All signs are pointing to Donald Trump becoming the 47th president of the United States, and only the second U.S. president ever to be elected to a second non-consecutive term. This election, however, proved far more dramatic than Grover Cleveland’s, given both the last-minute replacement of the incumbent candidate, President Joe Biden, an assassination attempt on Trump’s life, and the apocalyptic rhetoric concerning the fate of democracy throughout.
And yet while the results of this election are not without consequence, and we will doubtless see a doubling down on rhetorical excess in the coming days, it is easy to overstate the significance of what has just occurred.
For as different as they clearly are in many respects, the two candidates shared one major thing in common: neither Kamala Harris nor Trump has ever manifested much personal interest in the actual business of governing. Indeed, I hope I will not shock anyone by saying that these are the two least substantive candidates the two major parties have fielded in a single election since the 19th century. Thus, this election has, whether most voters consciously understood this or not, served as a referendum on the political establishment itself as much as anything else—Harris being its champion and Trump its scourge.
For, though neither a heavyweight political operator nor a policy maven, Harris would have represented a continuation of the status quo. After all, though many seem to have forgotten this, Biden remains the sitting president of the country. And while one can argue over when precisely he truly became unable to execute the functions of his office, it is inarguable for those with longer memories of the man’s career that he was already much diminished when he first took office. Nonetheless, his incapacity hardly posed an obstacle to him and his administration’s ambitious governance on multiple fronts. On foreign policy, it waged a proxy war against a nuclear Russian power while funding Israel’s war against Gaza. Closer to home, the Biden administration took the most aggressive regulatory approach of any administration in over 50 years and adopted novel and far-reaching policies concerning race and gender.
This is perhaps the clearest demonstration available that America has moved closer to the Hobbesian vision of the state, in which the actual person of the sovereign is less important than what he or she personates; the sovereign’s role is to represent us more than it is to personally govern.
Trump meanwhile is (again) in the interesting position of being a sovereign who otherwise opposes (and is largely opposed by) his own Leviathan. This is to say that he is both personally disliked by the overwhelming Democratic rank-and-file of the federal government, and he ran on a broad challenge against overweening federal power.
However, it is likely that this opposition will prove largely notional. Much has been made of the proposed appointment of Elon Musk to head a “government efficiency” drive. But they seem not to realize that the laudable goal of cutting out bureaucracy is itself a bureaucratic process. It requires a deep understanding of and patience for the particular nature of bureaucratic institutions. One cannot resolve their problems like Alexander cutting through the Gordian Knot. This is, ironically enough, a conservative insight; as G.K. Chesterton famously remarked, one ought not to remove a fence before having given serious thought to the purpose that fence’s existence served. And like it or not, there is no version of modern government that does not operate bureaucratically.
Thus, clearing out the administrative state will be a positively Herculean task—one that would defeat a far more engaged executive, whereas Trump has demonstrated little interest in managing even the basic functions of his office, much less committing to radically remaking entire branches of the federal government. It is not incidental that Trump has already held office once, and his two most successful endeavours during his first term were tax cuts and appointing two Supreme Court justices, both of which measures would have been undertaken by a more conventional Republican president. Meanwhile, hundreds of other appointments went unmade.
It is useful to remember at this moment of his victory that there is still no real thing as “Trumpism” as a governing paradigm. While there are heterodox movements on the political Right that seek to break with conventional post-Cold War GOP policies while continuing to oppose liberal Democrats, these have yet to capture Trump’s interest in any sustained way—recall that the much-feared Steve Bannon was unceremoniously dismissed within less than a year of Trump assuming office in his first term.
Conversely, those same movements have also proven unable to identify another figurehead with Trump’s broad political appeal, meaning they are largely starting from ground zero come his retirement or death. And while his undeniable influence on America’s political culture has caused other politicians to imitate aspects of his persona—including his own VP pick, JD Vance—these mostly come off as inauthentic impersonators.
Critics in particular make much of the Trumpian cult of personality, but this has never really been yoked to a consistent ideological program. That same cult of personality—or charisma, if one prefers—has drawn a variety of figures and organizations into its ambit: Republican Party reptiles, true believers, D.C. think tankers, and assorted human parasites.
It must be said that these also include thinkers of substance and originality, such as Oren Cass, who hopes to place America’s political economy on a more genuinely democratic footing at home, and Elbridge Colby, who hopes to reorient U.S. foreign policy toward strategic challenges in the Pacific abroad. These and others are a breath of intellectual fresh air, and one can only welcome more creative thinking on the Right, but that their ideas would be converted into meaningful policy under a Trump administration is uncertain at best. Going against this status quo requires a kind of sustained intensity along with attention to detail—what Alexander Hamilton called “energy in the executive.” There is little evidence that Trump possesses the necessary measure of these qualities even as a younger man.
The modern centralized state—along with the media-academic-NGO complex that supports it—is dug in deep. Even its eradication would not necessarily solve our problems. One can rightly argue that the construction of this state has been destructive to the habits of republican self-governance. But dismantling its architecture hardly ensures that, once degraded, those habits will naturally be revived.
In this respect, both Trump’s victory and Harris’ loss offer lessons for Canada, where the underlying governmental inertia continues to move the country according to its own ideological momentum. Over the past decade, Canada has undergone profound changes, largely independent of the preferences of the citizenry.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau—a chimerical figure who combines Trump’s egoism with Harris’ vapidity—is less a driver of these changes than many suppose, despite his position. The machinery of the state and its capacity for imposing even unpopular agendas on a nominally democratic citizenry remains general across different countries, and those who believed the rhetoric about this “most significant election of our lifetimes” would do well to reflect on the durability of the situation here at home.
