In The End of Democratic Delusions George Packer explains that the Reagan Revolution ended in 2008 and its successor—which he is calling the Trump Reaction—is neither progressive nor conservative. If he’s right (which seems likely) we will need to reorient our ideological map to make sense of the new political landscape.
For two and a half centuries American politics alternated between progressive and conservative periods, played between the 40-yard lines of liberal democracy. The values of freedom, equality, and rule of law at least received lip service; the founding documents enjoyed the status of civic scripture; the requisite American mood was optimism. Although reaction has dominated local or regional (mainly southern) politics, it’s something new in our national politics—which explains why Trump has been misunderstood and written off at every turn.
Thankfully Packer doesn’t stop at telling us “hey, this is no longer a struggle near midfield between liberal and conservative.” Here are his most valuable insights on the new terrain and my thoughts on the actions we should take to achieve the best short- and long-term success for the United States.
Asked by pollsters if they’re concerned about the state of democracy, these voters (Trump voters) answer yes—not because they fear it’s demise, but because it has already failed them.
I found myself among good company over the last couple of years trying to warn Trump voters in my sphere about the danger to democracy that Trump represented and the need to protect this venerable system we inherited. Now I wonder if I was wrong to think I had listened long enough to actually understand them. I know the system we have still has some baked-in flaws that need to be corrected and I still believe that the burn-it-down approach is misguided but rather than try to convince them to save democracy I need to accept the premise that democracy has failed them and genuinely seek to understand their perspective on how and why it failed them. The focus should be on how to address the issues that have soured them on the system.
Adjacent to the demographic illusion is the majoritarian one. By this theory, the Democratic Party is kept out of power by a white Republican minority that thwarts the popular will through voter suppression, gerrymandering, judicial legislating, the filibuster, the composition of the Senate, and the Electoral College. By this thinking, the ultimate obstacle to the American promise is the Constitution itself. The United States needs to become less republican and more democratic, with electrical reforms and perhaps a second constitutional convention to give more power to the people. This analysis contains some undeniable truths—the public’s voice is thwarted by structural barriers, partisan machinations, and enormous quantities of plutocratic cash. As long as Republican presidents continued to lose the popular vote, the majoritarian argument was tempting, even if its advocates ignored the likelihood that a new constitution would turn out to be less democratic than the old one.
As important as it is to reject the flawed majoritarian illusion it is also important to address the undeniable truths. We need to remove structural barriers that thwart the public’s voice and we need to neutralize both partisan machinations and the outsized influence of enormous quantities of plutocratic cash.
Something profound changed in 2008. I spent the years after the financial crisis reporting in parts of the country that were being ravaged by the Great Recession and the long decline that has proceeded it, and were growing hostile toward the country’s first Black president. Three things recurred everywhere I went: a conviction that the political and economic game was rigged for the benefit of distant elites; a sense that the middle class had disappeared; and the absence of any institutions that might have provided help, including the Democratic party. It was hard to miss the broken landscape that lay open for Trump, but the establishments of both parties didn’t see it, and neither did most of the media, which had lost touch with the working class.
Members of the media and both the progressive and the conservative establishments need to reengage with the working class. It is time to directly and effectively fix the rigged economic and political games and rebuild the middle class. The media, as well as both conservative and liberal political parties need to become institutions that effectively provide help to everyday Americans rather than vehicles that cater to one elite group or another.
The Trump Reaction will test opponents with a difficult balancing act, one that recalls F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line about a first-rate intelligence holding two opposed ideas in mind while still being able to function. The Democratic Party has to undertake the necessary self-scrutiny that starts with the errors of Biden, Harris, and their inner circle, but that extends to the party’s long drift away from the most pressing concerns of ordinary Americans, toward the eccentric obsessions of its donors and activists. But this examination can’t end in paralysis, because at the same time, the opposition will have to act.
Packer is right about the self-scrutiny that the Democratic party needs to undertake. Throughout the first Trump term and Biden’s administration I have been arguing that the Republican party needed to undergo a similar self-scrutiny. The only thing that has changed now is that I have no confidence that it can. I believe that it is up to anti-Trump conservatives to get firmly in touch with the concerns of ordinary Americans and use that perspective to guide them in their necessary efforts to reform or replace what’s left of the Republican party.
Journalists will have a special challenge in the era of the Trump Reaction. We’re living in a world where facts instantly perish upon contact with human minds. Local news is disappearing, and as much-depleted national press can barely compete with the media platforms of billionaires who control users algorithmically, with an endless stream of conspiracy theories and deepfakes. The internet, which promised to give everyone information and a voice, had consolidated in just a few hands the power to destroy the very notion of objective truth. “Legacy journalism is dead,” Musk crowed on his own X in the week before the election. Instead of chasing phantoms on social media journalists would make better use of our dwindling resources, and perhaps regain some of the public’s trust, by doing what we’ve done in every age: expose the lies and graft of oligarchs and plutocrats, and tell the stories of people who can’t speak for themselves.
Journalists definitely need to focus their limited resources on the kind of work that will help to rebuild public trust and as a society we will have to find a way to build a more resilient information ecosystem that can evade or withstand attempts at manipulation from rich individuals or powerful institutions.
