Findings of Donald Trump’s guilt or innocence on legal charges – whether of fraudulently inflating his assets, of fomenting insurrection, or anything else – will nether save nor doom the Republic. Only we will.
If Trump is excluded from candidacy for the Presidency by legal proceedings, a considerable constituency, who already feel disenfranchised by intellectual elites, will feel that grievance all the more pointedly. Public affairs will be as contentious and volatile as ever. If he is not excluded, he still needs to win an election to gain it. If he wins that election, the prospect of him pardoning himself of any convictions and turning the apparatus of government to wreak revenge on his adversaries will be destabilizing. If he wins the Republican primary campaign and loses in the general election, which would be by a slim margin, his supporters’ moves will also threaten civil instability.
What – highly unlikely – scenarios could stabilize American politics?
One would be a crushing victory over Trump by another Republican. This would be re-stabilizing insofar as any Republican candidate will have to convince the populist constituency that they have a true advocate. Assuming the Democrats continue in their identity-politics doctrinaire agenda, America would return to a version of the “normal” polarized standoff, in perhaps rowdier but familiar rhetoric.
Another stabilizing scenario could follow from a Democratic moderation, to appeal sincerely beyond their designated interest groups. If, rather than working to squeeze enough less-committed voters to swallow their core agenda, they re-fashioned that agenda to support the nation as a nation, the opposing populist impulse might attenuate.
Neither of these scenarios are at all likely, particularly in the course of 2024. “Third party” ideas also will not work, despite our widespread expressions of disgust with “both sides” in current politics. For starters, third party actors are still mostly politicians also, whose electoral appeal has already proven to be weak.
So it seems America is in for a period frightening of instability, given the reasonable fear that bad actors will compromise democracy and /or weaken the nation, all with a prospect of cataclysmic failure hanging over our heads.
An exit from the polarization that nurtures our extremists will only open up when Americans realize their common interest – which must, and can, run at the same depth as any other sense of identity that any American might feel. Of course this sense will never apply for every one of 330 million of us. But can some common identity and shared ultimate purpose take hold, for a critical mass that can set a new, civil, public discourse?
The nation conceived itself in an abstract but conceptually clear creed. We hold that all persons are equally endowed with unalienable rights to live by our own lights; we also hold that government exists to secure those rights. Abstract creed requires living flesh, and that stuff of tangible existence comes with baggage, good bad and ugly, for each and all. But this creed is the only explicit expression ever given of “who we are;” it has expanded its hold in the messy real world throughout our history; and it commits us to progress in the future. It makes our nation different from others, largely defined by received traits and traditions. Americans have a moral sanction to make ourselves in our own chosen image, from the open-ended language of our conception.
A population of hundreds of millions will have many diverse, often conflicting, interests. Injustices will occur, by circumstance and by connivance of various parties. Impartial justice and justly conducted politics are necessary for basic civic peace, even though they never erase civic conflict and contention. What they do is keep those contentions couched as differences over means – to keep America’s true ends standing above our differences as they underpin our pursuits.
The obstacles that the coming years will impose, to any number of groups’ interests and to continued progress in embodying our creed, may be great or trivial, all supported by someone or another. Some may well disrupt key systems and practices by which we have grown. A self-serving narcissist may impose injustice in government; self-righteous rule mongers may invoke rights to impose particular identity groups’ prerogatives; new technologies may disorient us; a directionless generation may gut our institutions. Any start to recovery and progress will only come if “all of us,” as S.S. McClure put it in 1903, put our common American convictions first.
Common Conviction 