The Thinking Man's Majority

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Be ready for what the next year is going to throw at us.

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What If Trump Succeeds by Failing?

Speaking of the next year, I was asked once again by Discourse to provide my prediction for next year, so I reiterated my comments about the most annoying way this all ends:

But what if it all just doesn’t happen? What if [Trump] files lawsuits [against his critics] that get thrown out and then drops the whole thing? What if he stages a few deportations for show, but under pressure from businesses that rely on immigrant labor, he lets most of them stay?

Remember the border wall in his first term: He did just enough to create a few photo ops and claim victory, but then quietly abandoned the project.

In reading the rest of this roundup from Discourse’s other writers, I was struck by how conservative the publication has become—but also how much self-delusion is required for the more old-fashioned, pro-free-market type of conservative to find a bright side in Trump’s return to office. More than one of these contributions, for example, predicts that the US economy will improve in the next year because Trump will pursue an agenda of deregulation—but they don’t even mention Trump’s central campaign promises, which are highly regulatory: tariffs and mass deportations. Both of those are likely to be very bad for the economy, and everybody knows this. So it’s striking to see them all just ignore it.

They have also very credulously bought into Elon Musk’s reputation. If you’ve followed Musk for long before this, you know that he has a tendency to make broad and highly confident predictions—about full self-driving, about landing people on Mars, about Hyperloop—that never come to fruition. Yet his reputation in the media somehow continues undiminished. Similarly, Musk’s confident predictions about his so-called Department of Government Efficiency are likely to be undercut by constitutional limitations and by his own general ignorance of how government functions.

But notice why Musk’s reputation survives repeated failures of his big promises. It’s partly because his companies do deliver on some things, such as reusable rockets. But it’s also because people don’t really care whether Musk actually puts a million people on Mars. They want him to perform a role: the inspiring “visionary genius” with big plans. So it doesn’t matter all that much whether the plans are realistic. In fact, the less realistic, the more audacious—and hence the better they serve their purely literary function.

Similarly, it’s possible that a lot of Trump’s agenda will dissipate in practice. And the thing I add in these comments is that maybe his supporters won’t care.

Perhaps this is what his voters really want: They want to cheer on Trump as he makes the “elites” angry—but they’re not all that concerned with whether he achieves actual results.

Like Musk, Trump is here to perform a role: the outrageous “outsider” who makes “the establishment” angry and afraid. So long as he performs that role, they will be satisfied. And if I’m right, they will be even more satisfied if he fails at his core agenda, because then Trump won’t have to take responsibility for its disastrous effects.

In effect, Trump can succeed in his second term by failing.

Mine is a relatively optimistic take on this, in which Trump doesn’t get to do any of the good things he may want to do (for example, the deregulation or the budget-cutting) but also doesn’t get to do the bad things. At the New York Times, Frank Bruni raises a darker possibility: Trump implements destructive policies which have destructive effects—but people don’t care, because everyone is so stuck in subjective media bubbles that the reality of a tariff-driven recession is drowned in a sea of partisan propaganda.

I don’t think that’s likely. I think the most likely non-optimistic scenario is this: Trump balks at imposing mass deportations and across-the-board tariffs, but instead uses these policies as instruments of political corruption. CEOs who make the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, donate to his inauguration committee, and suppress criticism of him in the newspapers they own will get relief from tariffs and deportations for their businesses or industries. (Elon Musk, for example, may be winning Trump over on H-1B visas for the tech industry.) People who lose the scramble for influence get hit by those policies. The same is likely to happen with deregulation and budget cuts. What stays and goes will depend a lot on who has influence at court.

This is the greatest news photo of 2024. (Getty Images)

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The Thinking Man’s Majority

I think we are currently one-third of the way through a major political re-alignment. I say one-third, because one major political party has fundamentally rebuilt itself. But the other major political party has not realigned in response. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris all ran very traditional Democratic Party campaigns: largely center-left in policy substance, cautiously and quietly “progressive” on culture war issues, and with a few big promises sprinkled in to try to keep the party’s petulant far left in the coalition. They depended on popular discontent with Trump—for a variety of legitimate reasons—to carry them over the top. This worked in 2020 and in mid-term elections, but it has now failed twice when it really counted.

