The New York Times - USA (2020-11-09)

THE NEW YORK TIMES OP-EDMONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2020 N A

L

OTS of peopleon the left and right

found reasons to be a little unhap-

py, or downright miserable, about

the election. The Republican

Party lost the White House; Democrats

have lost ground in the House, and their

path to a Senate majority seems very nar-

row.

But there is one group of people unre-

servedly happy — even ecstatic — about

the results: those who lean libertarian.

They got almost everything they

wanted. On the one hand, Joe Biden has a

friendlier record on trade and immigra-

tion, and on the other, they avoided the

burst of spending that inevitably comes

with unified control of the federal govern-

ment.

Old-school debt and deficit hawks will

also be pleased, but libertarians are ec-

static.

In the early years of the Trump admin-

istration, with Republicans in control of

Congress, the country saw a steady rise in

spending and ballooning deficits and debt.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas might not have

been quite right when he said that, after

all, President Trump “didn’t campaign on

cutting the debt.” Actually, Mr. Trump did,

but in a throwaway manner, while putting

more stress on continued, even increased,

big spending and debt.

And as is so often the case with one-

party control, as in Mr. Trump’s first

years, big spending took hold. According

to the Cato Institute, over Mr. Trump’s

four years (including two with unified Re-

publican control), spending went up by a

total of 10 percent. Something similar hap-

pened under George W. Bush: Spending

shot up 24 percent.

But what really seems like an effective

arrangement for controlling spending is a

Democratic president with Republicans in

charge of at least one body of Congress.

During the first four years of the Barack

Obama and Bill Clinton administrations,

both of which included years of split con-

trol of government, spending was more re-

strained or even reduced. Under Mr. Clin-

ton, spending inched up only 3 percent. In

Mr. Obama’s first term, total spending ac-

tually went downby 10 percent.

There are ways beyond the budget that

a Biden presidency could be a boon to lib-

ertarians. Mr. Trump was a disaster when

it came to free trade, kicking off a huge

trade war with China and “renegotiating”

NAFTA so that it contained more protec-

tionist, anti-free-market measures like

wage controls. By contrast, Mr. Biden will

probably cut a more pro-trade profile.

Mr. Biden is likely to pursue pro-immi-

gration reforms and policies, both in the

realm of regulation and administrative

practice, and in terms of legislation. Liber-

tarians never liked the mechanism by

which President Obama established the

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals

program, but they also hated President

Trump’s dismantling of it — as well as his

major cuts to legal immigration, big

spending for a border wall and more.

They view legal immigration, and espe-

cially high-skilled workers, as an eco-

nomic boon to the country and like that

free trade keeps prices down for Ameri-

can consumers and extends our opportu-

nities to sell abroad.

And there is also Mr. Biden himself.

Sure, he made campaign proposals for a

health care public option and spending on

climate programs. But he has a reputation

for tough fiscal discipline relative to the

rest of his party.

As vice president, he helped resolve

spending stalemates and government

shutdowns with that ultimate spending-

slashing tool that big-spending Demo-

crats and Republicans hated but libertari-

ans loved: sequestration, or automatic

spending caps.

As a senator, he worked hard to keep the

deficit and debt under control. To take a

couple of examples, in the mid-1990s, he

voted for a constitutional amendment that

would require the federal government to

balance its budget — a position that put

him at odds with a majority of the Demo-

cratic caucus. In 1997, he voted yes on a

Republican budget that cut both taxes and

spending.

With a Biden presidency, a McConnell-

dominated Senate and a less Democratic

House, libertarians get the best possible

outlook on spending, debt and deficits,

and these other important policy areas —

while also perhaps dodging the specter of

court packing and preventing far-left

nominees for important executive roles.

The election will be deeply disappoint-

ing to die-hard Trumpers, Democrats hop-

ing for a landslide and Never Trumpers

eager to see the Republican Party burn.

That’s a lot of people, probably even most

voters.

But for some of us, it will be a win — a

silver lining out of the country’s political

divisions. 0

The One Group Ecstatic About the Election Results

LIZ MAIR, a strategist for campaigns by

Scott Walker, Roy Blunt, Rand Paul,

Carly Fiorina and Rick Perry, is the

founder and president of Mair Strategies.

Libertarians will be

happy to avoid one-party

government control.

