http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-seven-broken-guardrails-of-democracy/484829/The Seven Broken Guardrails of Democracy
The American republic was long safeguarded by settled norms, now shattered by the rise of Donald Trump. DAVID FRUM
MAY 31, 2016
A long time ago, more than 20 years in fact, the Wall Street Journal published a powerful, eloquent editorial, simply headlined: “No Guardrails.”
In our time, the United States suffers every day of the week because there are now so many marginalized people among us who don't understand the rules, who don't think that rules of personal or civil conduct apply to them, who have no notion of self-control.
Twenty years later, that same newspaper is edging toward open advocacy in favor of Donald Trump, the least self-controlled major-party candidate for high office in the history of the republic. And as he forged his path to the nomination, he snapped through seven different guardrails, revealing how brittle the norms that safeguard the American republic had grown.
Here’s the part of the 2016 story that will be hardest to explain after it’s all over: Trump did not deceive anyone. Unlike, say, Sarah Palin in 2008, Trump appeared before the electorate in his own clothes, speaking his own words. When he issued a promise, he instantly contradicted it. If you chose to accept the promise anyway, you did so with abundant notice of its worthlessness. For all the times Trump said believe me and trust me in his salesman patter, he communicated constantly and in every medium that there was only thing you could believe and trust: If you voted for Donald Trump, you’d get Donald Trump, in all his Trumpery and Trumpiness.
The television networks that promoted Trump; the primary voters who elevated him; the politicians who eventually surrendered to him; the intellectuals who argued for him, and the donors who, however grudgingly, wrote checks to him—all of them knew, by the time they made their decisions, that Trump lied all the time, about everything. They knew that Trump was ignorant, and coarse, and boastful, and cruel. They knew he habitually sympathized with dictators and kleptocrats—and that his instinct when confronted with criticism of himself was to attack, vilify, and suppress. They knew his disrespect for women, the disabled, and ethnic and religious minorities. They knew that he wished to unravel NATO and other U.S.-led alliances, and that he speculated aloud about partial default on American financial obligations. None of that dissuaded or deterred them.
And the “them” is growing. When I wrote about the Trump candidacy last fall, that candidacy was still backed only by one-third of Republicans, most typically the party’s least-affluent, least-educated, and least-churched supporters. Back then, I offered four guesses about the party’s response to Trump: beat him, steal his issues, ignore him, or change the rules to circumvent him. I under-estimated him—or possibly over-estimated them. Trump steadily added to his support, moving up-market and up in the polls. In the Oregon Republican primary of May 17, the first after his last rivals conceded defeat, Trump won 66.6 percent of all votes cast. Polls in late May show 85 percent of Republicans now supporting Trump.
Those of us who live and socialize among conservatives every day discover that another friend has—with greater or lesser reluctance—accepted the leadership of the bombastic businessman and reality-television star. To those of us who still cannot imagine Trump as either a nominee or a president, this movement toward him among our friends, relatives, and colleagues is in varying degrees baffling and sinister. Yet it is happening: an inescapable and accelerating fact.
Whatever happens in November, conservatives and Republicans will have brought a catastrophe upon themselves, in violation of their own stated principles and best judgment. It’s often said that a good con is based upon the victim’s weaknesses. Why were conservatives and Republicans so vulnerable? Are these vulnerabilities not specific to one side of the political spectrum—are they more broadly present in American culture? Could it happen to liberals and Democrats next time? Where were the guardrails?
Let’s survey the breakage, from earliest to latest, and from least to most alarming.
The first guardrail to go missing was the old set of expectations about how a candidate for president of the United States should speak and act. Here’s Adlai Stevenson accepting the Democratic nomination for president in 1952:
That I have not sought this nomination, that I could not seek it in good conscience, that I would not seek it in honest self-appraisal, is not to say that I value it the less.
There was a certain quantum of malarkey here—but it wasn’t all malarkey. From the founding of the republic, Americans have looked to qualities of personal restraint as one of the first checks on the power of office. "The aim of every political Constitution is or ought to be first to obtain for rulers, men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous, whilst they continue to hold their public trust.” So argued James Madison in Federalist 57. In Federalist 68, Alexander Hamilton promised more specifically: “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.”
Through two-and-a-quarter centuries, conservative-minded Americans have worried that one change or another would obliterate the old ideals: the rise of parties in the 1800s, universal white-male suffrage in the 1830s, votes for women, television, etc. We can argue about the character of the various presidents elected along the way. Yet when Barack Obama sought the office in 2007, he sounded the familiar refrain: “I know you didn't come here just for me, you came here because you believe in what this country can be.”
To put it mildly, that’s not the tone of the Donald Trump campaign. President Nixon said in his 1969 eulogy of former President Eisenhower, “He exemplified what millions of parents hoped that their sons would be: strong and courageous and honest and compassionate. And with his own great qualities of heart, he personified the best in America.” Donald Trump, by contrast, former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney lamented, exemplifies what millions of parents would fear in their sons: “the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics.”
During the election of 1800, Hamilton warned his friend Harrison Gray Otis that Aaron Burr “loves nothing but himself; thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement” and could not, consequently, be trusted to honor any agreement with his political opponents. Trump’s political allies have said the same and worse of him, while yet grudgingly pledging to support him in the end. Something’s obviously changed in the American definition of acceptable behavior in those who seek power. That guardrail is down.
