THE FUTURE'S NOT OURS TO SEE

Way back in the 20th century, two famous men made these observations about the past. George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” William Faulkner upped the ante by writing, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Like many others, I’ve spent some time trying to game out Donald Trump’s future by looking for past precedents. But the past covers a lot of territory, and everyone sees it differently. None of the historical precedents that I can think of are exact fits, so rather than ignoring inconvenient facts in order to build a case, I’ll offer several possibilities that suggest different but plausible directions that American history could take in the Age of Trump. I’m going to concentrate on events in my country in my lifetime, so if there’s a Chinese emperor from the Ming Dynasty that matches Trump perfectly, you won’t read about it here.

Possibility 1: Donald Trump is the second coming of Evan Mecham. For fifteen months in 1987 and early 1988, Ev Mecham was Arizona’s governor. He an ultra-conservative Republican who wore a tinfoil hat before tinfoil hats were cool. He’d become kind of a joke, having run unsuccessfully for a variety of state offices over the years. But he beat out a weak field in the Republican gubernatorial primary in 1986, and then got lucky. For some reason, a Democrat who’d dropped out of his party’s nomination process jumped back in the race as an independent candidate.

Mecham won the three way race for governor with 40% of the vote, and proceeded to make a fool of himself – and of Arizona. He earned immediate notoriety by cancelling Arizona’s Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Boycotts ensued, including the Super Bowl, and they hurt the state’s economy. Meanwhile, Mecham appointed crooks, cranks, and cronies to state offices; he behaved arrogantly and erratically, alienating potential allies; he was obsessed with negative media coverage; and he was convinced that his political enemies were spying on him. New incidents and scandals came along almost every week.

As public opinion began to turn in favor of impeachment, Mecham’s opponents (who by now included many prominent Republicans) began to worry that he might tone down his behavior just enough to hang on to his job for a full term. A few of them commissioned a psychological profile. The study’s authors told them not to worry. Mecham wasn’t going to change; he couldn’t help himself. They were right. Defiant to the end (he claimed he wasn’t accountable to the legislature), Mecham was impeached and removed from office. Arizona moved on.

Mecham and Trump share a lot of personality traits, although Mecham wasn’t a womanizer as far as I know. He had a “base,” but it wasn’t nearly as extensive as Trump’s is now. The big difference is that in 1987, there were prominent Arizona Republicans (including John McCain) who were willing to admit that one of their own was a bad apple, and help get rid of him. Right now, there’s no sign that national Republicans give a damn one way or the other.

Evan Mecham was basically a fluke. He made no lasting impact on Arizona politics. We woke up from our bad dream and simply reverted to the status quo ante. We got MLK Day back, the boycotts ended, and the whole.

Possibility 2: Donald Trump is the second coming of Jimmy Carter. Ross Douthat, writing in the New York Times, suggested this comparison – not in personal terms, because Trump is a bad hombre and Carter is a genuinely good man; but rather in terms of the eras they represent.

He posited that Carter was a disjunctive president – someone who came along as the old order was crumbling and hastened its downfall. The old order in Carter’s case was the Democratic Party. Carter’s outsider status (Governor of Georgia rather than a Washington insider) coupled with the arrogance of the Democratic majorities in Congress led to bickering over who spoke for the party rather than to progressive legislation. The fall of the Shah of Iran and the ensuing hostage crisis sealed Carter’s fate, derailing a golden opportunity for a progressive era in American politics.

Disjunction can go either way, of course. If a disjunctive president solves the problems he exposes, his party is transformed and he’s remembered as a hero. If he merely reflects, or even amplifies, the rot at the core of his party, he’ll hasten the collapse of the old order.

Donald Trump has certainly revealed the depth of the dysfunction at the core of the Republican Party. And he’s leading them deeper into the swamp. Will he be able to convince a majority of the electorate that the swamp is actually a pristine mountain meadow? Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I doubt it.

I don’t believe that Trumpism will have become a majority movement by 2020, but there are two ways that Trump could retain the presidency. If Republicans are successful in their vote suppression efforts, they could eke out another win in the Electoral College. If Democrats nominate a weak candidate, it could prompt another cycle of low turnout and third party support, resulting in another Republican win in the Electoral College.

The best case scenario is that the Democrats nominate someone who can keep the electorate’s focus on Republican corruption and malfeasance. Voters will throw the rascals out, and it will be morning in America for progressives.

Possibility 3: Donald Trump is the second coming of Joe McCarthy. Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy’s reign of terror lasted nearly a decade, from 1947-1956, when rode the wave of post-war anti-communist hysteria to national prominence. In 1951, he said “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” (Doesn’t that sound a lot like Steve Bannon’s fantasies about President Obama seeding the Executive Branch with deep state saboteurs?)

When Democrats were in control of the government, Republicans didn’t mind this sort of talk. But McCarthy refused to tone it down once Dwight Eisenhower became president. It took way too long, but finally people began to stand up to McCarthy – Edward R. Murrow in the mainstream press, as well as politicians (including prominent Republicans like Senator Margaret Chase Smith) who noticed that he consistently failed to produce evidence of the treason that he claimed was rampant. Once his bluff was called, McCarthy faded away quickly, and the paranoid anti-communism he represented was left to fringe groups like the John Birch Society.

The nativist movement never went away, though. After the fall of communism, America Firsters simply switched bogeymen from communists to Muslims and Mexicans.

But wait – there’s more! McCarthy’s protégé and attorney was a sleazy guy named Roy Cohn. You’ll never guess who represented Donald Trump in the 1970s when Trump got in trouble for discriminating against minorities in his rental properties. Yep, it was Roy Cohn. Cohn also worked closely with Trump insider Roger Stone on political campaigns in New York.