Liz Mair

‘‘

I

SPEAK the pass-word primeval,I give the sign of

democracy,” wrote Walt Whitman in “Song of My-

self.” “By God! I will accept nothing which all can-

not have their counterpart of on the same terms.”

One of our greatest poets sought the deepest forms of

democracy, where people are completely unleashed to

share their fullest humanity. Whitman endlessly sang of

rebirth and renewal, in nature and in human society.

As a mythic, defining characteristic, the idea of rebirth

has a profoundly fertile history in this land. Americans

have never stopped being reborn, despite the conflicted

meanings invoked by that concept. We admire second

and third acts; we endured at least two reconstructions of

our Constitution and our race relations. We revived with

lasting significance from a colossal Civil War. We con-

fronted a Great Depression and remade the very idea of

modern government. We fought the largest war in history

on two world fronts and decisively won both. We cele-

brate, at least some of us, our dream of the assimilated

multitudes into some kind of “one from many,” living by

the creeds of natural rights.

But like all deep myths, this one has always survived or

grown against the grain of experience and taken suste-

nance in response to the power of its many enemies. Sup-

press the votes of Americans, and watch them go vote in

heroic numbers.

The challenge of repair from all the wreckage left by

Trumpism may be the work of not merely a political sea-

son, but of a generation.

First, this task requires an awareness of how long the

Trump disaster was in the making and how many people

and forces enabled it. And second, it requires a forthright

confrontation with the fact that to rebuild a society and a

political system, we must admit that they are broken.

A shortlist of our broken institutions can seem painful

and overwhelming: the presidency; the Senate; the Su-

preme Court; government agencies that run everything

from law enforcement to criminal justice to the envi-

ronment to public health; the election system, including

the Electoral College; the news media; our global part-

nerships like NATO; and finally, our public schools and

universities — places that are supposed to reimagine

lives.

Fueling this decline and distrust are not only warring

ideologies about the purpose of government, but also hos-

tility to the very idea that facts and truth, as well as re-

spect for scientific and humanistic knowledge, are the ba-

sis of a functioning democracy.

This sobering reality, however, is matched by our na-

tion’s spirit — as demonstrated by the remarkable voter

turnout in this election. And that spirit, along with the ac-

knowledgment that we are broken, can help us find the

stamina and the will to climb out from under the gloom of

this national nightmare.

In “The One and the Many: America’s Struggle for the

Common Good,” the theologian-historian Martin E. Marty

posited that the motto “E pluribus unum” had collapsed

into “almost shattering controversy.”

By the end of the 20th century, Professor Marty argued,

Americans had engaged in myriad culture wars that ren-

dered stories of any shared past all but impossible. He

saw the country divided into “totalists” and “tribalists.”

Totalists were people who felt left behind, cast aside by

elites, and who craved a story of “wholeness” about the

American nation. These folks felt assaulted by mass me-

dia and wanted nothing to do with complexity and con-

flicting identities.

The tribalists, who might assert race, gender, ethnicity

or religion, demanded theirstory as the source of group

cohesion against claims of any unifying whole. Professor

Marty saw Americans retreating into “separatenesses”

by choice, and he worried, with Reinhold Niebuhr, that

“the chief source of man’s inhumanity to man seems to be

the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to the other

man.”

In “Age of Fracture,” the historian Daniel T. Rodgers

brilliantly studied the big ideas and debates in political

culture over the past three decades of the 20th century

down to the attacks on Sept. 11. Mr. Rodgers found a cul-

ture in which the very notion of “human nature” had

changed from the post-World War II moment of stress on

“context, social circumstance, institutions, and history”

to a ’90s emphasis on “choice, agency, performance, and

desire.”

Baby boomers, on the left and right, now ran the coun-

try, but they inherited a politics shaped by Reaganism,

which thrilled to “city on a hill” mythology, but sought

votes by stoking resentments and hatreds born of vast

changes wrought by the 1960s. Ronald Reagan largely

avoided explicitness, but his legion of followers believed

civil rights, feminism and various liberation movements

had gone too far. The sense of society as “imagined collec-

tivities” shrank, Mr. Rodgers said. Americans were splin-

tering into increasingly divided enclaves of thought. The

country may have unified in the immediate wake of Sept.

11, but soon broke into political camps already formed and

growing in tenacity.

Mr. Trump’s presidency is the result of a long history of

the Republican Party’s descent into moral bankruptcy,

but also of a culture of social media-driven alienation in-

volving all of us. The presidency of Barack Obama was

startling progress, but the bitter reaction to him on the

right came from well-cultivated precincts of media, think

tanks, racial nationalism and corporate organizing.

