Mistakes that led to Trump

You can say this for the presidency of Donald J Trump: It has familiarised Americans with a number of heretofore obscure facets of their country’s governmental system. The emoluments clause, the 25th Amendment, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — once upon a time, discussions of the dangers of a president taking money from a foreign state or the prospect of his cabinet removing him from office were the stuff of fiction; the ins and outs of how to get a wiretap on an American citizen were confined to law review articles. Today, they’re the subject of front-page newspaper articles and cable news updates.

 
But there’s even more arcana we need to learn in order to understand this moment. Enter the veteran liberal political writer Michael Tomasky and “If We Can Keep It,” his sweeping, rollicking, sometimes breezy political and cultural back story to our current moment, one that demands we become informed, among other things, about the Connecticut Compromise, the career of Martin Van Buren and the Supreme Court decision in the Marquette National Bank case. Add it all up and Tomasky hopes to answer a fundamental question: how “our system became so broken” as to elect someone like Trump.
 
Tomasky begins at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. (His book’s title comes from the perhaps apocryphal answer Benjamin Franklin gave to a question about what kind of government he and his fellow delegates had created: “A republic, if you can keep it.”) He contends that the founders, with the Connecticut Compromise, designed a fatally flawed system for our federal legislature. By mandating that the Senate be made up of two representatives from each state, they gave outsize influence to sparsely populated states. As for the House of Representatives, a blasé attitude about maintaining districts of equal size led to inequality, with rural areas of 10,000 constituents having the same representation as urban ones with 50,000 constituents. This situation only changed with a 1964 Supreme Court decision mandating “one person, one vote.” “The founders were visionaries,” Tomasky writes. “But they were human. They made some mistakes.”

 

Van Buren is similarly flawed in Tomasky’s telling. Today, if he is remembered at all, it is as a little-known former president. But Tomasky argues that Van Buren’s more important role was as the mastermind of Andrew Jackson’s 1828 presidential campaign. Unlike the founders, who disdained political parties, Van Buren was a firm believer in them. In laying the groundwork for Jackson’s ascendance, he travelled the country trying to revive the two-party system, which had ended with the demise of the Federalists in 1816. He succeeded and Jackson’s election gave birth to today’s Democratic Party. Van Buren, Tomasky writes, “is the father of the modern political party, and therefore in some sense the man we might call the godfather of polarisation.”

 
Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp (1978) was “a pulverisingly dull case,” which ruled that banks should abide by the usury laws of the state in which they were chartered, not where their customers lived. By making this change, the court drove banks to move to states with the lowest, or even no, interest rate regulations, leading to an explosion in the credit card business and, as a result, an explosion in consumer debt. Where Americans had once cherished “thrift, discipline, doing without,” Tomasky writes, “in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Americans started to become a different people than they had been.” He adds: “Our consumer selves have overwhelmed our citizen selves.”

 
Tomasky excavates these and other bits of largely forgotten history in the service of making two main points about our current predicament. The first is that American politics have always been polarised but that the polarisation of today is qualitatively different — and more debilitating — than the norm. For much of the nation’s history, Tomasky argues, there was a significant amount of “intraparty polarisation” with the divisions among Democrats and Republicans “over slavery, Reconstruction, civil service, gold and populism” often being deeper than those between parties. Today, by contrast, Democrats and Republicans are more “ideologically coherent” and we have such extreme “party tribalism” that “the members of Team A think it’s an existential crisis if Team B wins.” “The Democrats of the 1800s were arguing about whether slavery should exist,” he notes. “Hillary and Bernie, for all the sturm und drang, were arguing about whether the minimum wage should be $12 or $15, and whether college should be affordable or free.”

 
His second point is that will is “the most overrated commodity in politics.” “It’s useless to hope that politicians can just go back to getting along the way they once did,” Tomasky writes. “They didn’t get along better in the old days because they were nicer people, or because they had the will to do so. They got along better because a particular set of historical forces and circumstances produced a degree of social cohesion that called on them to cooperate more. Today, a totally different set of historical forces and circumstances exist.”
 
Tomasky proposes a raft of reforms to get us out of the polarised mess we find ourselves in. Some, like ending partisan gerrymandering and getting rid of the Senate filibuster, are familiar. Others, like reviving “moderate Republicanism,” are probably futile. But some of his proposals — including starting “foreign” exchange programs within the United States so students from rural areas spend a semester at a high school in a city, and vice versa — are both realistic and novel.

 
Indeed, the most helpful — if sobering — point Tomasky makes is that while our current troubles created the conditions that brought us a President Trump, those troubles would exist no matter who was in the White House. And it will take much more than a new occupant to fix them.
 
If We Can Keep It
How the Republic Collapsed and How It Might Be Saved
Michael Tomasky
Liveright Publishing
273 pages; $27.95



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