“Rounding Up” is a newsletter rounding up various links, newsletters, and podcasts from the perspective of political reform. If you’d like to join this experiment, please subscribe.
Ever since he descended the golden escalator, the political career of Donald Trump has in some way been intertwined with the question of political reform. Some argued that the rise of Trump was a clear sign of the need for political reform; others argued that he himself could be a vehicle for this reform (while others claimed that he was an obstacle to this reform).
So I thought that this issue of “Rounding Up” would collect a variety of pieces about Trump’s legacy—particularly about his connection to political reform as well as the possibility of some “realignment” agenda separate from Trump the man. Keep reading for some other (non-Trump) material at the end.
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Eric Kaufmann argues that some form of populism retains currency—and that many Trump voters were “decidedly cool on Trump when compared to a hypothetical Trumpist politician with more respect for liberal democracy.” Christopher Caldwell has been sympathetic to many “nationalist” political programs. He thinks that Trump diagnosed some important points but that his administration was deeply flawed; in the opening paragraphs of this London Times column, Caldwell implies that Trump’s effort to overturn the presidential election did incredible damage to his legacy.
Pedro Gonzalez surveys a post-Trump landscape for a “nationalist-populist movement”: “Trump demands loyalty but gives little or none. And when he does, it’s often to the wrong people.” Ann Coulter also criticized Trump for a lack of loyalty on key issues.
Ross Douthat (who was cutting-edge proponent of a working-class realignment—all the way back in 2005!) fears that Trump himself could become an obstacle to popucon political reform.
Yuval Levin has developed a similar argument—that Trump’s leadership strategy did not rise to the challenges of the moment. Upcoming: Tuesday (January 26), Levin and Sohrab Ahmari debate the future of the right after Trump in a joint Notre Dame-ISI production. Register for it here.
Heather MacDonald argues that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election have damaged the cause of reform.
Andrew Sullivan and Shadi Hamid debate the effects of the attack on the Capitol.
Julius Krein repudiated Trump after Charlottesville. In a December 2020 autopsy of the Trump administration, he cataloged some of the ways Trump turned his back on some of his signature themes—and how that creates an opening for others in the GOP (and even for Joe Biden): “as Trump has drifted away from the more substantive themes of 2016, others have embraced them. Up-and-coming politicians like Senator Josh Hawley and pundits like Tucker Carlson have articulated more coherent right-populist arguments than Trump ever has. Senator Marco Rubio is leading an ambitious attempt to rethink Republican economic policy, while figures like Representative Matt Gaetz have emerged as passionate critics of foreign interventionism. It made little sense for these and other prominent Republicans to criticize the 45th president while he was in office. Should Trump enter the 2024 race, however, he will find the populist ‘lane’ of the Republican primaries far more crowded. The Democratic party has also changed. Joe Biden campaigned on a ‘Made in America’ industrial policy program, something Trump never really countered in the 2020 campaign.”
David Frum has been a fierce Trump critic, but he also thinks that Trump got a few things right.
Michael Brendan Dougherty argues that, of course, there will be a “Trumpism” after Trump because “Trumpism” long predated Trump (MBD notes the way that so-called “populist” policies have a long legacy in the GOP—and that a 2012 candidate very hawkish on illegal immigration and trade with the PRC was…Mitt Romney).
Alan Tonelson thinks about the lessons of “Trumpism gone awry.”
Oren Cass hopes the right can move past the Trumpist wars so that it can actually focus on doing the work of policy reform. (Related: American Compass offers a big-picture survey of Trump’s legacy, with essays by Wells King, Rachel Bovard, and more.)
Daniel McCarthy thinks that Trump himself has some staying power. (He also hints that a continued policy deadlock on the right makes it harder for the GOP to turn the page on Trump.)
Harper’s has a package about the effects of Trump far beyond politics. Lauren Oyler’s contribution looks at the way that the patina of moralizing urgency during the Trump era has restricted public conversations: “These conversations aren’t actually supposed to be conversations at all, but scripted lectures; the idea is to use the pretense of casual exchange to enact a grassroots educational campaign to explain to every racist uncle why his views are wrong. That no one, of any political persuasion, likes being lectured, particularly not by people they see once a year, did not figure into the left’s talking cure. That framing a usually pleasurable activity as an obligation tends to make people resent the activity also did not figure. If part of the purpose of these tough conversations is to integrate the bad into the good, they haven’t yet worked. Many people, both online and off, seem to think disagreement is only the result of a lack of understanding, not a different interpretation of the same information; they’re often the people who make the old mistake of talking at instead of talking to.”
Quick takes:
Brink Lindsey on civic virtue and democratic fellowship.
Walter Kirn wades into Camus.
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Matt Taibbi on Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism.
For this week’s closing image, a shot of the Capitol for inauguration day: