Great article/overview, especially on the impact of DOGE. Explains a lot of why there is so much insane resistance too. Always look forward to your analysis.
"The second Trump administration appears to be a coordinated program to build something up."
What in the world makes you say that?! It's obvious that Musk and Trump are only interested in tearing down every part of the government that ever told either of them "no", or that they think might tell them "no" in the future, and neither of them has the slightest interest in building anything except their personal bank accounts. And the rest of the "Trump administration" is a bunch of suck-ups who hope their flattering of Trump will get them some of the leavings of the illegal profits he has already made and expects to make.
The author writes "Will Republicans become the new majority party that realigns America? I’m not yet sure. I do know Democrats, who seemed triumphant and positioned to recreate politics a year ago, no longer seem well-positioned or capable of re-engineering their party to meet the present moment."
Republicans were established as the dominant party when a Republican won the 1988 election when another Republican was president, giving them three terms in a row. Republicans have won the presidency when another Republican was president multiple times before then, in 1928, 1908, 1880, 1876. They have also lost elections like this in 2008, 1960, and 1884 for an overall score of 5 wins and 3 loses. Democrats have also had 8 elections in which a Democrat was running when another Democrat was president. They lost all 8: 2024, 2016, 2000, 1968, 1952, 1920, 1896, and 1868. Not only that but there have been four elections in which the party with the most votes did not win, Democrats lost all four of these too.
So no, Democrats have not ever been triumphant in the sense where they can extend their period in power with a new candidate, whereas Republicans have. This is a huge advantage, and it has nothing to do with Democrats being woke, because Republicans had it when they were progressives, and the Democrats were the conservative party. Add to this the "House advantage" of ties going to the Republicans and it is amazing that Democrats have been able to as many elections as they did since the Civil War.
The key to Democratic victories has been the Republican propensity to screw up economically. Democrats got their day in the sun when the economy collapsed on Hoover's watch, and FDR won the 1932 election. Rather than handing power back to the Republicans in 1940, he decided to run himself for a third and fourth term, taking advantage of the fact that Democratic *incumbents* can win. FDR then died in office allow his VP to win a 5th Democratic term as an incumbent (any other candidate would have lost, as happened in 1952).
Democrats lost in 2024 because they did not have a healthy incumbent to run and they cannot win any other way. Why do you think Biden tried to run? Over and over again he said only he could beat Trump, but he couldn't either, so Democrats were doomed in 2024 just as they were in 2016. In contrast, Republicans will need to run someone other than the incumbent in 2028, in which they still have a decent chance of winning--unless Trump screws up, for which Republicans have a penchant* (e.g. 1992, 2008 and 2020). Having faith that Trump has the right stuff for failure, I think Democrats will probably win in 2028.
*Having these advantages makes a party sloppy. FDR's success gave Democrats an advantage (Nixon lost in 1960, where Eisenhower would have won handily had he been allowed a third time) and Dems got sloppy. Kennedy-Johnson cut taxes and started a war of choice, collapsing the Bretton Woods system three years after they left office. GWBush decided, hey! we can do better than Kennedy by cutting taxes TWICE and starting TWO wars of choice, and so managed to wreck things while still in office. Trump has been handing out the sledgehammers to his crew. He has a tall order, can he in just four years fuck things up enough to make Kennedy and Bush look like pikers?
According to this model, the election of reconstructive president Reagan began a new dispensation that will not end until we get another reconstructive president which hasn’t happened since. The centerpiece of the Reagan Revolution was supply-side tax cuts (cuts on taxes in investment and on high-income individuals) which continues to be advanced to this very day (Trump has promised yet more reductions) and so the Revolution is still ongoing.
I believe this is more than enough to establish my contention that the Republican party has been dominant since 1981.
I'm not sure exactly what you're arguing, which makes it hard to respond! I'm not sure how you're measuring what's a majority party, etc. It's not well-defined without an entire explanation of the model you're working through about how American politics works.
