Zachary Callen - American Political Development and the Trump Presidency

American Political Development and the Trump Presidency

AMERICAN GOVERNANCE: POLITICS, POLICY, AND PUBLIC LAW

Series Editors: Richard Valelly, Pamela Brandwein, Marie Gottschalk, Christopher Howard

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

American Political Development and the Trump Presidency

Edited by Zachary Callen and Philip Rocco

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Callen, Zachary, editor. | Rocco, Philip, editor.

Title: American political development and the Trump presidency / edited by Zachary Callen and Philip Rocco.

Other titles: American governance.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] | Series: American governance : politics, policy, and public law | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019032125 | ISBN 9780812252088 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Trump, Donald, 1946 | Political development. | United StatesPolitics and government2017

Classification: LCC E912 .A44 2020 | DDC 973.933092dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032125

Contents

Philip Rocco and Zachary Callen

Julia R. Azari

Daniel J. Galvin and Chloe N. Thurston

Travis M. Johnston

Gwendoline Alphonso

Paul Nolette

Megan Ming Francis

William D. Adler

Philip Rocco

Andrew S. Kelly

Zachary Callen

Adam Sheingate

Robert C. Lieberman

Introduction: An Unsettled Time

Philip Rocco and Zachary Callen

As the words of his inaugural address echoed across a rain-soaked National Mall, Donald Trump cut a hole in time. His presidency, he said, marked a breaking point in American politics. No longer would a small group of elites reap the benefits of government while forgotten Americans bore the cost. Now, Trump suggested, we are only looking to the future. Even so, the speech telegraphed a dystopian present; the United States had become a landscape of rusted-out factories, cities teeming with crime, and national borders defenseless against terrorist threats. Gone was the promised land that Trumps predecessors foretold in their inaugural speeches, the city on a hill that America was destined to be. Trump identified few, if any, sources of political possibility. America would be made great again not through providence, but by Trump himself: I will fight for you with every breath in my bodyand I will never, ever let you down. Rather than binding the nation through conciliation and compromise, Trump promised nationalism: The bedrock of our politics, he said, will be a total allegiance to the United States of America. He labeled his foreign policy with a phrase burdened with an isolationist and anti-Semitic history: America First.

Trumps presidency has created an atmosphere of tension that pervades American political life. On the one hand, Trump identifies and authorizes the grievances and fears of loyal followers spread across rural and suburban communities across the country. On the other hand, his actions in office have sparked credible fears about the future of U.S. democracy. Soon after Trumps election, there emerged a cottage industry of nonfiction literaturewritten by academics, journalists, and punditsdevoted to interpreting the present U.S. political situation. A sample of the titles is instructive:

Can it Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America

Fascism: A Warning

How Democracies Die

How Democracy Ends

How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

How to Save a Constitutional Democracy

Its Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America

The Despots Apprentice: Donald Trumps Attack on Democracy

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

As this list makes plain, anxiety is the genres central feature, and for good reason. In many respects, the Trump presidency has disrupted patterns of presidential governance. Trump is a figure untethered to republican virtues, who refers to the media as the enemy of the people and dehumanizes minorities, women, immigrants, and anyone who opposes him. Yet the anxiety runs deeper. Increasingly, even conservative commentators seem lost in the era of Trump and worried about the future of U.S. democracy itself, some going so far as to urge voters to turn to the Democratic Party. Given what we know about how democracies die, can it happen here? How bad is the situation? How much worse is it than our observational abilities allow it to appear? And, if regime change is indeed happening, can it be reversed?

Answering these questions, as the chapters in this volume show, requires us to understand how politics play out in time. One cannot consider whether it can happen here without historical data on regime change. It would be difficult to assess Trumps potential impact on democratic institutions without analyzing how these institutionsincluding and especially the executive branchhave developed over time. What explains the rise of Trump and, indeed, of Trumpism writ large? Without attending to the intersecting developments of political parties, racial ideologies, and governing institutions, no answer to this question would be forthcoming. To explore how time and temporality have shaped the Trump presidency, we draw on the research By paying close attention to the factors that contribute to both continuity and change in American politics, APD research is ideally situated to take a longer view and help make sense of the Trump presidency in a period when other approaches to American political science continue to struggle.

In one way, time provides a methodological instrument for evaluating the Trump presidency. Leveraging historical comparisons across national contexts allows us to identify the key variables that have contributed to democratic collapse in the past, providing a battery of diagnostics for assessing the health of American democracy in the present. Historical analysis also reminds us that for millions of African Americans, the threat of authoritarianism is a reminder of the past rather than a future dystopia. Tracking change over time reveals the social forces that disrupted these authoritarian orders and identifies the forms of struggle and mobilization that may be necessary to (re)produce democracy in America.

Yet time is not merely a methodological tool for comparing the Trump presidency with past moments of political disruption. Rather, understanding Trumps rise to power as well as his effects on political institutions demands attention to how time works as a substantive component of politics. As Elizabeth F. Cohen argues, time is required for almost any exercise of liberty that people seek to protect through the enforcement of social contracts, constitutions, and laws.routine simply because he wished to do so. Indeed, his status as a political outsider has in numerous ways proved to be a liability rather than an asset.