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The Real Danger in 2016

The real danger this year is that Clinton will mistake a landslide victory for a "mandate" to do whatever she wants.
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Noah Millman points us to Andrew Sullivan’s essay on Trump and democracy. Sullivan says this of Trump:

In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event.

Whatever else Trump may be, he doesn’t threaten our political system with extinction. For one thing, this gives Trump far too much credit, and underestimates how much resistance he would encounter. Sullivan says that “the defenses against him would be weak” if he became president, but that seems obviously wrong. In the unlikely event that he is somehow elected in the fall, he would be stuck with a splintered GOP (a large portion of which openly hates him), probably at least one chamber controlled by the other party, and an intensely hostile media. He wouldn’t be able to do much, and what he did do would come under close scrutiny. One of the ongoing and worsening problems in our politics is that the president is rarely checked by any of our other institutions, but if we had a president that inspired no loyalty or deference from most Americans that might start to change. Most presidents can count on reliable support from their own partisans, but a President Trump would have poisoned relations with much of the Congressional GOP from day one. I assume Trump would govern badly, or at least ineffectively, and would be voted out after one term. In that sense, Trump’s election might even have a salutary effect on our politics in that it would remind more Americans that we shouldn’t cede so much power to any one person or branch of the government. But we’re not going to find out, because a Trump victory in the fall is extremely unlikely.

I’ve been pointing out recently that the #NeverTrump faction doesn’t have that much support inside the GOP, which is why Trump will likely secure the nomination outright before the convention, but it’s also why he can’t win the general election. Assuming that they are serious about refusing to support him (and I think most are), that means that at least a quarter of the normal Republican coalition won’t cast a vote for their party’s nominee in November. Given that the Republican coalition cobbled together just 47% in the last election, it can’t afford to lose any Romney voters, much less a quarter of them. Many anti-Trump Republicans may still show up to vote in other elections, but many will probably just stay home. Some may bring themselves to vote for Clinton, but I suspect that is a bridge too far for many anti-Trump Republicans that are rejecting Trump ideological and/or ethical reasons. A few may end up being driven back to supporting Trump when they remember how much they loathe Clinton, but not enough to matter.

The danger in all this is not what Trump represents, but that Clinton will misinterpret her likely landslide victory for a “mandate” to do whatever she wants. Politicians are often inclined to believe wrongly that a large win gives them a “mandate” to push through their agenda, and the larger the win the more likely they are to overreach. The problem this year is that the “Respectables” Sullivan refers to aren’t really going to get their comeuppance they deserve, but will end up getting the president they want, and that will make them think that nothing important has to change.

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