In America's two-party system, both parties are also going to trade the presidency somewhat, even when one party has the advantage just due to the structure of the system. In the middle twentieth century after FDR, Democratic ideas were so dominant the Democrats held the House and Senate almost the entire period, and the House for 40 consecutive years and the Senate for 26 during the period. Yet Republicans still elected Eisenhower to two terms, and briefly held the house and senate for two 2-term stints. At the same time, Eisenhower was operating entirely under the other party's ideas, slowing their progress instead of enacting Republican ideas.
It would help if you explained the model you're working on for calling something dominant. It would take a long time (probably another article, which maybe I should write!) to explain the model I'm talking about. American political eras tend to either have a majority and opposition party (twentieth century R and D) or two dueling ideas (late nineteenth century Progressive era). The difference isn't who wins more, but whose ideas are dominant. Are we competing over one party's ideas, with the other party defined in opposition, or do we have two sets of entirely different competing ideas.
It’s really complicated because everything affects everything else. It’s frustrating because I can’t just go into the lab and try things out. Social science doesn’t work that way. But it is also fascinating. :)
"Democrats are now the busybodies telling you to drive slower, be nicer to your sister, dress appropriately, and remember to say thank you. Republican are the rebels telling off authority figures and doing donuts in muscle cars in the parking lot."
Brilliant and hilarious. It takes quite a lot for me to actually laugh out loud, but this did it.
This is a great analysis. Some of it accords with observations I’ve already made (Republicans somehow became the “cool” party) but some of it is helping me see some things in a new light, like DOGE.
I’m particularly interested in your take on foreign policy. My read on things is that the JD Vance speech in Munich can be read as more or less the opening shot in an effort to do what you recommend in your more comprehensive piece on the American Empire that is linked in that section - to try to force the Europeans to reform and start taking steps to reinvigorate themselves, whether they like it or not.
The emphasis on free speech and taking down “firewalls” is nothing less a bid to undermine the existing European political class, since they mostly would not survive compromising on either of those issues - speech controls are all that is preventing them from completely losing control of the narrative, and firewalls likewise are all that’s keeping populists out of having a direct say in governance, which would spell the death of lenient migration policies, the green deal, and much else that is near and dear to the hearts of the European establishment. I personally think that since those things are directly contributing to weakness and instability in Europe, this is in fact exactly what one would do if one were to theoretically go about trying to reform Europe into useful allies, but I’m curious what you think about that.
I will also say that I am not terribly sanguine about the chances of succeeding on that count; it is axiomatically the case that no governing class voluntarily relinquishes its power. I suspect that they’d rather take their chances with the Chinese or go down with the ship than actually change in any meaningful sense, for example by changing course to avoid the iceberg rather than strike it dead on. No sir, they would sooner die than admit they’ve been wrong on these things, especially migration. It’s too central to their self-image and what they imagine their technocratic project to be all about.
Furthermore, I question what you think these tributaries could actually bring to the table in a hypothetical war in the Pacific, even if we grant some degree of reform. European militaries are both smaller and less capable than ours, and there are serious limits to how much they could improve even if they wanted to (which they mostly don’t). With perhaps two increasingly dubious exceptions (the French and British) they don’t have anything that would even be useful in a fight with China, nor any means to get it to the Pacific theater even if they did. They’re mostly deindustrialized and have stagnant productivity and exorbitant labor and energy costs, so we can’t really count on them to backstop our war production. And of course if we don’t get Russia on side, or at the very least get them to stay quietly neutral during a war with China, the entirety of Europe would become a gigantic liability as a possible second front that they’d be utterly incapable of defending without us, and that we ourselves would be very hard pressed to properly defend in the midst of a hot war with China.
Seriously, what does Europe bring to the table? Granting whatever rosy assumptions you’d care to make about the next five years of European history, what is the ceiling on how useful they could make themselves? Does it justify listening to them at all vis a vis Ukraine and Russia, versus doing whatever it takes to stabilize relations with Russia and detach them from the Chinese?
This is such a great comment, and there's a lot to unpack in here.
First, I guess I'm of two minds about what Europe brings. I understand the view that they can't and won't contribute to a war in the east and therefore we should stop investing in them (including in their security). I don't think that's directly wrong at the moment. Not only do they have weak militaries, they don't mind China and its rise (unlike direct threat Russia), and their internal politics will be against getting involved.
