Yuval Levin assesses the impact of this month’s electoral win for Donald Trump and congressional Republicans.
The immediate aftermath of an election is a terrible time for political punditry. Everything the winner did looks brilliant, everything the loser did looks dumb, and even widely predicted results feel shocking when they actually materialize. There is no way to avoid these analytical vices, but maybe one way to minimize them is to think about what isn’t all that different or surprising about the outcome—and to trace out what the election doesn’t seem to mean. The point of such an exercise is not to minimize the importance of the election or the very real achievement of its winner. It is to reveal some of what the ecstasy and agony of the two parties could easily conspire to obscure.
Approaching this election from that angle first of all clarifies the continuity of our peculiar political era. The 2024 election was very much of a piece with our 21st-century politics: It was a relatively narrow win owed almost entirely to negative polarization.
Preliminary exit polls reveal an electorate deeply unhappy with the status quo, just as in the last several elections. Voters were not so much excited about what Donald Trump was offering as they were upset at Joe Biden (and by extension Kamala Harris) for mishandling key public challenges, and above all the economy. …
… Trump’s win, therefore, likely doesn’t mean that we are out of the exhausting bog of 50-50 politics in which we have been mired now for about 30 years. And it doesn’t mean that Trump’s eccentric mix of interests and priorities is well aligned with the public’s hopes and fears. This has been difficult for winning parties to grasp throughout this century. It may prove particularly challenging for the motley crew surrounding Trump, whose political instincts add up to an especially incoherent jumble—at once dovish and hawkish, libertarian and activist, traditionalist and revolutionary, authoritarian and anti-establishment.
