We're Not Going Back

Chaos and catastrophe will create an opening for something different

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

It’s a chant we heard repeatedly last fall at Kamala Harris’ rallies. Crowds would scream it in approval as the vice president prosecuted her case against Donald Trump, at that time the former president.

We’re not going back.

It was an accidental catchphrase for a campaign that had attempted to build its messaging around the more pioneering theme of offering a new way forward. Even as Harris talked about the future, her supporters wouldn’t let it go.

Now, as we dwell in the dystopia of the second Trump presidency, which is fundamentally so much worse than the first, the phrase takes on a new meaning.

We are probably not going back to what for many years had been considered normal politics. There likely will never again be anything that looks like the Clinton administration, or either Bush administration, or Obama or Biden.

Those presidencies belong to a different era, a time that has now passed.

The disruption of the Trump reaction is already so great—and threatens to be so much greater—that whatever comes afterwards is unlikely to look like anything that came before.

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One way to think about American political history is as a sequence of political regimes. There have been several distinct eras in our history in which one party dominated elections and set the agenda for national politics.

Although the boundaries between these periods can be fuzzy, hindsight allows us to identify the rise and fall of dominant political ideologies and the attendant rise and fall of the parties and candidates that advocated them.

Laissez-faire capitalism prevailed during first few decades of the twentieth century, favoring the Republicans who advanced it. But it was swept away in the public outcry against an ineffectual federal response to the catastrophic Great Depression and replaced for decades by the social welfare liberalism of FDR’s New Deal, elevating the Democrats who advanced it.

As the New Deal regime lost favor in the rice paddies of Vietnam and by taking a turn toward addressing racial injustice, Republicans saw an opening that hadn’t been available to them for decades.

The election of Ronald Reagan marked a moment of Republican ascendancy, with movement away from the liberal politics of the New Deal era to a right-leaning politics that cast government as the problem and marginalized liberalism as an out-of-touch philosophy advocated by coastal elites on behalf of minority groups. During this era, tax cuts, deregulation and spending restrictions were in vogue. “Liberal” became an epithet. Being a “card-carrying member of the ACLU” was a liability.

As much as some Democrats have long criticized other Democrats for embracing or at least not fighting against Reaganesque orthodoxy, the political conditions of the Reagan era—which I would argue stretched well into this century until they were undone by MAGA—gave them limited room to maneuver.

When Bill Clinton picked the Republican electoral lock in 1992, he did it as a New Democrat who positioned himself as a fiscal moderate—in stark contrast to the ethos of New Deal liberalism. His repositioning of the Democratic party after losing five of the previous six elections was reminiscent of the ascendance of the Eisenhower wing of the Republican party in 1952, which reclaimed the White House for Republicans after five straight electoral defeats by accepting the New Deal.

Clinton and Eisenhower were responding to the politics of their time, which in each case was defined by the prevailing regime. Clinton recognized that mid-century liberalism was an electoral liability much as Eisenhower understood the risks of opposing popular New Deal policies. Both were challenged by fellow partisans who sought to push their parties to oppose rather than work within the respective frameworks of the prevailing orthodoxy.

Conservatives who wanted to roll back the welfare state in the 1950s found a champion in Barry Goldwater, but his 1964 campaign was buried in a landslide. Still, they kept at it and finally made traction after Reagan was elected in 1980—almost three decades after Eisenhower’s first election, by which point the terms of the debate had shifted.

It can take a long time for tides to turn.

In the different political era that followed, their “less government” brand of conservatism was ascendant, although the public never embraced their goal of dismantling the welfare state. Having tried and failed to achieve their most extreme objectives, their heirs have signed on with Donald Trump to abandon democracy and try to get their way through the force of illegal action.

This has resulted in the destructive and disruptive agenda of the second Trump presidency, which has been so dislocating that it is bound to shape whatever comes next. There are always costs to political action, always unintended consequences. We don’t yet know how people will experience the loss of certainty, the loss of programs they assumed they could depend on, and the loss of essential government support, to say nothing of the loss of rights and the large-scale adverse consequences of Trump’s economic and foreign policies.

But we can be confident that people will respond, because they already are. Three months in and we’re seeing that response in growing protests, Trump’s sinking opinion polls, and victories for Democrats in special elections that defy our closely divided politics.

Ultimately, the scope of the reaction to Trump’s reign of destruction will shape the political space available to those left to pick up the pieces once this moment is over. There already has been enough damage to assume there will be an intense and sustained counter-reaction.

That’s based on how things look now. They can get much worse.

As markets party like it’s 1932, an economic catastrophe cannot be ruled out. As Trump undermines national security, an international crisis cannot be ruled out. As RFK, Jr. attacks medical research and dismantles HHS, a public health crisis cannot be ruled out. Any combination of these cannot be ruled out.

The greater and more sustained the fallout, the greater the potential for a reaction large enough to support a new and different political alignment built on an entirely different politics. We are watching the sands shift. When people feel their rights are threatened, the ACLU looms large as an institution fighting to preserve them instead of something to be derided and ridiculed. Liberal ideas about the importance of government that once were marginalized look sane in comparison to Trump’s madness.

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Still, what happens next is not preordained. Trump is in the process of trying to establish a lasting autocracy that would make it impossible to challenge his destructive behavior. It is hardly a foregone conclusion that he will succeed, but it is also not a foregone conclusion that he will fail. Nor is it certain that the result of his presidency ending in catastrophic failure will be a lasting progressive regime afterwards.

What we can say at this point is that the tumult of this era echos earlier periods that birthed a new and different politics. We stand at a juncture between the departed Reagan era and a different politics that has yet to be born.

Yes, we could still land on autocracy as the next enduring alignment. But Trump is setting us up for catastrophe, and the effects of catastrophe create an opening to move in a dramatically different direction.

The most optimistic way to look at this situation is to see it as a potential opportunity to bring forth progress from the destructive effects of madness. We have left behind the constraining politics of Reaganism. The convulsions we’re experiencing will leave us in a different place that holds the potential for a politics that was inconceivable during that earlier time.

We don’t know what’s going to happen. But we’re not going back.