I still think we should do it. I think their status as de facto vassals gives us a lot of tools and power outside the military (including things like intelligence, world pressure, and votes in international institutions). It also brings indirect benefits like strengthening our economic power, and helping us make international standards, which indirectly help us build things and get them around the world.
As for the Munich speech, I see them as unrelated (although they are meant to be linked). I think Europe needs a serious talking to about speech. I think America has the authority to deliver it and therefore should. Although I realize part of the goal of this speech wasn't the message but to build distance, by folks who are trying to break the alliance and justify it.
I subscribed, as I think you’ve got some interesting analysis here.
I personally think the opportunity costs of maintaining the Empire are becoming an issue as much as the fiscal costs. To pose a truly shocking question, for example, who do you think would make a better, more valuable ally now? Russia, or the collective EU? Not that such a recently unthinkable thing is likely anytime soon, but since it now is thinkable, we should be. Thinking about it, that is. (And there’s my hot take for the month, or possibly the year).
I get that there’s a lot of sentiment (not to mention sunk costs) associated with the transatlantic alliance, but it’s a new era with new problems, and this is a good time to rethink things from the ground up (which is why I like the idea of this newsletter). It seems to me that this is one of those rare moments in history when it feels like the old order is falling away and something new is rising to take its place. It’s a time of true possibility. Nothing is unthinkable right now, or unsayable (well, maybe don’t do what Kanye West did, but aside from that…). And so to that end, cheers, and I wish you and your project success!
There are three executive orders (EO’s) that Trump has signed that are worthy of support by everyone across the moderate political spectrum
The first of these EO’s recognizes that open borders are politically unacceptable and that the age of mass migration is over. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here destroys the wages of working class Americans and drives up housing costs when we can't house our own citizens. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their own country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay home and work there to improve their living conditions.
His second important EO addresses the insanity of gender identity which denies the reality of human sexuality and results in men invading women’s sports, restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. Women need and are entitled to privacy from men. Even more diabolical is the mutilation of innocent children (many who would grow up gay) in pursuit of the impossible because you can’t change your birth sex.
Finally his EO that corrects the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others is absolutely the correct approach. Who could believe that creating a new privileged class and a new discriminated against class would provide a solution to the problem? Not to mention that it’s clearly unconstitutional.
It would well serve both Democrats and independents to get behind these changes even as they choose to vigorously oppose other aspects of his agenda.
This is an interesting analysis of the horse race. It would ring truer to those outside your circle if you also considered governance. And yes, I'm one of those scoldy leftists, but listen up for just one sec before you react. I'm not going to convince, so I'll just report. Starting at least with Reagan's joke, R's have overtly dismissed any positive role for governance while covertly finding great utility for it in self-dealing. That's a corruption at the heart of R that is now fully metastisized in Trump 2. Second, what R's dismiss as woke is read by the left as just. R's now have fully embraced this and become the party that is against justice. When you disagree, explain Trump's cabinet appointments within your framework. Overreach on left and right is real, but to dismiss the left's views on governance and justice by ridiculing them, without introspecting in any way, is really throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Great article/overview, especially on the impact of DOGE. Explains a lot of why there is so much insane resistance too. Always look forward to your analysis.
Thanks, Wendy!
"The second Trump administration appears to be a coordinated program to build something up."
What in the world makes you say that?! It's obvious that Musk and Trump are only interested in tearing down every part of the government that ever told either of them "no", or that they think might tell them "no" in the future, and neither of them has the slightest interest in building anything except their personal bank accounts. And the rest of the "Trump administration" is a bunch of suck-ups who hope their flattering of Trump will get them some of the leavings of the illegal profits he has already made and expects to make.
The author writes "Will Republicans become the new majority party that realigns America? I’m not yet sure. I do know Democrats, who seemed triumphant and positioned to recreate politics a year ago, no longer seem well-positioned or capable of re-engineering their party to meet the present moment."
