Let’s start here: there’s something weird about the Trump presidency. He doesn’t seem to fit into a political order.
His supporters find it a good kind of weird: Trump is draining the swamp or shaking up the political establishment. His liberal opponents find it a bad kind of weird: Russian malfeasance and/or Jill Stein voters put Trump in office to wreak havoc on the American political system. The anti-capitalist left, as usual, has a variety of takes. I’ll set the leftist reaction aside for a future post.
What is it about Trump that’s so weird, then? What kind of outfit is Trump running here? Into what political order does Trump fit?
I’ll start by saying something I rarely say: let’s get a little help from political science.
Political scientist Stephen Skowronek published a book in 1993 (revised in 1997) called The Politics Presidents Make.
In Skowronek’s view, the presidency operates through a series of political orders. Each presidency is defined by its relationship to the established order. Presidents exercise power and authority to create (reconstruction), defend and innovate (articulation), oppose (preemption), or bankrupt and end (disjunction) the order.
Reconstructing presidents include people like Thomas Jefferson and FDR who created new political orders from the ashes of the old order. Articulating presidents include people like Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and George H. W. Bush who put a personal spin on the established order.
Preempting presidents include people like Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton who created and exploited divisions within the established order and organized a politics that sustained those divisions. Disjunctive presidents are the great ‘losers’ of history who were allied with the order, but brought it down in flames. This group includes Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, among others.
Trump, the Political Order, and Skowronek’s Theory
Where does Trump fit into this system? Or, what is the current political order, and where does Trump stand in relation to it?
We might suppose the United States is still under the order established by Ronald Reagan. Reagan harnessed the end of the FDR order and the emergent neoliberal system to structure politics around deregulation and corporate power. To this day, the Republican Party still mandates genuflection to Reagan prior to gaining presidential power and authority under the GOP label.
If that’s true, we can eliminate the categories of reconstruction and preemption. If Trump is allied with the Reagan order, he didn’t create the order and he doesn’t oppose it. And so, the question becomes: Is Trump is building on Reagan’s ideas in creative new ways, or is he bringing about the final destruction of Reaganism?
Trump and Disjunction
Trump won only 46% of the popular vote in November 2016. He lost by about 3 million votes.
Things hardly got better for him from there.
He was the least popular president-elect in recorded history. And he has continued to be massively unpopular. Republicans are getting annihilated in special elections across the country, and a wave of Democratic enthusiasm makes major Democratic gains in November 2018 very likely.
Things are no better on the policy front. Trump has repeatedly boasted about the transformative nature of his presidency, but in almost 2 years he has succeeded in ushering through only one major piece of legislation. That major piece of legislation amounted to little more than a generic Republican policy platitude. The Trump presidency is practically a circus of resignations, hirings, and firings, a shitshow as much like reality TV as like a typical presidency.
All this points to disjunction.
Complications?
But none of these things guarantee disjunction. A variety of things could happen. In 2020, Democrats could once again nominate a historically bad candidate with disastrously low favorability ratings and no central campaign message. They could could nominate a technocrat who wins, but fails to deliver a genuinely reconstructive vision. Reaganism could, in fact, live to see 2025.
While recognizing the almost endless potential of the Democratic Party to blow it, the likeliest scenario, on the above reasoning, is that Trump loses in 2020 to a Democrat who constructs a new political order. Skowronek himself largely agrees with this assessment.
I’m hardly the first person to consider Trump in light of Skowronek’s theory. Others tend to agree that Trump is a disjunctive president.
Corey Robin, for example, agrees in his article in n+1. As does Julia Azari. Robin even strengthens the reasoning by pointing out that Jimmy Carter, the most recent disjunctive president, initially had some success at creating an innovative new spin on the FDR order before it all came to naught.
Trump, therefore, might end up being an even less successful version of Jimmy Carter. And where Robin has hedged, he has leaned toward calling Trump an articulating president, the other of the two most likely answers.
Perpetual Preemption of the Political Order?
This issue seems to resolve nicely. Trump is possibly an articulator of the Reagan regime, but he probably represents a disjunctive end to that regime. Trump is a servant of Reaganism who will either advance or destroy the order.
But there’s a complication.
In his book, Skowronek carefully attends to some of the historical changes in the presidency. He thinks that as its power has increased (e.g., the office has become larger, more bureaucratic, and more able to get things done), presidential authority (i.e., the president’s legitimacy and warrant for action) has declined.
In particular, it’s harder for presidents, especially good ones, to do things, especially new things. These forces push presidents toward preemption. Thus presidents merely repudiate the previous president, and no one creates a new political order.
Skowronek calls this a state of perpetual preemption.
Examples
It’s all a bit odd. Usually you don’t end a book by blowing up your theory. And if perpetual preemption is the new reality in the United States, Skowronek’s theory will have little future value. That Skowronek goes this route shows, at a minimum, there’s probably something to it.
Let’s look at the last few presidents (i.e., Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama). Two of the three are clearly preemptive (Clinton and Obama). George W. Bush was probably an articulating president after 9/11, which opened up new avenues for W. Bush to creatively reinvent Reaganism. But before 9/11, even W. Bush felt like little more than a repudiator of the scandal-prone Clinton presidency.
