Rejoice, Donald Trump is no longer president. Breathe in the air, hug your family, be grateful the conga line of commentators who spent years spruiking the virtues of a deeply flawed president didn’t get their way. He wasn’t re-elected. He is gone. Trump has now departed in total ignominy, unwilling to even attend the inauguration of his successor. An ungracious loser till the end.
For Republicans, this is where the hard work really begins. How does the once great establishment party of America rebuild in the wake of the Trump catastrophe? Divided, diminished, tainted by its capitulation to a madman. It won’t be easy. A clean-out would be ideal, but unfortunately the same commentators who backed Trump will now sit in judgment of the next generation of Republican leaders. The senior Republicans still in the system will try and re-engineer history to justify their collective failures. This is why Trump’s demise may not be enough to repair the right of politics in the US. Reactionaries with populist agendas have overtaken true conservatism.
American politics has always been substantially more heady than Australian politics, but that doesn’t excuse the descent into madness we witnessed during the Trump years. Populism took hold at the expense of principles. And with so many senior Republicans prepared to kow-tow to Trump, the party has a problem. How does it throw off the anti-establishment roots that are now set within the party organisation?
Step one on the road to rehab for Republicans is to reclaim core conservative values. Not myopic, religiously outdated values, nor modern reactionary spiteful hissing. The traditional conservative values of protecting institutions and warning about the dangers of change are what Republicans should embrace.
The way former president Trump (aren’t they great words to hear? Say them out loud) stoked divisions by casting doubt over democratic institutions like the courts, the congress and the fourth estate should have been enough for any conservative commentator to have second thoughts about supporting him. The populism Trump dressed up as patriotic was simply an appeal to a hyper form of nationalism that historically never ends well. Preying on people’s discontent.
Scholars understood why millions of Americans voted for Trump, even if they were hoodwinked by a wannabe dictator. He personified what these disaffected voters found unfair in a society that can be unforgiving. Even though his business empire was built on sharp practices. But few scholars understood how so-called senior commentators and elected politicians could throw their support behind someone who openly mocked the disabled, attacked people about their appearance and delivered vile and unseemly rhetoric against women and ethnic minorities.
That should always have been enough to cast Trump aside as too evil to win the Oval Office. Especially among conservatives who once upon a time showed respect that was lacking on the left.
It is satisfying for everyone who warned of the dangers of Trump that a strong message was sent by the American people: a hammering on the popular vote, a resounding victory on the electoral college vote, a number of red states flipping to the Democrats and control of the House and Senate also handed to Democrats. But good government benefits from checks and balances. A healthy body politic requires strong political adversaries, to hold administrations to account.
The cleansing away of Trump needed a strong win when it happened, but there is danger for America in a one-sided debate in the aftermath. Democrats too should be worried about it. It is no coincidence that here in Australia John Howard lost government at the 2007 election after his thrashing of Mark Latham just three years earlier when the Coalition took control of both chambers for the first time in nearly 25 years.
The inability of the opposition to prevent the Coalition going too far, unchecked with its ability to pass legislation, rebounded on the government. It was turfed out of office soon thereafter, once Labor got its act together. The very laws it passed on workplace relations because of the control of the two houses were not only repealed, but ideologically wound back even further by the next Labor government.
Republicans may take a little longer to get their collective act together given the damage done by Trump but whether that is the case or not, Democrats need to avoid overconfidence. Overconfidence, by the way, is how Trump got elected in the first place back in 2016. The Clinton camp was too certain by half that America would reject someone as obviously flawed and crass as Trump. Many of us thought the same.
America has as many challenges internally as it does on the foreign policy front in the post-Trump era. Domestically, inequality is on the rise, social disconnection too, as a partial result of the pandemic. The death toll from COVID has devastated the US health system, which was already deeply flawed; 400,000 dead and counting. The team red, team blue divisions have not been greater since the Civil War. Not even at the end of the Nixon or Clinton presidencies.
Joe Biden is a natural-born centrist and deal-maker, but even he might find the task ahead overwhelming. He has started his term with a stake in the ground: pledging diversity in his cabinet and in the mindset of his administration. This won’t please the disaffected white middle-American base Trump manipulated for support, but Biden’s embrace of diversity is a necessity in a country needing to overcome its divisions along racial and gender lines.
Overseas, American power has certainly waned. The reputational damage done by Trump is off the charts. China has grown in power and confidence, and its authoritarian streak is already disrupting global trade deals and doing business internationally. In short, China is asserting itself.
What does America have left in the tank to respond? The worst the world could see happen is America retreat into isolation to deal with its own problems. By the time it arose from its slumber it might find the imbalance in geopolitical relationships too profound to overcome.
There appears to be an inevitability about the decline of America now. Even if getting rid of Trump has helped stave off the end coming sooner than it otherwise might. Cool-headed assessments of America’s capacity to sustain its dominance by the likes of Joseph Nye are harder to believe now. The worry is that America’s decline has been accelerated over the past four years, China’s rise continues to pick up speed, and India just hasn’t developed nearly as quickly as many hoped it might.
India being a democracy has long been the democratic world’s hope when it comes to replacing the power vacuum a declining America would leave behind. But the impacts of COVID and a highly dysfunctional body politic are stifling Indian growth.
As the world emerges from the effects of COVID, a realignment in the global order is inevitable. With Trump out of the picture America has a chance to reposition itself, but it won’t be easy.
Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.