The following column is the opinion and analysis of the author.
On the list of important presidents, few historians would write the names Buchanan or Hoover, yet these ineffectual figures led to the election of Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Most presidential scholars would list our current chief executive alongside the worst, but may ultimately find him to be among the most pivotal.
Since the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, the U.S. government has been increasingly in the grip of conservative ideology. Even the Democrats who slipped into office during that time — Carter, Clinton, and Obama — were severely constrained by either a conservative House or Senate, or both. The few blinking moments when they enjoyed Democratic majorities produced advances in health care and economic circumstances for the poor, especially Clinton’s Low-Income Tax Credit, which is a negative income tax for struggling families. That accomplished, President Clinton filled our prisons and deregulated Wall Street to satisfy the right.
There always comes a time when political agendas run their course and fall into disarray. After Lyndon Johnson completed the dreams of FDR for Medicare, voting rights, and other liberal reforms, the agenda of the Democrats ran out of steam. The Vietnam War and the struggle for racial equality, inflamed by the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., brought riots in our cities. Democrats struggled to respond but looked divided and ineffective. Richard Nixon arrived with a cry for law and order and was promptly elected.
The parallels to today are unmistakable and yet imperfect. This time the GOP goals of free markets, strong defense and deregulation were reached before Donald Trump, the interloper, emerged from his tower to win a shocking victory.
Initially detested by most congressional Republicans, he simply absorbed them on his way to establishing a movement that has divided this nation more than any time in a century. Those who had the courage to oppose him were dispatched to the political gallows, while the herd was quieted with excessive tax cuts and right-wing judicial appointments.
If history is a guide, the Republicans are in for a historic licking this November. Polls show the president losing ground with almost every voting cohort, including seniors, less-educated whites, Catholics and evangelicals. His government by tweet has grown old, and Americans are weary of his daily grandstanding and headline grabbing. The booming economy, fueled by reckless federal spending and record deficits, has been crushed by a pandemic he refused to acknowledge until too late. Trump and Trump alone has become the issue, the political equivalent of bidding against yourself. His likely exit from the Oval Office will be an ugly one.
Over the past few decades, it has become liturgical in conservative circles to speak in the most extreme terms about the disruption of the D.C. status quo and the culling of the federal government and its tentacles. Influential anti-tax evangelist Grover Norquist charmingly characterized the ultimate aim as reducing government to “the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.”
In Trump’s presidency, the ideologues have finally gotten their acid test. No president in American history has conducted himself with less regard for the existing apparatus or more contempt for the norms of civil discourse. Trump has cut an ornery swath through Cabinet members, military brass and any civil service agency personnel deemed to be disloyal. He has relegated even the best and most qualified advice to an afterthought to his impulses. A handful of months ago, health officials briefed him on a potentially lethal virus, migrating gradually from the Far East. He shrugged it off. What could a bunch of bureaucrats know?
The ultimate irony of the Trump presidency is that its legacy may well be to lay the predicate for a new progressive era in America. How could anyone lose faith in our country if they witnessed the virtual graduation for the 2020 high school class carried on every major network?
My wife and I, old folks now, were captivated by the astounding talent and grace of young Americans of every race, faith and sexual orientation. Their wisdom and knowledge belie their age. Their patriotism is in evidence with every righteous chant.
I still believe what Alexis de Tocqueville observed almost 200 years ago: “America is great because it is good.”
