Where We are in Political Time - The Post- Reagan Interregnum and Trump's Revolutionary Politics

JB

My 2020 book, The Cycles of Constitutional Time, was finished in late 2019 and I made minor adjustments in 2020, just as the pandemic was starting but before the 2020 election and the January 6th, 2021 coup attempt. It's only three and a half years ago but it seems like ages.

In Cycles I argued that the Reagan regime was ending and that a new regime would form in the next five to ten years, probably one with the Democrats as the dominant party, although there was a chance that Trump would form a new Republican regime organized around White Christian nationalism. What do things look like today?

The Post-Reagan Interregnum

The best way to summarize the situation is that the Reagan regime has ended but no new regime has yet formed. The United States is currently being offered the choice of two potential new regimes, one led by Joe Biden and the Democrats, and the other led by Donald Trump as leader of the MAGA Republicans. It is true that the Democrats won the 2020 presidential election, but Biden had only razor thin majorities in Congress, hardly the strong electoral victory that confirms that a new dominant coalition has formed and is in the drivers' seat.

We are thus in a tenuous interregnum and it is still an open question which kind of regime will successfully form. We won't know until several election cycles have passed, and it's possible that neither party will grow strong enough to form a new regime for a decade or more.  In Cycles, I predicted that we would have an answer in five or ten years, that is, by around 2030. But at present, that's not at all clear.

One might object that Democrats have demographic advantages, that they have won the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections, and that Republicans have only been able to win the Presidency through the Electoral College. But this overlooks the fact that a minority party can still leverage different features of the electoral system to dominate politics for a time. If the Republicans manage to form a new regime-- or more precisely, as central to forming such a regime-- they will continue to refashion elements of the political system so that they can stay in power whether or not they enjoy robust majority support. We should not confuse the dominant party in a regime with a party that represents the majority of the country, especially if the country slides toward some form of competitive authoritarianism. 

Nor do changing demographics prevent the formation of a dominant party that is Trumpist. In 2020, Trump showed that it was possible to make inroads with minority voters, especially in the two crucial states of Texas and Florida. For Republicans to dominate national politics going forward, they only need to gain a little more minority support, especially among Hispanic voters. 

In fact, we can expect that Republicans will run campaigns that emphasize that conservative Hispanic voters should make common cause with conservative working class white voters, especially on culture war issues and religion. And although this may confound liberal Democrats, one should expect that, over time, a significant share of Hispanic voters will consider themselves comfortably part of a White Christian nationalist coalition which emphasizes patriotism, Christianity, and reaction to the sexual revolution. Becoming part of a White Christian nationalist coalition will be a harder sell for many Black voters; even so, the number of socially and religiously conservative Black voters attracted to the Republican Party will likely increase over time, and the amount doesn't have to be all that large for Republicans to do well nationally.

Presidential leadership

Cycles built on Stephen Skowronek's typology of presidential leadership styles. In one possible future described in the book, Trump is a disjunctive president who presides over the dissolution of the older Reagan regime. Either Biden or a later Democratic president reconstructs American politics and a new regime forms. The other possibility described in the book was that Trump creates a new regime organized around White Christian Nationalism, deeply corrupt and authoritarian, with Trump as the reconstructive leader.

These two alternatives suggest that Trump is playing a dual role. He has brought the Reagan regime to a close, which makes him a disjunctive president in Skowronek's model. Yet Trump is now offering himself as a transformative president who seeks to reconstruct American politics in his image. If he wins a second term, he will have gone a very far distance toward succeeding. Thus he is both disjunctive in Skowronek's terms and (potentially) reconstructive. And from the standpoint of his party -- as opposed to the country as a whole -- Trump is almost certainly a reconstructive leader.

All this makes Trump very different from previous examples of disjunctive presidents. John Adams, John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, and Jimmy Carter did not remake their parties in their image either during their presidencies or especially after they were defeated in the polls. (Of this group, only John Quincy Adams had a later career as a distinguished member of the House of Representatives). In addition, unlike every previous disjunctive president, Trump is the leader of a mass movement that is deeply devoted to him. The standard portrait of disjunctive presidents is quite different. They are often mavericks, to be sure, but they do not lead social movements. And not to put too fine a point on it, John Adams was not the adored object of a cult of personality.

Many Republican elites still regard Ronald Reagan as the symbol of their party. But for an increasingly large part of the Republican base, Trump has displaced Reagan as the central symbol of the party and what it stands for. He has thoroughly recreated the party so that people are either loyal to him, or feel it necessary to ape his brand of grievance-based culture war politics. The party of Reagan has become the party of Trump, and his influence appears to be lasting even if he never gets a second term.

This difference is why we cannot treat Trump simply as a disjunctive president. He is like no previous disjunctive leader. He is currently bidding to become a reconstructive president and he has already completed one task we generally associate with such presidents, namely, transforming his party and its commitments of ideology and interest. For better and for worse, the Republican Party going forward is a rural working-class Trumpist party, even if Trump fades from the scene, and especially if he wins a second term. It is no accident that ambitious politicians like Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley have aligned themselves with Trumpism. They see it as the future of their party and their path to a future Republican presidential nomination. Perhaps if Trump is fully discredited, they will change their trajectory. But even if Trump is discredited, the Republican base will remain, and the base will expect Trump-like behavior from future presidential candidates.

We should understand Trump's coup attempt and his multiple indictments in this light. Trump's argument is that he is a political hero whom the Democrats are trying to squash by illicit and unlawful means so that they can (illegitimately) retain power. Of course he staged a coup, because his enemies stole the 2020 election. (In the alternative, the whole thing was a set-up and Trump is being unfairly persecuted.) And of course he's been subjected to multiple indictments and legal attacks, because that is how the globalist elites in the other party hope to sideline him so that they can cling to power.

For people outside his devoted followers, Trump's behavior makes him completely unelectable. But within his cult, the effect is precisely the opposite. The fact that Trump sits on the border of illegality is a feature, not a bug, in his claim to being a transformative, even revolutionary president. He is a revolutionary leader unlike any president who lost the presidency before him. His revolutionary bona fides are proven by the fact that he tried to stage a coup d'etat to stop a rigged election and by the fact that his political enemies are trying to eliminate him by any means necessary. His aura of illegality binds his followers to him, because they want to be part of the revolution too, and he, in turn, warns them that the forces coming after him are really coming after them. Outside his movement, this seems like self-serving spin and farcical nonsense. Within his movement, it feels like the truth.

In my next post, I'll discuss Biden's (very different) strategy for political reconstruction.