Lessons

After blogging the Bush and early Obama years fairly prolifically, I’ve had what amounts to a 15-year vacation from history. What have I learned in that time? A little bit of humility, to be sure. I was wrong about a lot of things — some inconsequential, some very consequential — too many to number extensively here, to be sure. But as I said, I learned something from being wrong. But I was right about a few things too, and I learned from that too. And as I watch the Trump II administration begin its work in earnest, some of those lessons seem awfully relevant right now.

1. Never make a sword so sharp that you wouldn’t want your enemy to wield it. Classical liberals have been shouting this for a long time. Any government project or agency is by definition political the moment it comes to life, and when you give it the power to do what you want, you license the other side to do with that power what they want. Democrats have ignored this rule for a long time. In fact, both parties have been in a handshake agreement for 30 years to get a crowbar into the Overton window of executive power and push with all their combined might. We’re about to see an administration use that power in a way that the Democrats will find deeply distasteful. As a relatively minor example, federal cultural and arts agencies will likely fund or celebrate some pretty awful stuff under Trump II, and progressives will no doubt be outraged by it. But if you create a political agency to fund art, how can you expect anything else? Trump’s proclamation of Black History Month, which named Clarence Thomas as an exemplar black American hero, is one small example of what will likely become more frequent. Frankly, I’m shocked it took Trump until the second term to tap into this power.

2. Stupid populist economic policy appeals to everyone. The Democrats laughed at the economic illiteracy of the Trump I tariffs — but then Biden kept them in place, which legitimized them as bipartisan policy. Now that Trump is taking a second helping, their opposition will be too little, too late, I fear. And while the critics are exactly right that tariffs on foreign goods do nothing but raise prices on consumer goods, they fail to see that the math is exactly the same for hefty corporate taxes. Really, I hate to burst your bubble, but the companies will pass on those costs.

3. Reaction politics are a loser. Democrats and Republicans take it as a matter of course that they must hate everything their opponents love, and love what their opponents hate. The American electorate may not be politically sophisticated, but they are sharp enough to see through this sort of bullshit. See the shifting Democratic positions on tariffs, above. If the left spends the next four years staking out a position of opposing anything Trump does, they will only create problems for 2028. His ideas, as foolishly as he may execute them as policy, have proved increasingly popular. What can they do instead? How about be the party of competence.

4. A similar dead end is the politics of smugness. After Biden won in 2020, Democrats doubled down on their tactics of telling the American people exactly how benighted, racist, and gullible they are. The American people took this about as well as you’d expect. A fairly simple rule for working to get someone’s vote next time is to avoid making them think you don’t want it. As more and more Americans turn against immigration, for instance, you might want to resist the urge to tell them they are stupid and bigoted. To be clear, I am in favor of immigration — lots of it, in fact. But I can see which way the winds are blowing. So I might, were I a Democrat, run on the policy of creating a sensible policy compromise that can allay voters’ fears and be executed with minimal disruption. Instead, the Biden administration spent three and a half years calling voters racists, only to pivot unconvincingly when it became clear that voters were about to give them a drubbing for it. As David Frum wrote almost six years ago, “If liberals insist that only fascists will enforce borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job.”

5. Stand up to bullies. I’ve been hard on the Democrats, with good reason. They were complicit in building this monster executive that Trump can now weaponize, and I don’t believe for a moment that four years of this will cure them of their foolishness. (As soon as they get power back, they will go blithely on with the project I mentioned in item 1 above.) But let me turn some scorn on Republicans, even if they are by this point a lost cause. If they take away no other lesson from their current predicament, let them take this: Stand up to a bully at the very first opportunity. It will only get harder as he gets more power. The GOP mortgaged its soul slowly enough that individual politicians could justify each step along the way as only a modest humiliation — a small bite of Trump’s shit sandwich. But the bites got a little bigger each time, and one started to see the grimaces on those occasions, with perhaps no better illustration than Oklahoman lickspittle Jim Langford voting against his own immigration compromise. To pinch from Wilde, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh.