President Trump, or the Twilight of the Conservative Gods
The Family Notes
By Nicolas Colin (Cofounder & Director) | The Family
Each presidential election in the United States sees the candidates making the same argument in mobilizing their supporters: “This election,” they say, “is the most important of our generation.” In 2016, Hillary Clinton took this argument as far as it could go: voting for her was a vote to preserve Barack Obama’s legacy; voting for Donald Trump was nothing less than a vote to destroy the United States.
Interviewed by The Nation just following the election, Stephen Skowronek, a professor of political science at Yale, presented a more nuanced version of these moments. In his eyes, the history of the presidency is divided into broad political regimes, each dominated by a certain ideology. The end of the nineteenth century, for example, was ruled by the Whig laissez-faire ideology. The Stock Market Crash of 1929 began another, more liberal regime organized around the new institutions of the New Deal. Since 1980, we’ve seen the regime in which the conservative revolution dominated.
For Skowronek, each of these political regimes is marked by three presidents. The first is the “reconstructive” president, the one who uses the office to erect the base of the new regime: Abraham Lincoln (elected in 1860) for laissez-faire; Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932) for the New Deal; Ronald Reagan (1980) for the conservative revolution. The second president in the cycle articulates the dominant ideology for a new day, coming along in a moment during which things were beginning to slow down. This was the role taken on by Teddy Roosevelt (who became president in 1901), Lyndon B. Johnson (1963) and George W. Bush (2000).
The third protagonist in this play is the “disjunctive” president, the one whose presidency is such a massive failure that it destroys the ideological consensus and creates the conditions necessary for a new “reconstructive” president and thus a new political regime. Herbert Hoover, elected in 1928, was the disjunctive president for the laissez-faire system. Bogged down in his ideology, he was unable to face the crisis of 1929, and thus discredited the Republican Party for generations. Jimmy Carter, elected in 1976, was the disjunctive president for the New Deal. Trapped by inflation and the energy crisis, too weak to impose a reform agenda, Carter plunged the Democratic Party over a cliff and opened the way to the conservative revolution.
All of this can present an optimistic vision of Donald Trump’s coming presidency. Rather than reinforcing the conservative revolution for multiple generations, he will likely be a disjunctive figure that discredits the Republican Party and opens, in four years, a new reconstructive phase under a Democratic president.
Since 2008, Barack Obama gave the impression of being that reconstructive president that Democrats had been waiting on for decades — which explains precisely why the Republican Party’s resilience from 2010 onward and Trump’s recent victory were so baffling. But for Skowronek, Obama arrived a bit too early, at a point when the conservative revolution was still vibrant. To kill off that regime, a Republican president needed to arrive as a disjunctive figure, thoroughly discrediting the party and finally breaking the trend.
Trump has all the qualities needed to achieve exactly that. Like Hoover in 1929, he is already caught between the still dominant ideology and voters’ expectations. Like Carter in the ’70s, he has only a vague understanding of the machinery of governance and little sway over his congressional majority. What’s more, he’s distracted by his personal affairs and could, much like Berlusconi in Italy, see his presidency crash through incompetence, nepotism and corruption.
The force of Skowronek’s model resides in its ability to match significant political patterns with techno-economic transitions. The laissez-faire ideology coincided with the age of steel and electricity (1875–1929); the New Deal was also the age of the automobile and mass production (1908–1973); the conservative revolution was the age of business strategy and global finance (1968–2008). With the onset of the digital age, a new techno-economic transition has already begun. Our current age, driven by personal computers and networks, also calls for a new political age, one that breaks from the conservative revolution with new personalities, new ideologies, and new politics.
It is not merely chance if we’re seeing new political figures take the stage such as Elizabeth Warren or France’s Emmanuel Macron. Unlike Obama, these figures could take power in circumstances that lend themselves to “reconstruction” as described by Skowronek. But prior to this, there must be the disjunctive figure who kills off the old regime. This will be a painful moment for the United States and the rest of the world, but we’re all counting on Donald Trump’s ability to rise to the challenge.
(While “The Family Papers” series is made of long-form stories, this “The Family Notes” series presents shorter reactions and highlights related to current events. Thanks to Kyle Hall and Laetitia Vitaud, as well as to William H. Janeway for useful reading recommendations. This story is adapted from an op-ed piece published in the French magazine L’Obs.)