Republicans were established as the dominant party when a Republican won the 1988 election when another Republican was president, giving them three terms in a row. Republicans have won the presidency when another Republican was president multiple times before then, in 1928, 1908, 1880, 1876. They have also lost elections like this in 2008, 1960, and 1884 for an overall score of 5 wins and 3 loses. Democrats have also had 8 elections in which a Democrat was running when another Democrat was president. They lost all 8: 2024, 2016, 2000, 1968, 1952, 1920, 1896, and 1868. Not only that but there have been four elections in which the party with the most votes did not win, Democrats lost all four of these too.
So no, Democrats have not ever been triumphant in the sense where they can extend their period in power with a new candidate, whereas Republicans have. This is a huge advantage, and it has nothing to do with Democrats being woke, because Republicans had it when they were progressives, and the Democrats were the conservative party. Add to this the "House advantage" of ties going to the Republicans and it is amazing that Democrats have been able to as many elections as they did since the Civil War.
The key to Democratic victories has been the Republican propensity to screw up economically. Democrats got their day in the sun when the economy collapsed on Hoover's watch, and FDR won the 1932 election. Rather than handing power back to the Republicans in 1940, he decided to run himself for a third and fourth term, taking advantage of the fact that Democratic *incumbents* can win. FDR then died in office allow his VP to win a 5th Democratic term as an incumbent (any other candidate would have lost, as happened in 1952).
Democrats lost in 2024 because they did not have a healthy incumbent to run and they cannot win any other way. Why do you think Biden tried to run? Over and over again he said only he could beat Trump, but he couldn't either, so Democrats were doomed in 2024 just as they were in 2016. In contrast, Republicans will need to run someone other than the incumbent in 2028, in which they still have a decent chance of winning--unless Trump screws up, for which Republicans have a penchant* (e.g. 1992, 2008 and 2020). Having faith that Trump has the right stuff for failure, I think Democrats will probably win in 2028.
*Having these advantages makes a party sloppy. FDR's success gave Democrats an advantage (Nixon lost in 1960, where Eisenhower would have won handily had he been allowed a third time) and Dems got sloppy. Kennedy-Johnson cut taxes and started a war of choice, collapsing the Bretton Woods system three years after they left office. GWBush decided, hey! we can do better than Kennedy by cutting taxes TWICE and starting TWO wars of choice, and so managed to wreck things while still in office. Trump has been handing out the sledgehammers to his crew. He has a tall order, can he in just four years fuck things up enough to make Kennedy and Bush look like pikers?
sic transit gloria mundi
No, the Republicans have not been the dominant party since the 1980s. Franks’s analysis is better than yours.
Republicans have held Presidency 28 out of 48 years (58%)
The Senate: 24 out of 46 years (52%) and the House: 24 out of 46 years (52%) for an overall 52% control of the Legislative branch
The Fed Chief has been a Republican 36 out of 46 years (78%)
Republican appointees have comprised the majority of Supreme Court Justices every year since 1980. The median Justice has been conservative 36 of 44 years (82%) see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_leanings_of_United_States_Supreme_Court_justices#/media/File:Graph_of_number_of_sitting_U.S._Supreme_Court_justices_appointed_by_Republican_and_Democratic_presidents.png
I average the 3 branches of the Federal government to get 65%.
Add in Republican domination of Federal Reserve and things like legalization of stock buybacks by Reagan and declining tax rates on capital (average of capital gains and corporate rates) which is associated with declining investment of profits in favor of share buybacks: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F256392ca-fa28-4b59-86d3-d93102c7a419_621x289.gif
plus declining top income tax rate since 1981 https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb0febab2-3c5e-41c7-8a20-55fe23f998fc_441x154.gif
and one can conclude that control of the “high seats of our civilization” that control of the political-economy, has favored Republicans since 1981.
I use the Skowronek concept of political time in which periods favorable to one or the other party shifts in what I call dispensations: https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-importance-of-a-political-dispensation
According to this model, the election of reconstructive president Reagan began a new dispensation that will not end until we get another reconstructive president which hasn’t happened since. The centerpiece of the Reagan Revolution was supply-side tax cuts (cuts on taxes in investment and on high-income individuals) which continues to be advanced to this very day (Trump has promised yet more reductions) and so the Revolution is still ongoing.