Overcoming this Trump scar, carved into our con-

sciousness, needs leadership with a chastened sense of

history, the knowledge that the beautiful vision of Ameri-

can pluralism is sometimes not as potent as the political

weapon of hatred.

If there is to be a rebirth of this American experiment,

our leaders should take heart that it has happened before,

but never without blood, sacrifice, social transformation

and epic political fights. Countless European immigrants

have found homes here, but never without travail or with-

out having to fight the headwinds of prejudice. Chinese-

Americans faced two major exclusion acts and murder-

ous attacks at mines and on city streets in the West in the

19th century. Mexican-Americans faced discrimination,

deportations, lynchings and all manner of hatred along

the southern border long before Mr. Trump ever bellowed

about a “wall” to keep out their descendants.

Native Americans in the 19th century and modern West

have fought white settlement, U.S. soldiers, ecological dis-

asters, forced marches and starvation, periodic geno-

cides, reservations and “civilization” schools. About four

million African-American slaves achieved emancipation

in the victory and horror of the Civil War, and thereby

prompted a second founding of the United States in the

three great constitutional amendments of Reconstruc-

tion. Black freedom made many other freedoms possible

— for women, for gays and lesbians, for the disabled —

even if it took generations.

All of these groups are Americans, and not only are

they still here, but their successful and tragic stories now

define the national history and how we commemorate it.

Their pluralism is the very lifeblood of our democracy,

and together they are the American electorate.

Perhaps the most famous rebirth metaphor in Ameri-

can history emerged when Abraham Lincoln went to the

ravaged town of Gettysburg, Pa., in November 1863 and

explained the Civil War. Lincoln spoke at an unfinished

cemetery constructed to cope with a staggering 7,

dead from the recent three-day battle, and another 33,

wounded and more than 10,000 missing or captured.

With astonishing succinctness, Lincoln told his coun-

trymen that the old republic had died on that and other

battlefields. Out of all that sacrifice, Lincoln argued, the

American people — the “nation” — could experience a

“new birth of freedom.” Popular government might yet be

saved, human freedom forged in new definitions, and

even the most challenging Enlightenment idea of all,

“equality,” launched on a new history. The first republic

was dying before their eyes; at horrible cost, a new one

could yet be achieved.

The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass had himself

created many breathtaking rebirth metaphors by 1863

and 1864 to explain and justify the scale of the war. Around

the same time that Lincoln delivered his annual message

to Congress in late 1863, Douglass was traveling the coun-

try delivering his “Mission of the War” speech. Lincoln

declared that “the policy of emancipation” “gave to the

future a new aspect,” a signal change from his rhetoric of

only a year earlier. The president envisioned a remade

America: “the home of freedom disenthralled, regenerat-

ed, enlarged.”

In his address, Douglass said the American “body poli-

tic” had never been healthy while slavery lived. His lan-

guage was shuddering but hopeful. He called the Confed-

eracy “a solitary and ghastly horror, without parallel in

the history of any nation.” Confederates had to be met and

defeated, however “long and sanguinary” the struggle.

Douglass’s rebirth story soared as a radical abolitionist

version of the Gettysburg Address; but the argument was

the same. The war had delivered the country a “broken

Constitution,” requiring a legal and political refounding.

He believed it was the “manifest destiny” of the war to

“unify and reorganize the institutions of this country,” and

such an aim gave the quest its “sacred significance.” The

mission of the war, Douglass exclaimed, was “national re-

generation.”

Fondly do we hope that rebirth from Trumpism will not

come from bloodshed, but from legal reform, peaceful ac-

tivism and politics. But our history should prepare us to

know we have been here before, and no regeneration

comes without strife. Above all we will need to revive,

somehow, the idea that truth matters. “For truth,” the phi-

losopher John Dewey wrote, “instead of being a bour-

geois virtue, is the mainspring of all human progress.” 0

Defeating Trump Is Just the Beginning

DAVID ROTHENBERG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The road to Trumpism was decades

long. The road back won’t be easy.

David W. Blight

DAVID W. BLIGHTis a professor of history at Yale and the

author of “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.”

