JAMES PIERESON: “Shattered Consensus” revisited.
Like most, I did not foresee the rise of Donald Trump, who had announced his candidacy just a month before Shattered Consensus was published. No one in the establishment of either party took him seriously, though the same could not be said of Republican primary voters and a significant swath of independents and conservative Democrats—many of whom were happy to give the upraised middle finger to leaders in Washington.
Trump outdid Obama by challenging the post-war consensus with regard to foreign policy, criticizing trade with China, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the failure of European nations to ante up for their own defense. More importantly, Trump countered Obama by charting a cultural revolution of his own in response to the “diversity” revolution. Many in Washington and in the press claimed that Trump’s campaign was “unfair,” as, in their view, Obama’s revolution was legitimate while Trump’s was not.
The Washington establishment, which generally accepted Obama’s agenda, did not take kindly to Trump’s more fundamental objections to the post-war order or to his defense of the political and cultural claims of those white voters across the country who were expected to step aside peacefully as Obama’s diversity coalition took their place. Democrats in Congress, with the assistance of officials in the fbi and the Justice Department, did what they could to sabotage Trump’s presidency and drive him from office. They had some success in that enterprise, though at the expense of alienating seventy million voters across the country who cast ballots for Trump in 2020. Meanwhile, Trump has not gone away, as officials in Washington hoped—and expected—he would. This year he is looking to finish what he started in 2016. In light of recent polls, he may succeed.
Trump’s presidency and the opposition to it, along with his presidential campaign this year, has provoked a “legitimacy crisis” in the United States in which millions of Americans have lost confidence in key institutions, including the federal establishment in Washington, leading universities, and the mainstream news media. Obama’s diversity coalition continues inadvertently to threaten those same institutions from a different direction by undermining their legitimacy—see Claudine Gay—thus intensifying the crisis. What happens when a majority of the population loses confidence in the legitimacy of the political order? Will they still send their sons and daughters into the military? Will they still make sacrifices to fight wars in foreign countries, or to support wars like those taking place in Ukraine and Israel? Will they still accept the judgments of courts of law? At some point they may stop paying their taxes. The United States is beginning to look like an “administered” polity that does not have the support of its population.
See also: It Is Not Texas That’s Defying the Law — It’s Biden.