In 2012, who could have imagined that in 2024, a Democrat supported by Dick Cheney would face off against a Republican backed by Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.?
Yet today, American politics is no longer about the game of “liberal” and “conservative” as it was practiced in the 2000s between two rival patronage networks who ultimately agreed on key issues from immigration to foreign policy. Instead, it is about values. It is about the direction of America. It is about a simple question. Was America on the right track until November 2016, or was it on the pathway to oblivion?
Behind Kamala Harris stand those who, regardless of nominal partisan affiliation, identified with the American politics of the 1990s and 2000s. Who believed that, despite some speed bumps when it came to Iraq, the rise of China, mass migration, and increasing polarization at home, America was on the right track. Globalization, open borders, free trade, and letting a few companies transform their founders into the sort of oligarchs who dominated Russian politics in the 1990s were certain to pay off in the end.
On the other side, rallying behind Donald Trump is an even broader alliance. Its members come from different parties and different ideological backgrounds. Tulsi Gabbard endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the scion of one of the nation’s most prominent Democrat families. The one thing that unites them is the belief that the American consensus as it existed before 2016 was not working and could not work.
They came to this conclusion at different times, and they may not agree entirely on what the solution is. But they know that whatever the path forward is, there can be, to borrow the vapid slogan of the Harris campaign, no going back. They understand that if Donald Trump loses this year that is precisely what will happen.
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born – so said the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. This could describe the last eight years of American politics.They have represented nothing less than a twilight struggle between the idols of the old order – globalization, free trade, corporatism, government-led cultural engineering – and those who push for something new.
One reason there has been a struggle to describe the ideological footing of Trumpism is because the unifying factor is the recognition that the old world is dying, and it must be buried before the struggle for succession can be concluded.
While the old world may be dying, it is not going to go down without a fight. The reason so many were willing to sacrifice so much to remove Donald Trump in 2020 was not because of anything he did, but to prove they had the power to do so. The conviction was that if the verdict of 2016 was reversed, the illusion of the old world could be restored.
In their more candid moments, the more insightful adherents of the old order may let slip the truth – that even they recognize that Humpty Dumpty cannot be put back together again. Their key goal is to ensure that if there is to be a new world, it will be built on their terms, with the minimal compromises necessary.
The 2024 election, then, is a struggle over which current in American politics and society will have to make peace with the other.
A victory by Donald Trump would force the major forces in American society to make peace with 2016 and to recognize that they can influence and contest the course of events, but that the key debates will take place on the terms Donald Trump created. Immigration will be fought on how best to close the border, not whether it should be closed. Tariff policy will be determined by what rates best maximize the interests of the United States, but the purpose of trade policy will be seen first and foremost as how best to help Americans. There will be vigorous debates about whether to prioritize Europe or East Asia and whether aid to Ukraine advances U.S. interests, but the framework of the debate will be that it advances American interests. Most importantly, and this is critical, identity politics enforced by cancel culture will be seen as a failure. The media and popular culture’s efforts to cancel Donald Trump and make support for him prohibitively costly socially will be perceived as having backfired.
None of this will produce a one-party state. It may not even help the Republican Party in the long run. The Democrats have benefited from Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s willingness to at least feign the abandonment of causes such as defunding the police and open borders.
But what a Trump victory will mean is that the Democrats who advocated the need to compromise with reality – the Tulsi Gabbards and Matt Stollers of the world – will have been vindicated. The Democrats perhaps stand to gain the most from a Trump victory if it brings their independent thinkers, for decades coerced into silence, to the fore.
In turn, a Harris victory would have the opposite effect on the Republican Party. It will cast 2018, 2020, and 2022 in a different light, demonstrating the futility of waging a frontal attack on the media and academic consensus, and the imperative of making peace.
Unlike the Democrats, for whom defeat would rehabilitate innovators and nonconformists, a Harris victory would benefit the Republicans who chose social acceptability and status over ideology. The former Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney aides who have waged partisan warfare on behalf of Democrats for almost a decade would be able to claim vindication. The “Republicans” who found Kamala Harris and Joe Biden compelling candidates for president would be greatly emboldened.
That is why the greatest division this year is no longer between left and right – Tulsi has always been on the left wing of the Democratic Party, David French on the right of the GOP – but between independent thinkers and worshipers of power. It is less important that David French is evangelical than that he writes for The New York Times and would not be anyone if he did not write for the Times. It is less important that Tulsi will have fierce arguments with Donald Trump and other Republicans. What matters is they are interested in her arguments, while the Democratic response is excommunication.
If there is one thing that unites Harris’s Democratic and Republican supporters, it is their belief that policy is too dangerous to be left to the voters, and those that attempt to involve voters in conversations about the future of the nation are cranks at best and dangerous extremists at worst.
The politics of Kamala Harris’s coalition is a politics of extortion, not ideology. Dick Cheney did not defend the Iraq War as wise, but charged critics with disloyalty. Advocates of mass amnesty for illegal aliens do not argue for the wisdom of such a policy, but rather make the cynical claim the party would be unable to win without it. Harris’s backers do not make arguments in favor of free trade with China. They treat proponents of tariffs as economically illiterate hicks, whose unfitness is proven by their prioritization of the well-being of American workers over abstract economic models.
A defeat of Kamala Harris is not, then, merely a defeat for Dick Cheney and Joe Biden, but for their entire model of politics. Politicians will be free to make arguments for amnesty and foreign wars if they so choose, but they will have to make them on the merits, not on the basis that a candidate who disagrees with them cannot win, because Donald Trump will have proven them wrong twice.
This will have a purifying effect on both parties. It will not eliminate disagreement, as disagreement is a healthy part of politics. It will require those disagreements to be grounded in argument rather than power.
Tulsi Gabbard can make liberal arguments without the need to hide behind power, a skill she demonstrated when she ruthlessly ended Kamala Harris’s 2020 primary campaign in a single debate. She did so not by repeating the shibboleths of institutional racism and neo-colonialism, but placing the blame for inequality in the justice system where it belongs – on the shoulders of political prosecutors more interested in their next job than fulfilling the one they were elected to. Political prosecutors like Kamala Harris, Alvin Bragg, and Fani Willis.
Those are debates we need to have about the criminal justice system, just like there are real debates we need to have about corporate power, as revealed by the behavior of social media companies during the 2020 election. Those debates will only happen if Donald Trump wins.
By proving that the politics of extortion and excommunication cannot work, a victory for Donald Trump would force political debate into the open. This is why figures like Dick Cheney fear Trump’s return so much. It is also why America needs it.
Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.
