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There are US presidential elections that don’t matter. Even if Bill Clinton had lost to Bob Dole in 1996, or George W. Bush had lost to John Kerry on the other side of the millennium, there is no reason to believe we would live in a significantly different world now. So don’t tweet “journalists say that all the time” when I suggest that November 5, 2024, is a turning point in history.
What is the special importance of this election? There is also the underappreciated possibility that if Donald Trump loses, America and its politics may become more stable for a generation. “Stable” does not mean “like Luxembourg.” Polarization will persist. But the dogma that Trumpism will outlast Trump — that Trump is the face and voice of deeper forces in society that could destabilize the republic for decades — is less robust than it was four years ago.
The lesson of 2024 so far is that it will be incredibly hard for American populism to replace Trump. In January, Ron DeSantis, who combined Trump’s policy points with administrative ability, withdrew from the Republican primary without even being able to state his case for 2028. In July, J.D. Vance won not only the vice presidential nomination but also the position of successor to the MAGA movement. Since then, there has been no indication that he is qualified. Vivek Ramaswami is another who might wonder if the peak of his public office career is over.
Any future challenger (perhaps Tucker Carlson) will face the same problem: Trump is almost his own political superpower. I count three.
The most obvious is stardom. In every country, one or two politicians per generation, sometimes none, have stardom. The far-right policies are too radical to be forced into their own position without the presence of a charismatic leader. And then there are the so-called emotional sunk costs. For voters who supported Trump around 2016 and paid the price among friends, relatives and social media sparring partners, abandoning him is a personal defeat. A new leader, no matter how faithful he is to his ideas, cannot carry that support with him. So every time someone tries to choose his successor, there is an air of “you’re not my real father.”
Of Trump’s advantages, the most illogical is his perceived incompetence. Some Republicans have convinced themselves (and, until January 6, 2021, they were half right) that Trump is too lazy and disorganized to do irreparable harm. A politician who combines Trumpian views with pragmatic control will lose as well as gain support, will terrify as well as impress.
Notice a related theme here: the near irrelevance of ideology. What was shocking about Trump was not that he could “shoot someone” in the street without losing supporters; many demagogues in the past might have argued the same thing. If Trump represents something new, it’s that he can take almost any line on almost any issue, with the possible exception of immigration, without losing supporters. (Do any of his anti-vaccination fans care that he recommended the COVID-19 vaccine?) The dictatorships of the 1930s are always the wrong lens for analyzing Trump, but they were about communism, territorialism, etc. The Trump phenomenon is less dogmatic and much harder to transfer to other leaders.
Raising the prospect of post-Trump stability in polite gatherings makes you seem unintellectual. Western elites are not Marxists in the sense that they yearn for the end of capitalism, but they are Marxist in that their view of what makes the world go round tends to downplay the individual; larger forces take the lead. A culture in which it is normal to speak of the “wrong side of history” or the “arc of history” implicitly believes that events are already half-scripted.
Was Trump’s rise to power a personal feat, or was it historically preordained by decades of deindustrialization, porous borders, and other provocations that were bound to invite an electoral insurrection? Surely it is both. It takes an extraordinary individual to take advantage of structural trends. The rise of populism in other democracies suggests something deeper is at work. But ultimately, especially in presidential systems, the individual is the catalyst, and American populists are lacking such a catalyst.
Many conservatives who dislike Trump won’t want to vote for Kamala Harris. Indeed, instead of selling them on a woman who is, at this point, laughably unscrutinized, Democrats should insist that the reward is not a four-year reprieve for the republic, but perhaps a much longer one. Perhaps another Trump is inevitable. But voters owe it to history to find out.
janan.ganesh@ft.com