After Trump, What Comes Next?
Explicit content warning
09/15/20 • 36 min
Donald Trump will not be president forever. Whether he leaves office in 2021 or 2025; whether he steps down peacefully or not; whether he’s replaced by a Democratic president or a Republican one—he will leave. And then the country will face the immense task of restoring democratic norms and facing up to the failings that allowed a populist, white-nationalist demagogue like Trump to reach office in the first place.
In this episode, with help from University of Chicago political scientist Will Howell, we look at the leading explanations for Trump’s rise and the competing ideas about ways to move forward after Trump.
Assuming Joseph R. Biden wins in November 2020—which isn’t a safe assumption, of course—should the next administration focus on structural reforms to make government more effective, so that Washington can then fix people’s real problems and take the oxygen out of populist anger? Or should it push forward with a program of cultural transformation that recognizes, and tries to root out, the deep strains of racism, xenophobia, and nihilism that fuel Trumpism and today’s Republican party?
It turns out (unsurprisingly) that your preferred prescription depends on your precise diagnosis of the country’s ills. Howell makes a strong argument for a reformist approach that puts good government and pro-social policies first. Other scholars fear that a deeper reckoning with Americans’ illiberal leanings will be required. As you’ll hear in the episode, I’m still of two minds. But I also hope there’s a middle way.
Chapter Guide
00:00 Content Warning
00:16 Soonish Opening Theme
00:30 Donald Trump Barrage Montage
01:13 What Is Donald Trump?
02:36 Never Another Trump
04:22 Disaster Response
05:07 Introducing Will Howell
07:30 Connecting Back to “Relic” and our Failing Constitution”
09:23 Defining Populism and its Harms
11:20 Once and Future Populist Demagogues
13:19 The Conditions for Populism, and How to Change Them
15:59 Institutional Reform or Policy Reform?
17:58 Redesigning the US Presidency
19:31 The F Word (Fascism)
20:13 Jason Stanley on Fascist Movements
21:09 Sarah Churchwell: “This Is What American Fascism Looks Like”
22:12 The Party of White Grievance
23:48 Will Howell Responds: Forces Working in Tandem
26:43 The Reformist Left and the Cultural Left
28:01 A Middle Way
28:45 Structural Reform or Detrumpification? Priorities for the Next Administration
31:31 Best-Case Scenario
33:33 End Credits and Acknowledgements
35:12 Recommendation: The Constant
Notes
The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.
Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.
If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes. The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show. Really!
Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish
Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.
Trump doll photo by Max Litek, shared on Unsplash. Thanks Max!
Donald Trump will not be president forever. Whether he leaves office in 2021 or 2025; whether he steps down peacefully or not; whether he’s replaced by a Democratic president or a Republican one—he will leave. And then the country will face the immense task of restoring democratic norms and facing up to the failings that allowed a populist, white-nationalist demagogue like Trump to reach office in the first place.
In this episode, with help from University of Chicago political scientist Will Howell, we look at the leading explanations for Trump’s rise and the competing ideas about ways to move forward after Trump.
Assuming Joseph R. Biden wins in November 2020—which isn’t a safe assumption, of course—should the next administration focus on structural reforms to make government more effective, so that Washington can then fix people’s real problems and take the oxygen out of populist anger? Or should it push forward with a program of cultural transformation that recognizes, and tries to root out, the deep strains of racism, xenophobia, and nihilism that fuel Trumpism and today’s Republican party?
It turns out (unsurprisingly) that your preferred prescription depends on your precise diagnosis of the country’s ills. Howell makes a strong argument for a reformist approach that puts good government and pro-social policies first. Other scholars fear that a deeper reckoning with Americans’ illiberal leanings will be required. As you’ll hear in the episode, I’m still of two minds. But I also hope there’s a middle way.
Chapter Guide
00:00 Content Warning
00:16 Soonish Opening Theme
00:30 Donald Trump Barrage Montage
01:13 What Is Donald Trump?
02:36 Never Another Trump
04:22 Disaster Response
05:07 Introducing Will Howell
07:30 Connecting Back to “Relic” and our Failing Constitution”
09:23 Defining Populism and its Harms
11:20 Once and Future Populist Demagogues
13:19 The Conditions for Populism, and How to Change Them
15:59 Institutional Reform or Policy Reform?
17:58 Redesigning the US Presidency
19:31 The F Word (Fascism)
20:13 Jason Stanley on Fascist Movements
21:09 Sarah Churchwell: “This Is What American Fascism Looks Like”
22:12 The Party of White Grievance
23:48 Will Howell Responds: Forces Working in Tandem
26:43 The Reformist Left and the Cultural Left
28:01 A Middle Way
28:45 Structural Reform or Detrumpification? Priorities for the Next Administration
31:31 Best-Case Scenario
33:33 End Credits and Acknowledgements
35:12 Recommendation: The Constant
Notes
The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.
Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.
If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes. The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show. Really!
Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish
Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.
Trump doll photo by Max Litek, shared on Unsplash. Thanks Max!
Previous Episode
Unpeaceful Transition of Power
Voters, hold on to your hats. The U.S. election system could face an unprecedented array of challenges in November, from the coronavirus pandemic to the prospect of cyberattacks to the depradations of President Trump himself. And that means there’s a non-zero chance that the election will misfire, leaving us with the wrong president—or no president at all—come noon on January 20, 2021.
At least, that’s the argument legal scholar Lawrence Douglas lays out in Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020, a new book that goes into extreme and eye-opening detail about the flaws that make the Electoral College system uniquely vulnerable to a disruptor like Trump.
