What if…

What if…

(Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images)

I love alternate history, so here’s a story for you. After flirting for a bit with the idea of running for president, Donald Trump decides to prove everyone in journalism right and not actually pull the trigger.

Ivanka persuades him it would be bad for the family brand, and Roger Ailes agrees to work with him on some kind of politics-themed media venture that will make a lot of money. The race appears to be shaping up as a coronation for Jeb Bush, though Marco Rubio is out there making the case for a more youth-oriented approach and Ted Cruz stands as an apostle of the true conservative faith. But then New Jersey governor Chris Christie starts making some interesting moves — he’s landing body blows from the right on the Florida Amnesty Boys while also making the case that it’s time for the party to stop losing elections over Social Security and Medicare.

“If Hillary Clinton takes office, it’s going to be the end of this country as we know it,” he says on the stump, “and these bozos I’m running against want to risk that by jeopardizing programs our seniors know and love.”

Christie’s combative style and lib-owning personality help him sell to the base that this is a commonsense approach and not a sign of weakness. Christie wants to run on tax cuts, backing the blue in the face of the rising Black Lives Matter movement, and no amnesty no-how while telling donors that they need to face facts about marriage equality and Social Security if they don’t want to see a third Democratic term in a row. He says he won twice in New Jersey, won the endorsements of lots of moderate Democratic mayors and building trade unions, and he knows how to deliver the blue-collar majority that will keep the country safe from thugs, illegals, and anarchists.

Conservative elites are mildly alarmed by this course of events, especially when Christie’s love of courting hard hat unions leads him into flirtations with protectionism and a denunciation of Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership. Paul Ryan wants to win in 2020 and privatize Medicare, not create viral videos of yelling at anti-police activists. But the Fox audience eats it up, and when Christie lights into Jeb and Rubio for promoting the failed policies that have us stuck in endless Middle Eastern wars, even some leftists start to say nice things about him.

President Christie

From there the story is straightforward. It’s actually pretty normal for a relatively moderate choice to win a GOP primary because the views of blue-state Republican voters have a lot of swaps in their delegate allocation.

The difference between Christie 2020 and Romney 2012 or McCain 2008 is that Christie did a much better job than those two of holding onto his moderate branding. He did meetings with key evangelical leaders and the NRA to clarify that he is 100% with them on judicial nominees and their other core priorities. But rather than running as “the establishment” choice, Christie runs as an anti-establishment moderate who wants to pull back from Koch-style politics. He tells business people that interest rates are low so he’ll cut taxes and there’s no need to yolk tax cuts to politically unpopular spending cuts. He’ll appoint business-friendly regulators. But there’s not going to be a Ryan-style Götterdämmerung where you eliminate the welfare state. That’s for losers.

In the end, he beats Clinton by a 51-45 margin with an unusually high number of third-party votes. Republicans gain in the House, and in contrast to our world, they also win the Senate races in New Hampshire and Nevada.

The first order of legislative business is to “repeal Obamacare,” but of course this turns out to be harder to accomplish as real legislation than as a slogan. Speaker Ryan initially wants a very dramatic bill that would upend the ACA root and branch while drastically cutting long-term Medicaid spending. But the White House, working with GOP senators from Medicaid expansion states, ultimately forces through a more modest plan. Republicans actually keep most of the ACA apparatus in place but eliminate the dreaded “mandate,” characterizing that as a repeal of the law along with eliminating many of the ACA revenue-raisers. A second bill cuts corporate taxes.

The midterms feature a noticeable backlash to Christie; as is happening elsewhere in the world, upscale, highly-educated districts are shifting left and many of Christie’s regulatory policies are unpopular, allowing Democrats to poach back some blue-collar districts as well. But the skew of the Senate map ensures it stays in Republican hands, and thanks to gerrymandering, a 3-point Democratic advantage in the House popular vote still generates a narrow Republican majority.

Alternate punditry

One big strand of commentary in this world is people dumping on Hillary Clinton for being a terrible candidate who lost despite Barack Obama still being popular.

Others say criticizing her is apologizing for misogyny, and others point out that Christie really only did a bit better than the fundamentals would suggest. The most noteworthy thing is that Clinton suffered a lot of defections to Jill Stein on her left — a symptom of Democratic Party agenda exhaustion after eight years in office.

But a lot of this is just transparent factional infighting.

Strategists and analysts who are really just interested in winning elections say there’s fundamentally nothing surprising about what happened here. Christie moved to the center on two very important economic policy issues, Social Security and Medicare, while keeping the donor base locked down with the promise of tax cuts. Similarly, on the religion-loaded issues, Christie negotiated a surrender on the once-hot marriage equality issue but sold evangelical leaders on the idea that he was their best chance to control the Supreme Court and reverse Roe v. Wade.

To the extent that anything about Christie’s politics defied expectations, it’s just that people were surprised you could win the nomination while running as a moderate. But Republican elites were in a pragmatic mood, and the base turned out to be very fired up by a rightward shift on immigration. That was a risky gambit on Christie’s part in the general election, but it worked for him because Democrats simultaneously shifted left on issues related to immigration enforcement and crime in general.

But how different is any of this?

Obviously, the punchline is that the “Chris Christie” in my story is not that different from Donald Trump in reality.