We have yet to see what the Democrats will do in response, but I have another new piece in Discourse offering one piece of advice: Democrats should embrace becoming the party of college-educated voters.

Since the election, there has been a certain amount of panic among Democrats over the fact that their party seems to be losing the blue-collar vote and becoming the party of college-educated voters. USA Today observes, “Two-thirds of white men without a college degree supported [Donald] Trump this election, according to exit polling data from The Washington Post. So did 60% of white women who didn't go to college.” On the other hand, according to CNN exit polls, “[Kamala] Harris won white women with a college degree by about 15 points—an improvement over both [Joe] Biden and [Hillary] Clinton.” Trump won the votes of college-educated white men, but only by a 2% margin, much lower than in the past two presidential elections.

Why is this a reason for panic? There’s an old story about Adlai Stevenson, the Princeton egghead who ran for president in 1952 and lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower. After a particularly eloquent speech, a supporter approached Stevenson to assure him he had the vote of “every thinking person.” “That won’t do,” Stevenson supposedly replied. “We need a majority.”…

Yet…America absolutely needs a political party that is informed by the outlook and priorities of the college-educated—and less-educated voters will eventually feel the consequences of telling all the educated “elites” to go to hell.

My main example is vaccines—and the disastrous consequences that will follow as we reject them. I go on to talk about the advantages college educated voters bring to these issues.

Obviously, not all non-college-educated voters are this misinformed—nor does going to college automatically protect someone from making foolish choices or believing flim-flam. But there’s an obvious reason college-educated voters will be more likely to get their information from “high-quality news media” rather than the online or cable TV rumor mill. A college education provides four years of training (or more) in how to do research, how to evaluate sources, how to weigh different claims of knowledge. If you’ve ever had to put footnotes in a class paper, you know that “I watched a random influencer on YouTube” or “I listened to Joe Rogan’s podcast” are not adequate citations. My editors here won’t even let me link to Wikipedia.

A college education also provides graduates with a base of technical knowledge that makes it easier to evaluate claims. Perhaps more crucially, it gives them a familiarity with the kinds of institutions that produce knowledge. If you’ve spent a few semesters doing lab work for your professors, you will be less inclined to believe modern medicine is all some kind of conspiracy cooked up by Big Pharma.

By contrast, if you don’t know how any of these systems work, you will go with what you do know—so it’s no coincidence that Trump is trying to give us an “As Seen on TV” administration. “Vote for the guy you saw on TV all those years, so he can appoint other people you’ve seen on TV.”

College-educated voters have their problems, including a greater likelihood of absorbing the latest crazy fad from academia. But as we’ve seen recently, populism has its own crazy fads. The system I advocate is one in which a party does not give up on popular appeal but does at least attempt to show that they know what they’re talking about.

Under the old standard, candidates in both parties would use populist rhetoric on the campaign trail and make broad appeals to the common man—but then they would dutifully journey to Washington, DC, to give serious speeches at think tanks to demonstrate (with a greater or lesser degree of success) that they could talk intelligently about the big policy issues. Those are the rules the Democratic Party should stick to. A politician has to gain some credibility with blue-collar voters, while still being able to pass a job interview with college-educated voters.

The realignment of the Democratic Party will be the second third of our current political realignment. The final third will be the two parties competing on these new grounds until they reach some kind of equilibrium.

I’ve been arguing for a new “liberal” coalition that can attract the liberal elements from each side, who will find common cause against both the illiberal left and the illiberal right. I admit that after last year’s election, this is less likely—and I fear we will end up with a new political alignment in which we are instead given a choice between two illiberal populist factions.

A lot of that is going to be decided starting now.