Barely a day
passes when I do not see some new plan for an anticipated “restoration” after
President Trump leaves office. As 2029
approaches, I am sure we will see many more.
Alas, I have yet to see a plan that thoughtfully engages with what
should be the most foundational question in this process: do we seek a strong federal administration or
a weak one? Or, put another way, is the
goal to strengthen majoritarianism or to protect minorities that the majority
may wish to trample?
The right answer
to this question depends on how anti-MAGA thinkers envision the future. If they seek to empower future majorities and
the party that controls the presidency and Congress, presumably they believe
that they will hold majority power for the foreseeable future once Donald Trump
passes – or at least that a stronger executive will allow them to build more
than MAGA can destroy when holding the reins.
The goal of this strategy presumably would be to make it impossible for
the Republican Party to dominate power until it moderates and rededicates
itself to democratic values, much as voters made Democrats wander in the
wilderness for twenty of the twenty-four years between 1968 to 1992 because
they perceived the party as being too far left.
Alternatively, if anti-MAGA
thinkers believe that control of the federal government is likely to alternate
frequently, they should limit the powers of any majority and support devices
that allow minorities to block actions harmful to them. This would be particularly true if they believe
that MAGA is more efficient at destroying than they are at building.
Of course, Democrats
want to be a persistent majority and believe they should have the
majority of the electorate’s support.
But neither of those is the question.
The question is one of prediction:
do MAGA’s opponents believe they actually will be the majority? And, related, will they make maintaining
majority electoral support their top priority?
If so, then plans like dismantling the filibuster and remaking the
Supreme Court might make practical sense.
If not, those moves would be disastrous.
I see no reason to
believe that Democrats will persistently hold a majority in years to come: I am convinced that Donald J. Trump will not
be the last president to seriously threaten this country’s democracy in the
near future. Further, I believe the liberal-progressive
movement, as it currently stands, is structurally incapable of doing what is
necessary to have a plausible chance of preventing another ruthless MAGA
president from taking office. I
therefore regard progressive proposals to raise the stakes for elections as not
just misguided but profoundly reckless.
To start,
alternating control of the White House would continue an entrenched recent
pattern. Democrats have won half of the
last two, four, six, eight, and ten presidential elections. The last Democrat to secure 53% of the
popular vote was Lyndon Johnson over sixty years ago; in the intervening years,
Republicans have surpassed 53% three times.
Although some progressives like to point to President Trump’s relatively
low popular vote totals, in both 2016 and 2024 extremely conservative
candidates won about 51% of the vote while candidates on the left took 49%; the
two elections differed primarily as to which coalition was more fractured. Even with the economy staggering and hundreds
of thousands dying as the Trump Administration fumbled its response to the
pandemic – failures that would have obliterated a Democratic candidate – President
Trump still received almost 47% of the vote in 2020.
To be sure,
President Trump is quite unpopular now, but he will not be on the ballot
again. And his deep unpopularity has not
translated into corresponding support for Democrats: at this writing, only 38% of voters think
well of Democrats compared with 55% hostile to them. That is all but indistinguishable from
Republicans’ 39% to 56% unfavorability
rating. This is not the stuff of which
dynasties are made.