Today, Joe McCarthy’s legacy is the word “McCarthyism,” a pejorative term for an unethical political attack designed to suppress dissent. Trump is McCarthy’s most successful spiritual heir. How long he can sustain that success depends on how long the Republican bubble lasts. The mainstream press was slow to realize the threat that Trump posed, but (after their fecklessness helped elect him) are now calling him out with regularity. The question is whether that matters.

In the mid-50s, Edward R. Murrow arguably had as much credibility as any politician except the President. There’s no one like him in the era of “fake news.” In the mid-50s, the average American was savvy enough to get suspicious when none of the dire consequences McCarthy insisted upon ever came to pass. Nowadays, Republicans are still crying wolf about President Obama, and a non-trivial segment of their base seems willing to believe them no matter what.

It is clear that none of our current crop of Republicans have the inclination, much less the courage, to call Trump to account. The only way to stop him is through the electoral process.

Possibility 4: Donald Trump is the second coming of George W. Bush. Like Trump, Bush was lazy and incurious, a “born on third base and thinks he hit a triple” guy who failed upwards all the way to the White House. Bush was content to bask in the cheers while more cynical men made the decisions. Alas for America and the world, the decisions they made were catastrophic. They wrecked the economy and launched two foolish wars which led directly to the rise of ISIS as well as to the flood of refugees from the Middle East that has been the source of so much divisiveness in Europe and America.

Neither W. nor Trump would have amounted to anything without their fathers’ money and influence. Like Bush, Trump has surrounded himself with advisors who aren’t nearly as smart as they think they are. And like the architects of the failed Iraq War, Steve Bannon is spoiling for a fight, particularly if it’s against Muslims.

That’s where the Bush parallel turns dark. Left to their own devices, I’m confident that Trump and the Republicans would self-destruct. The one thing that could bail them out, at least temporarily, would be a war.

As the Republican wars in the Middle East proved, Americans will rally ‘round the flag, at least for a while. Americans are willing to support a war against an aggressor, as long as it’s clear we’re the good guys, and as long as we get a quick win. Americans are good at conquest, but we’re terrible at occupation. We won every battle in Vietnam and Iraq, but lost both of those wars because we couldn’t tolerate sustained casualties inflicted by a determined guerilla resistance.

The special danger of a war with Trump as commander in chief is that he could easily become impatient at the first sign of difficulty and go nuclear. Bomb them back into the Stone Age and take their oil, that’s the ticket. Or he might encourage one of our allies, like Israel or Russia, to use their nukes against a foe that refuses to go down easily. Trump and Bannon are cruel men who love bold gestures. What gesture would be bolder than a nuclear war?

Possibility 5: Donald Trump is the second coming of Richard Nixon. Unlike Trump, Nixon was an overachiever who (like his contemporary Joe McCarthy) became famous by leading anti-communist witch hunts. That’s what got him elected to Congress, and then onto the Republican ticket as Eisenhower’s Vice President. And after a couple of bumps in the road (losing the presidency in 1960 and the governorship of California in 1962) he finally made it into the White House for six years, until the majority of his own party turned against him as the Watergate scandal unraveled and he resigned in disgrace. By the end of his public career, Nixon was clearly in bad shape mentally with a strong streak of paranoia exacerbated by a drinking problem. The majority of his own party turned against him. He was 61 when he resigned, nine years younger than Donald Trump is now.

Unlike Trump, Nixon was a hard worker, and he was a pragmatist rather than an ideologue. He knew how the federal government worked, and – much as it pains me to acknowledge it – he did some good things as President. He created the EPA, and opened diplomatic relations with China. He ended the military draft, gave Native Americans the right to tribal self-determination, and signed Title IX, a landmark in the fight against gender bias in higher education. Those things don’t outweigh the evil that he did, but compared to Donald Trump, Nixon looks pretty good.

Both Nixon and Trump share a paranoid streak and a desire for revenge against their perceived enemies. They both counted the press among their enemies, and they both acquiesced (at the very least) in election rigging. Whether Trump’s Russian connections will wreck his presidency remains to be seen.

And that concludes my “second coming of” scenarios. Although there are a few similarities between Trump and Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, George Wallace, and Ross Perot, I don’t think those comparisons are as apt as the ones I’ve already made.

So which scenario seems the most plausible? Much as I’d love to see a quick Evan Mecham-style “OMG, what were we thinking?” Trump exit, I think some variation on the George W. Bush scenario is a more likely. Why? One more 20th century quote: L.P. Hartley wrote, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

You may have noticed a recurring theme in most of my scenarios: in the 20th century, there were Republicans who had some integrity. They were willing to put principle over party – reluctantly sometimes, but when push came to shove, they did the right thing.

Republican integrity began to dry up and blow away during the Reagan years, and it was long gone by the time George W. Bush moved into the White House. Major Republican initiatives – from the Reagan’s Laffer Curve to Bush’s Iraq War – were built on a foundation of lies and nonsense.

It must have felt incredibly liberating when Republicans discovered that they could just make shit up. But they found themselves on a slippery slope. First they abandoned moderation in favor of conservatism, and then abandoned conservatism for oligarchy. Now they’re in the process of abandoning oligarchy for nihilism. Even their longtime propaganda outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh increasingly find themselves following the lead of Breitbart and Infowars. Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about.

The past is a foreign country, and the future’s not ours to see. Since we can’t count on Republican help, we’re going to have to get the job done ourselves. That will require hard work, and persistence in the face of inevitable setbacks. As Jesus said (Matthew 24:6) “See that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.”