The Next United States of America
To Trump supporters, I understand that you crave the catharsis. The American system is in need of an update, and it’s never been more apparent.
The question is, as we move into an election cycle where we make critical decisions about the future of our country: can Trump actually find the places to make those changes? Because he’s captured the Republican party, it’s being forced to rebuild its platform under him. And because the buck stops with him for as long as that’s the case, that platform will be constructed first and foremost towards his interests, and against his enemies. Yes, in the many areas where he doesn’t have much interest, there is lots of room for other — smarter — people to advance their new ideas. But at any point, as is the case when there is a leader like him at the top, any of that work can be obliterated in an instant in the service of his own volatile interests. After the 8 years of his political career we know how that looks: ego-driven me-first power brokering. Loyalty trumps merit, aggression trumps cooperation, power trumps law, and temporary gains trump moral principles. For his supporters, I know, this claim will trigger the usual knee-jerk reaction: claiming that the “other side” operates the same way. The better reaction would be: when are we going to be better than that?
Trump has generated incredible amounts of controversy and general antibody reaction to his influence. The fundamental error underlying his candidacy is the claim that this reaction comes directly and exclusively from the sources of rot in the country. Sure, there is a level of institutional capture by political and corporate interests opposed to his. But that’s not the only force reacting to him. Among the reasons that motivate people to be on the “other side” of him, which his political machine works tirelessly to discredit, is decency. The Trump supporters who have been with him the whole way through seem to be stuck in curated information ecosystems that make even good people entirely blind to his flaws, and the newest converts to Trumpism, like his vice presidential candidate, seem to have elected to have selective memory about them. Trump’s unapologetically loud message is that common decency; treating other people with civility, speaking truthfully, treating relationships with others as more than transactional, and acknowledging one’s mistakes or limits to one’s own capabilities; that these don’t matter. That the only value these possess is as superficial PR tools, and anyone who attacks his many abuses of them is actually just doing so for their own gain. In fact, these moral principles hold value of their own, a society that truly values them flourishes in the long run, and defending them is the work that the best and most selfless citizens — if not always the ones in power — undertake. Yes, many people who hold these and other moral values have also found themselves unable to support the Democratic Party. But most have always been, and still remain today, firmly opposed to Trump’s leadership.
So building a platform against Trump’s enemies carries that inescapable and critical flaw of also building a platform against not just the self-interested forces opposing him, but also against these people. As much as his subordinates want to step up and claim free speech and debate, meritocracy, self-sufficiency, decentralization, family-centricity, and other values as the principals of his candidacy, the fact is that a man who holds principals so carelessly can never build a solution with them at the foundation. For that reason, the right solution to America’s governmental ailments can never be built under him. The extent to which his influence sets the culture for a new Republican Party is the extent to which America flounders in the coming years.
Yes, I believe that the Republican Party has to be the organization to put forward the next, while certainly not the final, viable plan for the US. The Democratic Party, paradoxically for an organization that most Americans still consider synonymous with “liberalism” and “progressivism”, has become a hollowed-out defender of the establishment, one that espouses illiberal ideologies, and no whose constituents no longer hold any shared vision except keeping Trump out of power. I believe that a wealth of ideas for positive change have grown in the chaos of the past eight years, and a large majority of Americans are very ready to hand a new party a landslide victory; but the absolutely crucial part of this is to select a leader capable of putting together a genuine platform from these ideas. It simply can’t be under the leadership that presided over January 6th and the ousting of Liz Cheney. Most people who possess their own moral code which includes any of what I mentioned above will refuse to do the required bending of the knee to work under Trump. To sign the unwritten but now-obvious contract that a moral code must always be second to Trump’s interests, one must also value their own advancement above all else. However, a leader who can remove that barrier to entry, who can instead genuinely commit themselves to the service of humanist values that transcend their own interest, will discover a wave of the brightest, most goodhearted and optimistic people, in not just the country but the world, swelling behind them.