American voters face a choice between a vice president bereft of experience in economic and foreign policy, and a former president who resembles one of Shakespeare’s power-obsessed mad kings. The nominees represent parties that have shown little sign of being able to make the kind of compromises essential to successful governance. Is there any hope that either of these nominees and their parties can address the genuine crises the country faces?
Start with Donald Trump. He succeeded in 2016 because he was able to speak to one half of the divide that had opened up in America between the great metro centers that have prospered from the growth of high technology and finance and a middle America of small towns and mid-sized cities whose prosperity, if it exists, rests on resource extraction. Many of these towns have suffered for decades from the loss of manufacturing and mining jobs.
Trump spoke to the “left-behinds” who felt victimized by bad trade deals and footloose corporations, who felt looked down upon by the tech professionals, professors, and financiers of the big metro centers, with their predilection for political correctness. He also spoke to Americans who objected to illegal immigrants taking jobs and benefiting from public services, and who worried that Democratic support for draconian restrictions on fossil fuels would threaten their livelihoods. Unlike other Republicans, Trump didn’t scare off these voters with tirades against government debt and entitlements. In the 2016 election, Trump cobbled together a successful coalition of Rust Belt, farm, and fossil-fuel states.
“Trump’s first term wasn’t without its successes.”
Trump’s first term wasn’t without its successes. He kept the recovery from the Great Recession going by discouraging the Federal Reserve from raising interest rates. He slowed illegal immigration across the border. He slapped tariffs on Chinese goods in the hope that doing so would boost US manufacturing, and he and his trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement to stem American job loss. The Trump of The Art of the Deal also kept war at bay in Ukraine and East Asia, partly through his willingness to talk to the people in charge, including North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
If Trump were elected to a second term, it’s fair to assume that he would staunch the flow of illegal immigration (which Biden has finally begun to slow); that he would deal aggressively with China’s economic threat to the United States without provoking a war with the People’s Republic; and that he would try to end the disastrous war in Ukraine that under Biden has dragged on with no end in sight. Trump doesn’t share the Washington think tanks’ illusions of a Ukrainian victory. And even a bad deal that preserved Ukraine’s sovereignty would be better than a continuation of a conflict that leaves Ukraine impoverished and ungovernable. Trump and his administration would also no doubt correct some of the recent excesses of cultural progressivism. He would not, at minimum, appoint an assistant secretary of health who would lobby to reduce restrictions on “gender-affirming care” for minors.
But there is good reason to fear a second coming. Trump’s dark side was evident even before he first ran for president. His egotism, vengefulness, and gratuitous provocations overshadowed the achievements of his first term and led to his defeat in 2020; these tendencies would, there is reason to believe, blot out a second term. After his defeat in 2020, Trump attempted to challenge the results with dubious arguments and fringe legal theories, and he is preparing to challenge the 2024 results in the event he loses again.
In a country scarred by Indian wars and by a Civil War fought over slavery, Trump encourages hatred and division among Americans through scapegoating, bigotry, and violent rhetoric. He remains responsible for these things, even if his opponents have at times done the same. Trump isn’t the first president to lie. Franklin Roosevelt, for one, lied in 1941 to win passage of Lend-Lease and aid the British war effort against Hitler. But Trump has debased the coinage of the presidency by lying repeatedly for purely personal ends—to deflect criticism and to enhance his reputation.
Most of what Trump has proposed during the 2024 campaign either can’t be done or shouldn’t be attempted. Trump has promised to deport 12 million illegal immigrants—a promise which, if carried out, would sow panic and disorder and jeopardize families and communities. He sees the goals of tariffs as eliminating trade deficits with every nation—an effort that would imperil the dollar and wreak havoc in international trade. Tariffs and tax cuts won’t help unless they are accompanied by provisions that ensure that companies use them to create jobs and enhance their competitiveness. Trump’s earlier tax cuts encouraged stock buybacks rather than productive investments. And his plans for energy self-sufficiency are based on the idea that climate change is a hoax. He says he will “terminate” the Green New Deal.
In his first term, there was a gap between what Trump promised to do and what he was able to accomplish. In his second term, his proposals for upping the trade war with China would run afoul of some of his most lucrative backers from Silicon Valley and Wall Street, upon whom he has depended for financing his campaign this time around.
In his campaign, Trump has steered clear again of traditional Republican jeremiads against big government. But some of Trump’s most important donors are also free-market libertarians who disdain government intervention in the economy. Trump has already promised Elon Musk, probably his largest single donor, a role in his administration. Does Trump agree with Musk’s suggestion to subject the American economy to a kind of shock therapy? If so, a second Trump term—without even considering his stated plan to use the Justice Department to avenge himself against his detractors—could turn into a nightmare.
