The ostensibly high-minded, grown-up, responsible intellectuals have told me over the years that I shouldn’t waste too much time on anything as vague and gossamer as arguments over fundamental political principles. Whether the intellectuals lean left or right, and even more so if they’re somewhere in the boring but respectable center, what they want to hear is statistics, very-recent news, political popularity polls, and pending legislation. You’re taken more seriously if you talk about that stuff than if you point out hard-to-quantify things such as the degree to which one party or another echoes the philosopher Rousseau or takes a pessimistic view of agrarian life.
However, even if both major political parties end up deploying very similar policies when the rubber hits the road, knowing why they did so—or even just why they think or say they did so—may help you predict what they’re likely to strive to do the next time they have significant political leeway or public-support leverage. It may indicate where we’re headed.
Politicians from both major parties might deploy SWAT teams to the suburbs and target very similar criminals, for instance, but it may really matter in the future whether one party has habituated itself to thinking that this was Step One in eradicating local control of law enforcement whereas the other has habituated itself to thinking that this was Step One in eradicating foreign influence on American culture—not that either of those goals is good.
With that in mind, it’s fair to ask not just how big current federal budget outlays are, how many people are being deported (fewer than under several prior recent presidents, apparently), or the number of new troop deployments but what Trump and others imagine themselves to be doing, even if we all agree on the immediate practical consequences.
Asking about the rational long-term plan is a habit most of us lost during Trump’s first term because it was so chaotic, and that was as much the fault of the largely-liberal establishment as it was the fault of Trump’s petty whims. First-term Trump, despite all the fears his enemies expressed and confident bluster his supporters emitted, was almost entirely Trump playing defense: Trump reacting to attacks, critics, negative news reports, lawsuits, impeachment efforts, intelligence-sector schemes, and so on. It was easy to dismiss worries about his long-term political project when people on both sides were telling us the whole effort could collapse next week if a given current dispute wasn’t fought over ferociously at maximum volume.
It wasn’t clear that either temperament or circumstances would afford him the contemplative quiet time necessary to formulate anything as consequential as a long-term agenda, and with virtually all politicians, that’s good. Most politicians, not just Trump, want to do terrible things to the world, to each of us, if they’re given the time and space to think about it. If they’re paralyzed by petty squabbles and thus unable to come up with new ideas or implement new legislation, we’re usually much better off, contrary to what all those aforementioned respectable intellectuals constantly tell you.
If the practical answer to the question “What does Trump have planned for America for next year?” was, for a few years, something like “He’s very angry about Rosie O’Donnell today,” that was for the best. Now that Trump’s had time to think about things—and now that multiple political factions have had a chance to ask what they really want out of Trump’s second term or the regimes that succeed it—it’s reasonable to be more worried.
Take his remark last month that he’d be comfortable pulling the broadcast licenses of ABC and NBC because they lie so much. Mostly tantrum-throwing bluster if uttered during the crazy days of the first Trump term, it’s now the kind of authoritarian idiocy that may see a few Stephen Miller-like advisors and/or podcasters voicing support as they fumble around for a few remotely-plausible arguments from fringe constitutional scholars.
Ditto his gleeful ruminations about jailing flag-burners for a year. Eight years ago, his supporters might have said he probably wouldn’t make good on the idea, so there’s little point in worrying about it. It’s not as if arguments in favor of banning flag-burning are novel in the U.S., but it’s troubling that many of Trump’s supporters lately sound moved not by the (already bogus) conservative rationales of old—unique sacred symbol, more than just an act of speech, etc.—but by the shallow, more street-fighter-like rationale “Oh yeah, well the left does it when they punish vandalizing rainbow flags, so I totally get to do it too!” or, even more shallowly and more sadistically, “See how just the threat to ban flag-burning goaded the left into burning a flag! That’ll cost ’em at the polls! Ha ha, stupid leftists getting down into the gutter! Trump is a master strategist!”
That kind of who-can-hit-lowest thinking is as clear a downward spiral as one could seek in political philosophy: punches over principles, the rule of men over the rule of law, today’s vicious kick over any hope of future civility. You can hate ABC, NBC, and flag-burners as well and still worry about where the thinking of their current foes leads—and worry in particular about people who claim, perhaps disingenuously, that they see no reason to worry.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey