Donald Trump's minority presidency is a return to form for the Sixth Party system. Every aspect of his presidency is the same in form if not degree with presidents dating back to Richard Nixon. Trump's presidency may represent the patterns of the current party system in its most attenuated and disturbing, but he is not new or novel. Instead, he is the unexpected but reasonable outcome of the social and political forces that have governed American politics since the Vietnam War era.
Starting in 1992, the US has elected three minority presidents (Clinton, Bush and Trump) and one majority president (Obama). For most of that time, we have also had divided government in which one party controlled the White House and the other at least one house of Congress. The resulting legislative gridlock has deepened the underlying public distrust in government.
Trump's pose as the outsider businessman who was going shake up government and get things working again was an almost perfect repeat of Ross Perot's 1992 pitch. Trump's ability to stage a hostile takeover the Republican party should come as no surprise to anyone. Republicans have been thriving on the anti-politician, anti-Washington, anti-government rhetoric for decades. Their voters took them seriously and handed the reigns of power to the most un-politician person to run for office. Everything about Trump's conduct is a rejection of politics and politicians; he is radically uncircumspect in words and deeds; he respects no one and tramples decorum underfoot. He is the logical outcome of decades of Republican rhetoric. That Republican politicians didn't mean it when they said is irrelevant; Republican voters believed it.
The inability of the Republicans, with nominal majorities in both houses of Congress, to actually govern is a feature not a bug. The paradox is that they can't overtly undo policies they dislike. The irony is that they can silently destroy them by failing to adequately fund or staff various agencies. In turn, as government becomes dysfunctional, it creates a feedback loop. Voters grow angrier and angrier at politicians and government and are motivated to turn to a Donald Trump, who falsely promises he can fix things. As Congress has become more dysfunctional, the voting public has focused on Presidents. The architecture of the US political system is such that even the most powerful president cannot act without Congress. Voters want government to work (for them). So they vote for presidents hoping they can make it work. Of course, they cannot.
The Sixth Party system has been characterized by legislative gridlock. Policies go to Congress to die. With the exception of a few, short term flurries of activity (i.e. 2009 to 2011), Presidents and Congress have been at loggerheads. Few meaningful policies have been enacted. The current dysfunction is not unprecedented; Carter and the Democratic Congress in the late 70s were unable to work together to enact major legislation, despite there being a long list of important issues and despite sharing basic values. Carter, like Trump, ran afoul of Congressional personalities and egos. (I’m not arguing Carter was any thing like Trump, personally the two men could not be more different; Jimmy Carter, among other things, has actual integrity and honesty.)
By the early 1980s, any bipartisan gas left in the tank was rapidly consumed. Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court ended any partisan comity in DC; for people on the right, the Bork hearings are still a source of inarticulate fury. (Reagan was warned by Democratic leaders to not nominate Bork; he was warned Bork would be rejected; Reagan and his administration wanted a fight and they got it.)
The American Right is still fighting the Cold War. Republican Presidents since Nixon have dreamed about redeeming the US from our defeat in Vietnam. Whether it was Grenada or Iraq or Afghanistan or Ira (again) and hopefully not North Korea, Republican foreign policy has been muscular and aggressive. Of course, it has failed repeatedly.
If you missed the air of desperation in conservative attacks on Democratic presidents and their foreign policy you can be excused. Conservatives and Republicans (basically one and the same these days) need to believe Democratic presidents are failures to sustain their belief in their ideology. It is a source of grinding pain for conservatives that almost every single negative prediction about the 2003 Iraq War was accurate. On a boringly regular basis, conservative columnists offer up articles attacking communism and socialism and cultural Marxism in the US, along with triumphalist articles about the victory of capitalism. Yet they are unable to grapple with the inherent tensions in capitalism. (Democrats and liberals are hardly immune; Hillary Clinton’s campaign was the vortex of the inherent tensions among progressives about our political systems.)
Donald Trump (in fact all of American politics) are currently repeating the behaviors of the Sixth Party system. Immersed in the system, we struggle to see it at work. The good news is that since we are part of the problem, we are also integral to the solution.
Our challenge, the liberal project for the next few years, is to see what is happening and envision and articulate a way forward. It’s not just undoing the President of Donald Trump; it’s remaking American politics from the ground up.
(I’m not done thinking about this topic; I’m hoping comments here can help me refine and clarify my thinking.)