The career of Kamala Harris exemplifies the rise of college-educated women and minorities in the Democratic Party. Two of the last three nominees have been women. Harris comes out of the San Francisco Bay Area and for most of her career has backed the politics of the college-educated professionals of the great metro centers. She represents, in other words, the other side of the great divide running down the middle of American politics.
Harris’s record as a public official doesn’t paint a clear picture of her priorities in economic or foreign policy. She made her mark in California as a prosecutor. In the Senate, she is best remembered for her aggressive questioning of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh during her service on the Judiciary Committee. As vice president, she was assigned the task of stemming illegal immigration from Central America, where, as has now become clear, the administration did little to break up the network of smugglers that was responsible for up to 80 percent of illegal border crossings. Her finest moment as vice president came during her defense of abortion rights after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. As a presidential candidate, she has been cautiously competent but, except during her convention address, uninspiring, her discourse riddled with clichés.
“Harris has put forth positions on the economy that are slightly to Biden’s right.”
In her abortive 2019 presidential primary campaign, Harris veered far to the left, but she has subsequently repudiated her support for Medicare for All and for banning fracking. She has also steered clear of identity politics. But at a time when the electorate has moved away from center-right stances on economics, Harris has put forth positions on the economy that are slightly to Biden’s right. These positions may reflect her desire to win over larger donors, or they may be campaign ploys, or they may reflect her real convictions.
In her first economic address, Harris departed from the Biden administration’s proposal of a 39.6 percent capital-gains tax for those earning more than $1 million a year. Instead, Harris proposed 28 percent. She also backed off from the administration promises to impose tough regulation on cryptocurrencies. And Harris didn’t merely reject Trump’s tariff hikes. Herequating of tariffs with taxes suggested that she was against any plan to raise tariffs on Chinese goods, even though the Biden administration retained and expanded Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports. (In fairness, though, Biden himself campaigned against Trump’s tariffs in 2020.) Her own economic proposals, featuring a plan to encourage small business, recall Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign.
Harris hasn’t distanced herself from Biden’s foreign policy. That is probably to be expected, since as vice president, she would have created a diplomatic stir if she had dissented. But there is no evidence that she favors different policies. She eschewed even the smallest, and least controversial, chances to hint at a difference. After weeks of negotiation, a Palestinian-American legislator from Georgia who had submitted an anodyne speech urging support for Harris while lamenting the plight of Palestinians in Gaza (without mentioning Israel’s bombings) was denied a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention.
If Harris does continue the Biden administration’s policies, she will be courting disaster. In Ukraine, the administration has gone from promises of a Russian collapse and Ukrainian victory to being dragged along by the inertia of war without any apparent strategy to end it. In the Middle East, it has proclaimed support for a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon while providing weaponry for the continuation of war.
I don’t mean to second the argument that under Harris or Trump, America will be in decline. Other countries have even worse problems than we do. Unlike China, Japan, or many European countries, the United States isn’t facing a diminishing workforce that has to subsidize growing numbers of retirees. Americans have abundant natural resources.
“Other countries have even worse problems than we do.”
I am also not arguing that if Trump wins, the United States could be plunged into civil war or dictatorship. I don’t underestimate Trump’s ability to sow chaos, but I still believe that at his age, he is a passing phenomenon without comparable successors. It’s possible that Harris—whom I voted for—could be more than a mere alternative to the mayhem of Trump, that she could be a transformative president. I would say, however, that under either Harris or Trump, America is unlikely to deal adequately with the problems that it faces.
One of the hallmarks of the older American progressivism of Herbert Croly and John Dewey was the idea that government should be guided by the spirit of pragmatic inquiry. Policies should be understood as experiments subject to improvement or rejection in the light of subsequent experience. America’s greatest achievements of the last century followed this pattern. The Social Security Act of 1935 was an imperfect initiative that over the next four decades became refined. America’s foreign policy during and after World War II was the product of lessons learned by many in both parties from the failure of American isolation in the interwar years.
What is most striking about our current politics is that it precludes this kind of pragmatic experimentation, whether in foreign or domestic policy. Harris, even if she wants to continue what was positive in Biden’s domestic policies, will probably be stymied by a Republican Senate (and perhaps House, too) and by a Supreme Court averse to executive-branch regulatory initiatives. Trump has already promised to rescind all unspent funds under the Inflation Reduction Act, and his House ally Mike Johnson has suggested (in remarks he later sought to walk back) that Republicans would seek to repeal the CHIPS and Science Act.
That’s no way to run a government, but for the time being, it’s how it is being done. It won’t doom America to extinction, but it will block any progress on a range of serious problems—from widening economic and social inequality that underlies our political polarization and gives inordinate power to the very wealthy; to the danger of climate change that, if ignored, will eventually require massive readjustment.