I believe this is more than enough to establish my contention that the Republican party has been dominant since 1981.
I'm not sure exactly what you're arguing, which makes it hard to respond! I'm not sure how you're measuring what's a majority party, etc. It's not well-defined without an entire explanation of the model you're working through about how American politics works.
In America's two-party system, both parties are also going to trade the presidency somewhat, even when one party has the advantage just due to the structure of the system. In the middle twentieth century after FDR, Democratic ideas were so dominant the Democrats held the House and Senate almost the entire period, and the House for 40 consecutive years and the Senate for 26 during the period. Yet Republicans still elected Eisenhower to two terms, and briefly held the house and senate for two 2-term stints. At the same time, Eisenhower was operating entirely under the other party's ideas, slowing their progress instead of enacting Republican ideas.
It would help if you explained the model you're working on for calling something dominant. It would take a long time (probably another article, which maybe I should write!) to explain the model I'm talking about. American political eras tend to either have a majority and opposition party (twentieth century R and D) or two dueling ideas (late nineteenth century Progressive era). The difference isn't who wins more, but whose ideas are dominant. Are we competing over one party's ideas, with the other party defined in opposition, or do we have two sets of entirely different competing ideas.
I linked to this post:
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-importance-of-a-political-dispensation
A broader treatment of political evolution is here:
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/political-evolution-in-the-us
But political evolution is intertwined with economic evolution
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-economic-culture-evolves
It’s really complicated because everything affects everything else. It’s frustrating because I can’t just go into the lab and try things out. Social science doesn’t work that way. But it is also fascinating. :)
"Democrats are now the busybodies telling you to drive slower, be nicer to your sister, dress appropriately, and remember to say thank you. Republican are the rebels telling off authority figures and doing donuts in muscle cars in the parking lot."
Brilliant and hilarious. It takes quite a lot for me to actually laugh out loud, but this did it.
PS. The rest was on point as well.
That's the greatest compliment you could have possibly given. Thanks!
This is a great analysis. Some of it accords with observations I’ve already made (Republicans somehow became the “cool” party) but some of it is helping me see some things in a new light, like DOGE.
I’m particularly interested in your take on foreign policy. My read on things is that the JD Vance speech in Munich can be read as more or less the opening shot in an effort to do what you recommend in your more comprehensive piece on the American Empire that is linked in that section - to try to force the Europeans to reform and start taking steps to reinvigorate themselves, whether they like it or not.
The emphasis on free speech and taking down “firewalls” is nothing less a bid to undermine the existing European political class, since they mostly would not survive compromising on either of those issues - speech controls are all that is preventing them from completely losing control of the narrative, and firewalls likewise are all that’s keeping populists out of having a direct say in governance, which would spell the death of lenient migration policies, the green deal, and much else that is near and dear to the hearts of the European establishment. I personally think that since those things are directly contributing to weakness and instability in Europe, this is in fact exactly what one would do if one were to theoretically go about trying to reform Europe into useful allies, but I’m curious what you think about that.
I will also say that I am not terribly sanguine about the chances of succeeding on that count; it is axiomatically the case that no governing class voluntarily relinquishes its power. I suspect that they’d rather take their chances with the Chinese or go down with the ship than actually change in any meaningful sense, for example by changing course to avoid the iceberg rather than strike it dead on. No sir, they would sooner die than admit they’ve been wrong on these things, especially migration. It’s too central to their self-image and what they imagine their technocratic project to be all about.
Furthermore, I question what you think these tributaries could actually bring to the table in a hypothetical war in the Pacific, even if we grant some degree of reform. European militaries are both smaller and less capable than ours, and there are serious limits to how much they could improve even if they wanted to (which they mostly don’t). With perhaps two increasingly dubious exceptions (the French and British) they don’t have anything that would even be useful in a fight with China, nor any means to get it to the Pacific theater even if they did. They’re mostly deindustrialized and have stagnant productivity and exorbitant labor and energy costs, so we can’t really count on them to backstop our war production. And of course if we don’t get Russia on side, or at the very least get them to stay quietly neutral during a war with China, the entirety of Europe would become a gigantic liability as a possible second front that they’d be utterly incapable of defending without us, and that we ourselves would be very hard pressed to properly defend in the midst of a hot war with China.
