan identities have hardened since then. “Today, far larger proportions of Democratic and Republican voters hold strongly negative views of the opposing party than in the past,” observe Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster in their paper, “All Politics is National: The Rise of Negative Partisanship.” Negative partisanship is the argument deployed to reconcile anti-Trump Republicans to their party’s nominee.
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Once you’ve convinced yourself that a president of the other party is the very worst possible thing that could befall America, then any nominee of your party—literally no matter who—becomes a lesser evil. And with that, the last of the guardrails is smashed.
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Many conservatives and Republicans recognize Trump as a disaster for their institutions and their ideals. Yet they have found it impossible to protect things they hold dear—in large part because they have continued to fix all blame outward and elsewhere.
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Policy, however, is not the first or second or third impetus of the Trump campaign. It’s driven by something else—and the source of that something is found inside the conservative and Republican world, not outside. The Trump phenomenon is the effect of many causes. Yet overhanging all the causes is the central question: Why did Republicans and conservatives react to those causes as they did? There were alternatives. Of all the alternatives for their post-Obama future, Republicans and conservatives selected the most self-destructive of the options before them. Why? What went wrong? That will be the excruciating mystery to ponder during the long and difficult work of reconstruction ahead.