Moreover, a clear mechanism was pushing a state of perpetual preemption by the late 1990s. It was the Internet.
The Internet is an ideal vehicle for bashing one’s enemies and contrasting oneself to the vile and unvirtuous opposition. It sets up a handy platform for shouting platitudes and slogans rather than creating a real vision of, and roadmap for, material change. This is notably true of social media, especially Twitter.
Trumpism
Donald Trump began his political career as a businessman on TV, a professional wrestling personality, and an anti-Obama crackpot and conspiracy theorist. Once elected, he spent a fair bit of time overturning Obama’s executive orders and/or administration priorities. He clearly smells more than a little of preemption.
How does he get away with bashing others and accomplishing little? The Internet is Trump’s tool, and he uses it effectively for his own purposes. Trumpism is hard to imagine without Twitter.
And so I think there’s at least some reason to believe that Trump is a preemptive president and that we have entered a state of perpetual preemption. If we’re in such a state, we have good reason to believe that there is no settled dominant regime and that the presidency will bounce back and forth between two awkward political coalitions defined in large part by opposition to the other.
What’s the Point?
All this business about the nature of the Trump presidency impacts how we fight the Trump Administration, evaluate potential Democratic candidates, and assess the likelihood that we’ll have to deal with a second Trump term. It’s also of critical importance for left-wing strategy and coalition-building.
On the electoral front, if Trump is an articulating president, he’ll probably lose in 2020.
That’s good news.
The bad news is that any Democrat who defeats Trump will likely be a preemptive president who accommodates and incorporates Trump’s policies, just as Bill Clinton accommodated and incorporated the exploitative ‘free trade’ policies and neoliberal ‘welfare reform’ of Reagan/Bush, and just as Barack Obama accommodated and incorporated drone warfare/the war on terror and the neoliberal education ‘reform’ of W. Bush.
If Trump is a disjunctive president, he’ll almost certainly lose in 2020.
Again, that’s good news.
The more complicated news is that if Trump is a disjunctive president, his political opponents need to work on creating a new political order. And it’s there that the internal conflicts within the Democratic Party will be important. Do Democrats build a new regime around Silicon Valley, automation, super PACs, celebrities, and/or identitarianism? Or do they build a new regime around universal health care, racial justice, and worker justice?
Leftists must keep an eye on this.
Reconstruction and Its Alternatives
If Democrats are prepared to reconstruct the American political order in something like the latter way, there may be areas for useful partnerships, particularly at the local level.
I believe the best way to organize is through solidarity and direct action, not elections. But we might have the occasional rare opportunity to organize without being constantly under assault by the Democratic Party. That would be a relief. There will still be a need to guard against uncritical electoralism, but there might be opportunities for useful gains (e.g., the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez).
However, if Democrats are not prepared for ‘Sandersista’-style reconstruction, struggles become much more difficult. We’ll need new ideas and new strategies, and the Democratic Party will not be a part of any of that.
Supposing, though, that Trump is a preemptive president, we’ve probably entered a state of perpetual preemption.
That’s a different story entirely. It means, first, that Trump will probably win in 2020. He will probably be succeeded in 2024 by a generic anti-Trump Democrat who will fail to generate much in the way of meaningful accomplishments. We’ll have 6 more years of disaster, followed by another round of Clintonism.
If you want a picture of the future where there’s a state of perpetual preemption, imagine alternating between Trumpism and Clintonism forever.
That’s very bad news.
Final Thoughts
There’s another reason all this matters. A state of perpetual preemption would likely be much worse than Skowronek believes. He thought perpetual preemption had potential to be a good thing.
The reason for this, I think, is that Skowronek saw a positive relationship between creativity and destruction. As Skowronek puts it in his book, “the power to recreate order hinges on the authority to repudiate it.”
He’s rather insistent about the link: “the presidency is a battering ram, and the presidents who have succeeded most magnificently in political leadership are those who have been best situated to use it forthrightly as such.”
Skowronek’s probably correct that the power to create a political order depends on the accumulation of public warrant for destruction. The trouble is that undermining or even destroying the prior order neither presupposes, nor hinges upon, nor even correlates especially well with, the power or authority to create a new order. The dependence relationship works only one way, not the other.
What I’m saying is that it’s entirely possible to damage the existing order without building a new one.
Enter Trump.
If Trump is a preemptive president, and we’re in an age of perpetual preemption, there’s a good case to be made that this is where we find ourselves. On this interpretation, Trump is using the office as a battering ram, tearing shit up, and leaving only rubbish.
His political program is heavy on pronouncements, flash, and the generation of sexy headlines, but light on substance. His voter base is found among the traditionally regressive classes, and his appeal is largely identitarian in nature. He presents himself as little more than the defender of the honor of the allegedly wronged and besmirched white man.
That, I think, presents certain challenges that warrant further attention.
“What should I read next?”
OK, so you’ve got an overview of Trumpism. Great! Maybe you’d like to consider Trump’s rhetoric, or ask about fascism or impeachment?