BEFORE DEMOCRATS BEGINtheir reckon-
ing over their apparent failure to take the
Senate and their reduced numbers in the
House, before the intraparty recrimina-
tions between centrists and progressives,
let’s take a moment to appreciate what’s
before us. After four grueling years, Don-
ald Trump has been defeated.
The fact that the election came down to
the wire in the swing states, that around
70 million Americans looked at the last
four years and opted for more, is an omi-
nous sign for the future of the Republic. It
is also a reminder of how much worse this
could have been.
Trump, it turned out, was far better at
pumping up his side’s turnout than we
might have assumed from polling data.
The president lost Pennsylvania, but he
received far more votes in the state —
more than 3.3 million — than he did in
2016, when he won it.
Joe Biden got more votes in Texas this
year than Trump did in 2016, and it still
wasn’t nearly enough for a flip. There was,
in fact, a red wave; it just wasn’t big
enough to carry Trump to victory.
This increased red turnout was a boon
to down-ballot Republicans in some
states. They appear to have benefited
both from people who love the president
but haven’t been consistent Republican
voters in the past, and from the smaller
share of anti-Trump Republicans. Repub-
lican senators outperformed Trump in
Maine, Texas and, in the case of David
Perdue, very slightly in Georgia.
A Republican Senate is not yet a lock —
races in Alaska and North Carolina still
haven’t been called, and there will be at
least one and probably two runoffs in
Georgia — but it’s a likelihood. The impli-
cations for Biden’s first term are dire, and
the sort of pro-democracy reforms that
would stave off a future of minority rule
are, for the moment, off the table. It’s un-
derstandable that many on the left are
dispirited.
But that should not distract from the
monumental accomplishment of ending
Trump’s malignant presidency. It is rare
for American presidents to be defeated af-

ter a single term. This is the fifth time it
has happened in a century.
Because of the Electoral College, the de-
ciding states in this campaign were to the
right of the country at large. The president
tried to muster the power of his office
against his opponent. He pressed
Ukraine’s government to defame Biden
and got his allies in Congress to launch bo-
gus investigations.
He corruptly used government re-
sources for his re-election, even turning
the White House into a stage set for the
Republican National Convention. In an
unprecedented move, he put his name on
stimulus checks, making it seem as if the
money came from him.
Trump installed a lackey atop the Postal
Service who slowed down mail delivery
during a pandemic in which a dispropor-
tionate number of Democrats were rely-
ing on mail-in ballots. The president
stacked the courts with judges who would
likely rule his way if his margins in tip-
ping-point states were close enough to
challenge.
This year, V-Dem, an international
project tracking democracy around the
world, wrote, “The United States of Amer-
ica is the only country in Western Europe
and North America suffering from sub-
stantial autocratization.” As The Washing-
ton Post reported, the group’s data shows
that only one in five democracies that
start down such a path is able to right itself
before full-blown autocracy takes hold.
Beating the odds required an extraordi-
nary coalition that ran from Angela Davis
to Bill Kristol. It required young progres-
sives disappointed by the losses of Bernie
Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to never-
theless mobilize for Biden. It required
some traditionally Republican suburban-
ites to put the good of the country over
partisanship.
And while exit polls showed that Trump
improved his margins among Black and
Latino voters — especially Cuban-Ameri-
cans in Florida — we still owe Biden’s win
to people of color.
As I write this, he’s ahead in Arizona,
which is possible only because he got an
enormous share of the Latino vote there.
He has a tiny lead in Georgia — a state that
was solidly red when Trump took office —
in large part because of the heroic work of
Stacey Abrams and her New Georgia
Project, which has registered and orga-
nized Black voters in the face of relentless
voter suppression.
There will be time later on to argue over
what, if anything, Democrats can do to
win back people who likedemagogic
strongman politics. There will be time to
start thinking about how to address the
damage wrought by a president who,
along with Fox News celebrities and other
right-wing figures, is going to convince a
large part of the country that their loss is
illegitimate.
Yet for now, an existential threat to lib-
eral democracy in America has been van-
quished.
Trump will almost certainly continue to
vandalize the country during the lame-
duck phase of his presidency, but soon he
will no longer be able to rule over us. He
will be cast out of the White House, dis-
graced, to meet his creditors and New
York criminal investigators.
The next chapter of American politics
won’t be easy. But this one — squalid, ter-
rifying, degrading, tragic — is almost
over. 0

MICHELLE GOLDBERG

We’re Finally

Getting Rid

Of Him

Don’t undersell the

triumph of ousting

Trump.