In the final presidential debate of 2016, when moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump whether he’d accede to the outcome of the election if Hillary Clinton were to win, Trump refused to answer. “I’ll keep you in suspense,” the candidate said. Douglas tells Soonish that this intentionally subversive response raised a specter in his mind that he hasn’t been able to dispel.
“Whatever damage a candidate could cause to our system by refusing to concede, imagine the kind of damage that an incumbent could cause to our system by refusing to concede,” Douglas says. “How well equipped is our system to deal with that type of eventuality? The rather alarming conclusion is it's very poorly equipped indeed.”
The problem isn’t merely that the the Electoral College system is unrepresentative by design, or that its winner-take-all nature makes it possible for a candidate to assume office without winning a plurality of the popular vote (an outcome that befell the nation in 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016). It’s also that the Constitution and the laws Congress has put in place around national elections fail to specify which votes count in the not-so-rare cases where electors don’t vote as pledged, or where states nominate competing slates of electors.
The opportunities for mischief multiply when an election is so close that the outcome might turn on contested ballots, such as the notorious hanging-chad punch card ballots of 2000 or the mail-in ballots that coronavirus-wary voters are likely to use in record numbers this fall and that Trump is already noisily denouncing. “At times I've described it as this Chernobyl-like defect built into our electoral system,” Douglas says. “If everything lines up the wrong way, this meltdown could occur.”
Chapter Guide
00:00 Hub & Spoke Sonic ID
00:08 Opening Theme
00:21 "I'll Keep You in Suspense"
02:05 Trump Defeats Clinton
02:19 How Donald Thinks
02:51 Meet Lawrence Douglas
04:35 Bad Design and Total Election System Failure
06:19 Dear Listeners
08:07 A Warning to Americans
09:24 What Makes a Victory Decisive?
11:27 Trump Moves the Goalposts
12:14 Faithless Electors
15:26 Update: SCOTUS Rules on Faithless Electors (added July 7, 2020)
16:56 SpongeBob for President
20:34 Competing Slates
25:54 Lies and Meta-Lies
29:05 Spoiler #1: Election Day Snafus
31:14 Spoiler #2: Foreign Interference
33:16 Spoiler #3: Covid-19
37:06 Beyond Ordinary Politics
39:07 "If I Don't Win, I Don't Win"
40:16 Short-term Tactics for Preventing Election Disaster
41:22 Long-term Strategies for Fixing our Elections
43:07 The Constitution Kinda Feels Like a Suicide Pact
43:33 End Run: the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
46:08 My Simple Hope
46:44 End Credits and Hub & Spoke Promo
The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.
Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.
If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show.
Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.
Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.
Marine One photo by Victoria Pickering,
Next Episode
American Reckoning, Part 1: Civil Wars and How to Stop Them
Welcome to a special two-part series about the looming clash over the future of America. In Part 1, we look at the tattered state of our democracy as the election approaches, and we assess nonviolent ways to respond to the twin threats of political polarization and President Trump's thuggish behavior. Part 2 is coming October 12.
These are probably the last two pre-election episodes I’ll make, so I decided to try something a little ambitious and probably a little crazy: making sense of 2020 in all its perverse complexity. It’s a cliché at this point to say that Donald Trump isn’t the disease, he’s the symptom. But it’s true, and underneath all the name-calling and dog-whistling on the campaign trail this year, there’s a far deeper problem, which is that we’re more divided in our goals and our beliefs than at any time since the Civil War.
In the series I bring together ideas from a bunch of conversations I’ve been having with smart people who think about partisanship, polarization, the duties of citizenship, and the future of democracy, including (in Part 1) Sean Eldridge of Stand Up America and Protect The Results, Erica Chenoweth at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and Robert McElvaine at Millsaps College in Jackson, MS. The episode explains why the threat of communal violence is so real right now. It also puts the current unrest in historical context, and looks at ways for citizens to usher the country through this perilous moment—for example, by mobilizing nonviolently to ensure that the election is fair and free.
The prospect of a Trump win in November—whether fair or fraudulent—is horrifying. The thing is, a Trump loss would create its own set of problems. As Yoni Appelbaum wrote in a 2019 Atlantic magazine article entitled “How America Ends”:
"The president’s defeat would likely only deepen the despair that fueled his rise, confirming his supporters’ fear that the demographic tide has turned against them. That fear is the single greatest threat facing American democracy, the force that is already battering down precedents, leveling norms, and demolishing guardrails. When a group that has traditionally exercised power comes to believe that its eclipse is inevitable, and that the destruction of all it holds dear will follow, it will fight to preserve what it has—whatever the cost."
What form that fight might take is the unsettling and unanswered question now lingering over the nation. Armed extremists, like the participants in the Michigan kidnapping plot exposed this week, hope violent action will spark mass chaos and civil war. We can thwart extremist individuals and groups one by one. But can we stop the politicians who stoke extremism for their own cynical ends?
Part 2 of this special two-part episode, coming Monday, moves beyond the election to ask how we might reconfigure our politics to defuse the kinds of tensions that got us into this mess. Because the real question isn’t how we’re going to get through the election without a violent meltdown—it’s how we’re going to get through the next decade and the next century.
See the full show notes for this episode at https://www.soonishpodcast.org/soonish-404-american-reckoning-pt1
The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.
Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.
If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts. The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show!
Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.
Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.
American flag photo by Peggy Zinn, shared on Unsplash.
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