The Winged Nike of Pennsylvania Avenue: Cautions and Conclusions

The Winged Nike of Pennsylvania Avenue (full series)
It Wasn’t Just the Presidency | The Current American Plurality
How the Left Lost | Cautions and Conclusions

Cautions and Conclusions

But the Victory that now lies with President-elect Trump’s Republicans remains winged and ready to flee. They may find that, in the words of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s George Washington from the musical Hamilton, that “Winning is easy, young man, governing is harder.”

Already, their victory was less comprehensive than it could have been. Republican Senate candidates in Michigan and Wisconsin lost by three-tenths and nine-tenths of a percentage point, respectively, while poor Republican nominees in Arizona and Nevada encouraged those states to split their federal tickets. Redistricting that followed the 2020 Census, into which the Left had poured millions in resources, and re-draws following the 2022 elections hurt House Republicans. In 2016, a popular-vote lead of 1.1 percentage points handed the House Republican Conference a strong majority with 241 seats. In 2024, a popular-vote lead of approximately 3 points will yield a Republican majority so narrow it could theoretically be threatened by special elections to replace Representatives selected for jobs in the second Trump administration. School choice suffered setbacks in multiple ballot-measure campaigns.

The new Republican coalition may prove unwieldy as it comes time for President Trump to govern. Traditionally conservative Republicans in the Senate have proved less than enthusiastic over some of Trump’s administration selections. While ex-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) was forced to withdraw as Attorney General nominee over personal indiscretions, the nominations of ex-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) as director of national intelligence, of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as secretary of health and human services, and of outgoing Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR), the choice of Teamsters Union boss Sean O’Brien, as secretary of labor have received pushback from Senate Republicans over policy differences. Such coalitional selections and approaches to governance can fail in two ways. First, they can make the government’s policy incoherent. Second, if the government adopts a full-spectrum liberal policy that resembles the Bidenomics it was elected to dispatch to history with extreme prejudice, the electorate may seek others who will do the deed.

And always there is the temptation to the same hubris that made Nike fly from the Democrats. Joe Biden and his allies misread the electorate’s commission to them in 2020. While the electorate had almost surgically excised the mercurial incumbent Donald Trump from American government, it had bound the new Democratic majorities with narrow margins and a nominally moderate president in the hope of restoring an Obama-era vision of normal life after the COVID-19 pandemic. But instead, President Biden and his allies took Winged Nike landing upon them as a commission to change America on a scale equal to that of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, a hubris highlighted by a 2021 dinner involving President Biden and a number of liberal historians including Doris Kearns Goodwin and John Meacham.

When instead of liberal normality, continued COVID militancy, inflation, foreign crisis, and open-border disorder emerged from the Biden administration, the electorate turned to Republicans to return the country to normal on their terms. After four years of “WEIRD Elite” consolidation, the national electorate handed the federal government to the counter-elite. The WEIRD Elite, and the Biden administration that handed its government to it, failed to deliver for the “normal center” of “inoffensive, law-abiding, upwardly-mobile, middle-class culture,” which is why its attempt to hand power off to Biden’s number-two failed. Whether the second Trump administration can deliver for the normal center will determine whether President Donald Trump will be able to do what his nonconsecutive-term forebear, Gover Cleveland, could not, and hand his party future success on which to build.