Seriously, what does Europe bring to the table? Granting whatever rosy assumptions you’d care to make about the next five years of European history, what is the ceiling on how useful they could make themselves? Does it justify listening to them at all vis a vis Ukraine and Russia, versus doing whatever it takes to stabilize relations with Russia and detach them from the Chinese?
This is such a great comment, and there's a lot to unpack in here.
First, I guess I'm of two minds about what Europe brings. I understand the view that they can't and won't contribute to a war in the east and therefore we should stop investing in them (including in their security). I don't think that's directly wrong at the moment. Not only do they have weak militaries, they don't mind China and its rise (unlike direct threat Russia), and their internal politics will be against getting involved.
I still think we should do it. I think their status as de facto vassals gives us a lot of tools and power outside the military (including things like intelligence, world pressure, and votes in international institutions). It also brings indirect benefits like strengthening our economic power, and helping us make international standards, which indirectly help us build things and get them around the world.
As for the Munich speech, I see them as unrelated (although they are meant to be linked). I think Europe needs a serious talking to about speech. I think America has the authority to deliver it and therefore should. Although I realize part of the goal of this speech wasn't the message but to build distance, by folks who are trying to break the alliance and justify it.
Hey thanks for the reply!
I subscribed, as I think you’ve got some interesting analysis here.
I personally think the opportunity costs of maintaining the Empire are becoming an issue as much as the fiscal costs. To pose a truly shocking question, for example, who do you think would make a better, more valuable ally now? Russia, or the collective EU? Not that such a recently unthinkable thing is likely anytime soon, but since it now is thinkable, we should be. Thinking about it, that is. (And there’s my hot take for the month, or possibly the year).
I get that there’s a lot of sentiment (not to mention sunk costs) associated with the transatlantic alliance, but it’s a new era with new problems, and this is a good time to rethink things from the ground up (which is why I like the idea of this newsletter). It seems to me that this is one of those rare moments in history when it feels like the old order is falling away and something new is rising to take its place. It’s a time of true possibility. Nothing is unthinkable right now, or unsayable (well, maybe don’t do what Kanye West did, but aside from that…). And so to that end, cheers, and I wish you and your project success!
Thanks! And welcome aboard!
There are three executive orders (EO’s) that Trump has signed that are worthy of support by everyone across the moderate political spectrum
The first of these EO’s recognizes that open borders are politically unacceptable and that the age of mass migration is over. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here destroys the wages of working class Americans and drives up housing costs when we can't house our own citizens. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their own country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay home and work there to improve their living conditions.
His second important EO addresses the insanity of gender identity which denies the reality of human sexuality and results in men invading women’s sports, restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. Women need and are entitled to privacy from men. Even more diabolical is the mutilation of innocent children (many who would grow up gay) in pursuit of the impossible because you can’t change your birth sex.
Finally his EO that corrects the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others is absolutely the correct approach. Who could believe that creating a new privileged class and a new discriminated against class would provide a solution to the problem? Not to mention that it’s clearly unconstitutional.
It would well serve both Democrats and independents to get behind these changes even as they choose to vigorously oppose other aspects of his agenda.
This is an interesting analysis of the horse race. It would ring truer to those outside your circle if you also considered governance. And yes, I'm one of those scoldy leftists, but listen up for just one sec before you react. I'm not going to convince, so I'll just report. Starting at least with Reagan's joke, R's have overtly dismissed any positive role for governance while covertly finding great utility for it in self-dealing. That's a corruption at the heart of R that is now fully metastisized in Trump 2. Second, what R's dismiss as woke is read by the left as just. R's now have fully embraced this and become the party that is against justice. When you disagree, explain Trump's cabinet appointments within your framework. Overreach on left and right is real, but to dismiss the left's views on governance and justice by ridiculing them, without introspecting in any way, is really throwing out the baby with the bathwater.