What we are talking about in either case is taking a recognizable form of Republican Party politics that is sporadically successful in the northeastern United States and taking it national. This is the politics of Rudy Giuliani and Paul LePage and Larry Hogan. It’s conservative on economics in the sense that people don’t like paying taxes, and dislike of taxes tends to make them skeptical of new programmatic spending. It’s “tough on crime” in a way that left-wing people deem racist. But fundamentally, it’s more about owning the libs and checking the excesses of progressive politics than it is about advancing its own constructive ideological program.

Now obviously Donald Trump is a wild, bizarre phenomenon. He’d say and do crazy things. He’s wildly corrupt. He lies in an unusual way, not using slippery or misleading rhetoric but just blatant up-is-down stuff out of a totalitarian nightmare.

But my basic hypothesis is that all of that was bad for him — it’s why Christie’s electoral performance is considerably better. Christie keeps his shit together. He doesn’t openly feud with co-partisans. He doesn’t embarrass people who agree with him.

Because he’s a bit less of a domineering figure, I think the Christie administration would have more intra-party ideological tensions. The Freedom Caucus would stick closer to its origins and complain that spending isn’t really being curtailed. Those kind of disagreements would create headaches for the White House, but also increase the salience of its relative policy moderation. I think the smart take would be that Christie was headed for reelection, but these tensions would be a big issue in the second term. Then of course Covid happens, and realistically everything hinges on how the administration handles that.

The point, though, is that I think the main macro-trends of Trump-era politics are explicable in fairly banal terms. Relative to aughts politics, what Trump did was abandon unpopular GOP positions on the key issues of entitlement spending and gay rights and retrenching to some less sweeping conservative views on work requirements and transgender issues. In an abstract game-theoretical sense, Democrats could have countered that by moving to the center. But instead, they themselves moved to the left. And given those macro strategic choices, Democrats have actually done amazingly well — they’ve recruited good candidates, and Trump is an unpopular nutjob.

O’Malley would’ve won

Of course Republicans didn’t nominate my Alt-Christie; they nominated Donald Trump, a man with some good political instincts but also some very serious weaknesses — weaknesses so severe that Clinton beat him in the popular vote and nearly beat him in the Electoral College.

But she lost, and I think the peculiar toxic dynamics of the 2016 Democratic primary created a rip in the space-time continuum that we are still living with to this day. Sanders ran against Clinton from the left, and Clinton beat him thanks in no small part to the loyalty of Black voters. Something we have seen in many subsequent primaries is that African American Democrats are generally more moderate than white Democrats, so it’s hardly shocking that they would back Clinton. But Clinton’s campaign actually seemed a little confused as to why they were winning Black votes and thought it made sense to incorporate formerly obscure left-wing academic ideas into her public campaign

Before Clinton, nobody in Democratic Party politics would have ever thought it made sense to tweet about intersectionality or deliver speeches on “systemic racism.”

But at the same time, before Sanders, nobody in Democratic Party politics would have ever thought that the alternative to that style of politics was socialism and running around saying that you don’t want to make the country like Venezuela, you actually mean Sweden.

The alternative was just normie politics full of banal patriotism, homages to the progress made in the past, and discussion of policy specifics. I used to do joke tweets about how “Martin O’Malley would’ve won” and I even have an “O’Malley Would’ve Won” t-shirt. But I think that alternative history is true. If somehow Clinton and Sanders hadn’t entered the field and we’d had O’Malley against Elizabeth Warren, then he’d have beaten her (because most Democrats aren’t that left-wing), and then he’d have beaten Trump (because Trump is crazy). There would still be protests against police brutality and people making fun of left-wing academics, but nobody in workaday practical politics would think that incorporating exotic academic ideas into routine political rhetoric is the right way to address concerns about police misconduct.

Back to reality

Of course, we are in the real world.

But while I’m reliably told that academic historians think counterfactual history is nonsense, what they teach you in philosophy classes is that counterfactual reasoning is critical to doing any kind of causal analysis.

And I think that basically, Trump is such a weirdo and his rise to power was so unexpected that it’s tended to obscure some pretty banal points about politics and gotten a lot of people lost in the fog of speculations about “Trumpism without Trump.”

The counterfactual is helpful because it lets us see that the “lol nothing matters” interpretations of recent politics are probably wrong. Positioning and salience on policy matter a lot. Trump successfully defanged Democrats’ best issue for winning over cross-pressured moderate voters by moving to the center on Social Security and Medicare. And while I think that analysis has a pretty clear upshot (Democrats should moderate on cultural issues), it’s also just an objectively hard problem.

Labour would have an easier time winning in the U.K. if the Tories would give speeches about how the NHS should be completely dismantled and replaced with a free-market health care system. But they don’t do that, even though the right-of-center U.K. policy elites are surely familiar with the same works that undergird American conservatives’ thinking. They exert discipline, and that’s that.

Far and away the most effective thing for Democrats to do would be to hypnotize Kevin McCarthy and get him to wage the 2022 midterms on a detailed plan to balance the budget through spending cuts. Barack Obama was a very skillful politician, but he was also lucky to face off against Paul Ryan. Unless and until Republicans revert to pushing the right’s most unpopular ideas, Democrats are just going to be in a tough situation.