Trump won't permanently change America

It should be a simple lesson. If history teaches us anything, it is that reaction always follows action. A due humility that recognises the impermanence of all political settlements, and many socioeconomic ones, might be the best insurance against the overreaching of politicians and social engineers of all stripes. Ignore this lesson, and instability will almost always be the result.

Conservatives like to think that human nature is unchanging, giving rise to eternal social verities, while progressives assume that once it is forced into an artificial shape, it will stay so forever. We should not need to be reminded, and should take pride in the fact that humans are far more resilient than our politicos and intelligentsia like to think.

In the modern era, of course, change is the great constant, abetted now by the ubiquity of information technology. This unending change results in a competition between the temporary status quo and its discontents, both of which shift sides over time. Such sociopolitical reaction may occur over discrete issues, such as a military conflict or Obamacare, but the more disruptive reaction is over large trends, such as the evolution of a culture or the political ideology of a particular government. This action-reaction dynamic may also occur more quickly in liberal societies, where democratic governing mechanisms allow public preferences to be more quickly absorbed into the political system. These facts are well worth keeping in mind, as the commentariat continue to try to come to grips with recent American and European history.

We see this dynamic acutely with the rise of Donald Trump, whose political success was so entirely confounding to the very people who should, through their being endowed with professional leisure to contemplate the big, important things, have been the first ones to perceive why his seemingly quixotic quest would, in the end, succeed. Those who said Trump’s victory was “against all odds” or similar hackneyed phrases simply showed how little they paid attention to, if not respected human nature.

They could not understand Trump because they had convinced themselves of a particular interpretation of today’s world, and could not envision a credible reaction to it. Transnational global elites assumed that history had ended, not with the triumph of liberal democracy, as predicted back in 1989 by Francis Fukuyama, but with that of the administrative state and its supportive transnational politico-economic network. Nativism and protectionism could be warned against in a purely prophylactic way, since the elites assumed they had safely contained those threats through the sinews of the globalisation that shapes modern western countries.

In offering himself as the first viable champion of the 21^stcentury’s “forgotten man,” Trump all but assured that he would capture the votes of those who felt either left behind by globalisation over the past four decades or who recoiled from the relentless sociopolitical engineering of the Obama Administration. While that was not enough to win him an outright majority of the vote, it was enough to put him over the top in America’s indirect Electoral College system.

The takeaway point is not that Trump won with a minority of votes; rather, it is that, given the chance to vote for an extreme rejection of the current system, tens of millions of Americans were perfectly willing, even eager, to take a giant leap of faith with a political novice. In this, Trump’s victory resembled Barack Obama’s in 2008, which also represented a massive grassroots upwelling against the domestic corporatism and foreign adventurism of the George W Bush administration.

Seasoned observers now assert that Trump has smashed previous political alliances, bringing together unlikely bed partners and fundamentally transforming US politics. Look, they point out, the Democratic Party is weaker after Barack Obama than it has been in a century, while Republicans rule all the branches of the federal government and most of the states, as well.

Yet Trump will no more remake the American political landscape than did Barack Obama or George W Bush. After the victories of each of these presidents, we were assured that a “new coalition” of political forces had been forged. The short-term memory of the punditocracy triumphed over a subtler and humble assessment of the recurring pattern of action and reaction. The lesson remains clear: overreach will result in a reshaping of the temporarily dominant pattern of power relations.

The new president is already facing his first encounter with this reality, if on a small scale. Trump’s rushed, ill-crafted temporary ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations may have seemed a proper response to the appearance of an open borders policy on the part of the Obama administration. Yet its sweeping denial of entry even to those holding legal green cards, not to mention children in need of medical care and individuals who had risked their lives supporting American military operations, has itself occasioned a massive backlash, including protests and court challenges. Even if the courts rule in Trump’s favor, a more carefully drafted and implemented, not to mention fair, rule would have saved the new administration unnecessary turmoil and distraction.

Some of the same dynamic is being played out in Europe, where, when finally given a say on the matter, a clear majority of Britons (though not Scots) voted to leave the European Union. That their political classes had spent decades telling them how great the EU was, even while the ordinary Brit felt increasingly hostage to mandarins across the English Channel, again ensured the “inconceivable” outcome; inconceivable, that is, to those wedded to the current system thanks to the privileges it provided them at the expense of their less-fortunate countrymen.

Dark warnings about the rise of Europe’s right-wing parties, and their echoes of nativism, anti-Semitism, and even fascism should not be dismissed, but once again, the elites unnecessarily find themselves shocked by the growing demand throughout Europe that national politics be accountable to the people of a defined nation-state and that their economies provide for citizens who have long labored under increasingly difficult circumstances.

And here, the elites find themselves besieged on both sides. Having secured the commanding heights of government and culture, they little realised they had in reality shut themselves in a lightly defended fortress in a valley, surrounded by disaffected masses of progressives and conservatives alike.

Yet once this inchoate opposition detected a breach in the walls of post-modern cosmopolitanism, such as that provided by the eurozone crisis or unsustainable levels of immigration, their onslaught against the centrist elites could no longer be held back.

Again, it is a simple lesson of action (enforced transnationalism) followed by reaction (patriotism/nativism).

Even in authoritarian societies, the same dynamic plays out, if within a more restricted scope. Thus, after the chaos of the early Soviet years, Vladimir Lenin instituted the New Economic Plan, slightly moderating some of the more extreme anti-capitalist policies of his new government. Similarly, after the carnage of the Mao decades, Deng Xiaoping introduced the economic reforms that continue to reshape modern China, turning it into the world’s second-largest economy.

Where elites in authoritarian regimes differ from their western counterparts is in brooking no challenge to their political control, nor offering any opportunity to discern the actual will of the people. The only one who tried wound up destroying his own power. Mikhail Gorbachev remains, in one sense, an example to authoritarians of what not to do, as the reaction to his policies turned out to be an existential threat to the very system he ruled.

That is why historians try to draw the big lessons from the past, with a humility that nothing is permanent and no one path foreordained. Would-be politicians, pundits, and policymakers would do better to drop their “grand strategy” classes, or their reading of European post-modernists, and instead learn the lessons of mid-18^th century Anglo-American relations, where a studied indifference to the moderate demands of Englishmen living in America sparked a revolution that eventually reshaped the world. Or post-Revolutionary France and Napoleon. The examples go on and on.

The moral for Donald Trump is clear: over reach, and you will become a modern Ozymandias. That may give comfort to his many opponents, but they must heed the lesson as much as he. Embrace the golden mean of statecraft, and your works may not be washed away.

Michael Auslin is the author of The End of the Asian Century: War, Stagnation, and the Risks to the World’s Most Dynamic Region (Yale)