Ruy Teixeira is a well-known political analyst and a Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation and The Center for American Progress. He’s written a new book with the provocative title, The Optimistic Leftist: Why the 21st Century Will Be Better Than You Think. He summarized the argument for optimism in the face of the Trumpist debacle in a recent article in the Washington Post. While he notes that the current mood among progressives is unusually dark, he asserts that:
… fears that Trump will set back the left’s agenda dangerously and irreparably are not well founded. Core advances can’t be undone. Although Trump could do some real temporary damage, he and his movement will fade, and the values and priorities of the left will eventually triumph.
We can only hope that Teixeira is correct, but it’s possible to argue that the real threat that Trump represents is essentially normative and only secondarily on the level of policy. It is becoming increasingly apparent that his cabal’s approach to government threatens the nature of the civic discourse that we have more or less managed to maintain for over two centuries. Nor will that “real temporary damage” on the policy level necessarily be easy to reverse given that it is likely to represent the desires of the network of destructive rightwing interests currently, if perhaps loosely, allied with Trump, but not dependent on him.
Teixeira’s belief that “core advances can’t be undone” seems to me to rely on three basic assertions :
(1) There has been a steady evolution of public opinion into more progressive directions over the past decades, an evolution that he does not believe can be reversed and that is, in fact, amplified in younger Americans. In spite of the resurgence of overt racism in the era of Trump, the United States, Teixeira argues, has moved too far towards a more tolerant and accepting society to ever ultimately embrace wholesale the tribal Trumpian world-view.
(2) There are ingrained political procedural hurdles that will slow and even frustrate the Trump cabal’s efforts to destroy progressive programs and institutions. Entirely undoing well-established progressive programs would require legal and legislative actions that are not only influenced by public opinion that does not favor such change, but which are also sufficiently complex that they frustrate abrupt alteration of established programs, limiting the potential for damage to “nibbling around the edges.”
(3) The Trumpian agenda will be undone by its own incoherence and irreality. The lack of even a soupçon of reality behind the world view Trump has attempted to sell augurs,Teixeira seems to be saying, for his inevitable failure — the fate of the coal industry, for example, is subject to a wider range of economic forces than just the efforts of Trump and his fossil fuel buddies to rig the game for Big Coal. Consequently his promises to bring back high-paying coal mining jobs is just so much hot air that will dissipate leaving his Applachian supporters seriously disillusioned. In fact, the inherent contradictions presented by the Trump cabal’s helter-skelter efforts to articulate policy may actually, Teixeira asserts, only succeed in “blowing up one of the main roadblocks to better economic performance: the conservative Republican anti-government, quasi-libertarian consensus around economic policy.”
These arguments, though, presuppose a stable political world that obeys the established rules of an enlightened democracy. The real danger that Trump presents lies outside the lines between which Teixeira is busy coloring — which is not to say that it is without precedent. The most dangerous aspects of the Trump presidency reflect trends that have been manifesting themselves more and more prominently over the past twenty to thirty years.
— Has, as Teixeira asserts, racism and intolerance really receded sufficiently to thwart that aspect of Trump’s appeal? The resurgence of racism that has both helped create and which now informs the Trump presidency may represent a strain of American thought that is, as Teixeira believes, inevitably receding, but the fact that it has been more or less successfully, if covertly, exploited by Republican politicians over the past few decades, and has arguably brought new voters into the Trump Republican fold, suggests that the race card, as it is played by the right wing, will not go gently into that good night anytime soon.
— Can our civic institutions mitigate the potential damage that the Trump cabal will inflict on our social and economic environment? To answer this question stop and think about who stands with progressives against Trump’s excesses and lies at present: the courts and the media. Then think about the nomination of the radically conservative Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court — along with the fact that he may only be the first of several such lifetime appointments, not to mention appointments to federal circuit courts, etc. There go the courts.
As for the media, it is possible to argue that the work to undermine their credibility has already been done. Trump’s “alternative facts” are simply the most extreme expression of the world view promulgated by the right wing propaganda network that Republicans rely on to mute the voice of the opposition. First there was talk radio with its devoted audience of the angry, alienated and underinformed. Then came Fox News, extending the reach of the “big lie” into the mainstream — and now, Trump is bringing even more extreme rightwing propaganda outliers such as Beitbart and Newsmax into the information mainstream, while characterizing the two “newspapers of record” in the United States, The New York Times and The Washington Post, as purveyers of “fake news.” The effect is to undermines our ability as a country to establish a shared frame of reference based on verifiable fact. It is difficult to see how the damage will be undone no matter how much backbone some members of the mainstream media begin to manifest at this late date.
— Does the progressive direction of American public opinion really mean that we will successfully reject the excesses of Trump and those who seek to take advantage of his destruction of political norms to serve their special interests? Does post-Trump, public opinion really matter? When polled, majorities don’t support Republican — or Trumpian — policies. What’s going on? Gerrymandering. Voter suppression. Disinformation. Political apathy. In spite of widespread progressive anger at the direction taken by the Trump administration, the Republican majorities in congress seem to be more worried about angering the pro-Trump GOP base. The point: the control and manipulation of political structures can be used to render widespread progressive inclinations meaningless.
It’s also true that public opinion is malleable. We all know how presentational frames work — Think about “welfare queens.” Trump and his allies have their own propaganda outlets that saturate popular consciousness with these frames. And so far, Republicans seem to be better at painting policy in big, easy to understand word pictures. It doesn’t matter that the pictures are misleading and often play to our worst inclinations. Just remember Trump’s rally in Kentucky this weekend where the crowd waved placards proclaiming ”Promises made, promises kept,” in a place where nearly 500,000 people who were promised by Trump that they would have even better insurance stand to lose their health care coverage thanks to Trumpcare.
There are two other factors that feed progressive worries about Trump’s ability to alter our political, social and economic world in destructive ways:
— Conservative sugar-daddies: Citizens United isn’t going to go away anytime soon. The folks behind the scenes with the checkbooks don’t mind that the Trumpian persona is absurd as long as he’s good for their bottom line. And they’re apt to be here, working their green magic, long after Trump has gone.
— An opportunist Commander-in-Chief and the war machine: Trump can and seems likely to plunge us into some type of war, especially if things go seriously south for his administration. And then all bets could be off. We have a tradition of lying down and allowing wartime presidents to walk all over us, laying waste to the institutions that serve to insure that our government answers to us. Nor will we be able to count on a majority Republican congress to hold the line.
I don’t know if Teixeira will be proven right or wrong in the long run. I have my fingers crossed that he’s got it right. I do believe, however, that there is no such thing as a sure bet, and that many of the same factors that came together to bring us Trump are still operating and if we are to have the progressive renaissance Teixeira foresees, we will have engage all our energies. We have one hell of a fight ahead. D.R. Tucker sums up this point of view in a post on The Political Animal blog:
Enthusiasm and disappointment are the comedy and drama of life, and those who assume that 2018 and 2020 will be occasions for joy should take heed, as there are still plenty of opportunities for misery. The right-wing noise machine is still powerful. Hate is still a compelling force. The unyielding desire on the part of Trump’s base to punish perceived Outsiders, Enemies and Adversaries can still get those folks to the polls. The war against Trump’s wingnuttery is not over. Hell, it has barely begun…and despite how things might look now, progressives are still the underdogs–by a long shot–in this struggle.