The second broken guardrail is the expectation of some measure of trustworthiness in politicians.
The dark arts of politics include dissimulation, evasion, and misdirection. Days before the election of 1940, Franklin Roosevelt famously promised the mothers and fathers of America, “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign war.” He’d left himself a wide loophole, however, for as he explained to his speechwriter Robert Sherwood, “If somebody attacks us, then it isn’t a foreign war, is it?”
Outright lying, however, happens more rarely than you think in politics, especially in high and visible offices like the presidency. Political scientists estimate that presidents keep about three-quarters of their campaign promises. When presidents break their word, the reason is far more likely to be congressional opposition than the president’s own flip-flopping. If politicians really did lie all the time, voters would not be so outraged on those occasions where a politician is indubitably caught in untruth—and yet voters are outraged. Even where the politician did not intentionally lie, as George W. Bush did not intentionally lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, important statements exposed as damagingly untrue inflict untold political damage.
Donald Trump’s dishonesty, however, is qualitatively different than anything before seen from a major-party nominee. The stack of lies teeters so tall that one obscures another: lies about New Jersey Muslims celebrating 9/11, lies about his opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan war, lies about his wealth, lies about the size of his crowds, lies about women he’s dated, lies about his donations to charity, lies about self-funding his campaign. “Whatever lie he’s telling, in that minute he believes it,” Senator Ted Cruz said of Trump in May 2016. "But the man is utterly amoral. Morality does not exist for him.”
As late as March, 2016, more than half of Republicans and Republican leaders described Trump as “dishonest” in a Washington Post survey. They voted for him in the primaries all the same, and by rising pluralities even as the lies accumulated.
Trump’s lies weren’t overlooked—and they weren’t believed. They were condoned by Republicans who had come to believe, “everybody does it.” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough spoke for many:
Conservatives that have been betrayed by the Washington establishment for 30 years, by Republican candidates that run for office saying they're going to balance the budget and lie. Republican candidates that run and say they're going to overturn Obamacare and lie. Republican candidates who say vote for me and I'm going to have a humble foreign policy and lie.
';But Scarborough’s list of betrayals weren’t “lies.” They were failures, failures made inevitable by the impossibility of the Republican base’s own demands. (How do you balance the budget while cutting taxes, without touching either defense or Medicare?) As one unfriendly critic noted, the Republican rank-and-file weren’t exactly innocent victims of elite deception.
Republican voters … wanted everything, and, after all, GOP leaders promised them that it was possible—even though those same leaders knew it was not.
Place the blame for that failure where you will, however, the results were glaring: radical Republican rejection of the trustworthiness of their leaders—all their leaders. What, then, was one liar more—especially if that liar were more exciting than the others, more willing to say at least some of the things that Republicans wanted said? Cynicism leads to acceptance of the previously unacceptable. Another guardrail down.
A third broken guardrail is the expectation that a potential president should possess deep—or at least adequate—knowledge of public affairs.
Donald Trump is surely the most policy-ignorant major party nominee of modern times, or perhaps of any time. As with the lies, it’s almost impossible to keep track of the revelations of gaps in his knowledge. The most spectacular may have been talk-radio host Hugh Hewitt’s exposure of the fact that Trump lacked the most basic understanding of the structure and mission of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
It’s a fair generalization that Republicans demand less policy expertise from their national leaders than Democrats have usually expected from theirs. Ronald Reagan was less well-informed than Jimmy Carter; George W. Bush had mastered less detail than Al Gore. Yet both Reagan and Bush had at least proven themselves successful governors of important states. Both men offered clear and plausible presidential platforms, which both men implemented in their first year in office more or less as advertised.
What’s different now is the massive Republican and conservative rejection of the idea that a candidate for president should know anything substantive about governing at all. As of November, 2015, 62 percent of Republicans insisted that “ordinary Americans” would do a better job solving the country’s problems than professional politicians. While 80 percent of Democrats wanted experience in government in the next president, according to post-Super Tuesday 2016 exit polls, only 40 percent of Republicans did so. The larger share, 50 percent, preferred an “outsider.”
Over the past three cycles, Republicans have elevated a succession of manifestly unqualified people to high places in their national politics. Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann shot to stardom in the Tea Party era. For a brief period in late 2015, Ben Carson led the Republican polls—Carson being the only candidate who made even Donald Trump look knowledgeable by comparison. Government is a complex science and a sophisticated art. Its details matter, its trade-offs reverberate into four and five dimensions. Although Republican voters in the aggregate are better informed than Democratic voters in the aggregate, their votes are guided by two more urgent and immediate feelings: bleak pessimism (79 percent of Republicans say they are on the “losing side” of most political debates, versus 52 percent of Democrats) and unyielding refusal to compromise with opponents (while 63 percent of Democrats favor a president who’ll compromise with the other party, only 35 percent of Republicans do so). Despairing yet obdurate, Republicans have come to value willpower over intellect, combativeness over expertise. Donald Trump’s nomination culminates that evolution. A third guardrail down.
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