Is Donald Trump the Next Jimmy Carter? The New Republic / by Scott Lemieux

Is Donald Trump the Next Jimmy Carter?
The New Republic / by Scott Lemieux / 6h
Is Donald Trump the Next Jimmy Carter? | The New Republic
This is not to say that it will be all smooth sailing. Having a buffoon in the Oval Office without any expertise or long-standing policy commitments will make it harder to prevail in the most important battle of the next year, over the future of the Affordable Care Act. There will be times when Republicans overreach and fail. But unlike the Democratic Congress under Carter, they know what they want to do and will do a lot of it. A lot more of an ideological agenda will be accomplished by this Congress than under a typical disjunctive presidency, which tends to entail broadly popular compromises or stasis.

Another flaw in slotting Trump as a disjunctive president is that it implies that we’re still in the Reagan regime and that Barack Obama was a preemptive president. Azari doesn’t directly address the issue at much length. But the political scientist Corey Robin, in his intriguing piece in n+1 making the Carter-Trump connection, argues that “we are now reaching the end of the fourth decade of the Reagan regime,” asserting that Obama is a preemptive president, like Bill Clinton.

The problem here is that the “preemptive” label just doesn’t fit the facts. Obama’s signature domestic achievements—increasing taxes on the wealthy to pay for benefits for the poor and middle class, substantially expanding both regulation and public expenditure through the Affordable Care Act, enacting wide-ranging stimulus through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and tightening regulation of the financial industry through the Dodd-Frank Act—are all ambitious statutes, squarely within the New Deal/Great Society tradition.

While 20 years ago Democrats would have reacted to electoral defeat by moving to the right, most signs indicate that the party will continue to move left.
There are strong arguments that all of these laws were compromised by the need to win support of unsavory vested interests and/or Republican senators, and didn’t go far enough. But, of course, the same was true of the New Deal. Particularly when you also consider Obama’s aggressive use of the regulatory state on issues such as the environment, labor rights, and immigration, his governing posture was very different from Clinton’s embrace of the dictum that the “era of big government is over.”

Typically, the minority party facing a dominant regime moves towards this regime. But if this is still Reagan’s regime, the opposite has been happening with the Democratic Party. Obama campaigned to the left of Hillary Clinton in 2008. Clinton campaigned to the left of Obama in 2016 (and far to the left of her husband’s actually preemptive 1992 and 1996 campaigns). While 20 years ago Democrats would have reacted to electoral defeat by moving to the right, most signs indicate that the party will continue to move left.

Obama was neither a preemptive president nor a reconstructive one. Instead, we are in a political space in which there is no dominant regime. Two ideologically coherent parties—one increasingly committed to expanding the New Deal and the Great Society, one to inflict the crushing blows to it Reagan and Bush couldn’t—are becoming increasingly polarized. The same factors that are almost certain to cause the Supreme Court to lurch dramatically to the left or right when the median vote changes hands will also mean that narrowly decided elections will carry increasingly large consequences if there is unified government and hopeless gridlock when there isn’t.

And it’s likely that this post-regime politics will persist for a while. The Democrats, having won the popular vote in six of the last seven elections, have a viable electoral coalition. Despite nominating an unpopular candidate facing unique headwinds, the party won three million more votes for its most progressive program in decades. Meanwhile, while it’s a minority coalition nationally, Republicans will remain competitive because of the federal system and skewed apportionment in both houses of Congress. The Democratic Party may well be able to defeat Trump after one term and even stop important parts of the Ryan-McConnell agenda—but even if they do, their opponents aren’t going anywhere. The 21st century figures to be characterized by intense polarization, not by the rise and fall of dominant regimes.

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