Ten months into the second Trump Administration, one of the few non-partisan things that can be said is that politics and government are in turmoil. Blame whom you will, a budget impasse has shut down the federal government, on-again-off-again trade measures set markets on roller coasters, executive orders test Constitutional definitions, and public discourse grows more intransigent – and worse.
Whatever else Trump has done, he has blown the cover off of a superficial stability projected by prior political and governing routines. It may be radical and uncivil to fire thousands of federal workers, but “government waste” had become more than a cliché. It may be ill-informed to demand prettier Navy ships, but warship construction and maintenance have been dysfunctional for years. It may be drastic to eliminate USAID, but many inside State and other agencies found it frustrating to work with them.
Trump’s capricious, boundless, self-aggrandizing drive is unique in our politics discourse, but the bipolar duopoly of political meta-identities actually takes him in stride, only altering its rhythm, accelerating along a well-marked path toward partisan alienation. Where the “two sides” had turned budget impasses into a ritual, quietly closing deals within a few days, now they are ditching the routine and actively using the shutdown to claim political points. Where special prosecutors targeted opposing figures in painstaking case construction, the Department of Justice cuts corners to indict Trump nemeses.
At bottom, politics are gridlocked just as before Trump; the dynamics of the partisan standoff have been escalating the vitriol for a long time. Trump’s self-un-constraint is only one more escalation. While it may boost his supporters now, it also gives his adversaries a rhetorical template to mimic from “the other” side when the wheel turns. Columnist Kim Strassel notes that the parties (in her case citing the Democrats) do take each others’ tactical precedents “and run with them.”
Today’s escalation, and the turmoil that feeds it and feeds off of it, have, in a sense, two components. One is the old partisan trench warfare, ever-intensifying by its nature. The other is the radical departure from earlier norms. This element comes from Trump. And in his personal operating style he raises real portents around due process of law, separation of powers, and terms of the Constitution. The polarized public discourse does not separate these portents from old partisanship – the left sees it all as a unified attack on democracy by the Trump-led right, and the right sees it all correcting the left’s creeping woke dictatorship. This mode of discourse, if it continues, guarantees ever-deepening division in our body politic.
Can, or will, anyone extricate the concerns over due process and separation of powers – not to mention the idea of a third term President – from the bipolar trench war? “Both sides” have an interest: if the right enjoys the left’s discomfiture today, they will resent it all the more as those marginal swing voters swing back the other way. One commentator, noting the fissures within the Democratic party, suggests they put political content aside and unite in opposition to Trump. But shoudn’t all interests of all sides defer the partisan combat and focus on maintaining – or restoring, if your rhetoric demands that word – civic comity in Constitutional order?
Of course citing the Constitution then summons all the lawyers. And the Constitution is a legal document. It makes up the nation’s governing state, but it inevitably requires politics to exercise governing power. The document regulates those processes, but then, inevitably again, becomes a subject of political contest. Hence its provision for amendment; hence also the lawyers; hence, sadly, an nearly inevitable reversion to partisan polarization.
Republics, columnist Peggy Noonan reminds, are hard to maintain. We are indulging a partisan duopoly in a dangerous dynamic of alienation, of diverging political camps that look more and more like congealing, hostile, national identities. The tragedy of this dynamic would be that we do have a basis of common national identity – an inspiring, truly revolutionary concept of what the American “People” is. In declaring the independence of this People, the Declaration asserted that “We” hold certain Truths – of equal endowment of all in unalienable rights, and of government dedicated to secure those rights by consent of the governed. This creed of our national self-conception is abstract, and so admits of different interpretations, emphases on diverse aspects of freedom. But it was and is unique among national identities – we are not bound to old claims of blood, soil or monarch. We can have comity in the creed, over political alienation, if we make its ethos our higher priority.
If we cannot maintain this Republic, we lose more than a constitutional order. We lose America’s still-working example of free people’s self-government. It is time for all of us to embrace comity in our founding, to set political, even ideological, differences to one side for the nation’s sake. Due process, separation of powers, a measured and deliberate approach to any Constitutional revision, a first premise that founding creed comes before partisan identities, must take priority. Likely no politician will whole-heartedly endorse this call. So it falls to each of us, in our own hearts and minds, to demand this as first fealty and first promise of anyone who aspires to govern.
Common Conviction 