This Is the Difficult Part

When I was young, there was a fairly poisonous piece of advice floating around for college applicants: “Getting in is the hard part.” This, I discovered, was dangerous nonsense—Calc 4 was significantly more difficult than anything I’d done in my high school years, and should have received proportionally disciplined attention. Instead, I began the long personal declension that led to a life in the press.

Conservatives are buoyed by Donald Trump’s electoral victory, and with justice: Even if the final tally falls short of a Republican popular vote victory, it is a much stronger showing than the GOP has made in some time. Yet it is not a “landslide”; it is only tenuously a “mandate.” Voters rejected a party whose incumbent president, already suffering historic disapproval ratings, was disclosed to be a doddering nullity and who was replaced by a vacuous, operationally incompetent lieutenant who, despite every gracious opportunity afforded in the press, failed to articulate a distinct governing vision. The Republicans are being given a fair shake, and nothing more.

Why all the wet-blanket skeleton-at-the-feast stuff? Because this is the part of the cycle in which dangerous delusions are formed. In 2016, the Republicans became so convinced of their basic rightness and the favor of heaven that they barely campaigned in 2020; this species of magical thinking, the belief that memes and star-power and the basically favorable disposition of the American people would carry the day, underwrote the belief that a red wave would engulf the country in 2022, despite persistent quantitative evidence to the contrary. This year’s campaign showed that the GOP learned its lesson—Trump’s overdriven effort to get votes from anyone and everyone drew accusations of “desperation” and “flailing” in the press. 

The Democrats suffered a symmetrical delusion: Trump’s hard and high floor of unpopularity, particularly after the bad behavior following the 2020 election, was the monocausal theory of victory—no campaigning needed, just put a placeholder candidate in there, don’t bother trying to persuade particular voters that you have something substantive to offer them. It turns out a purely negative campaign has its limits. The question is whether the Democrats will learn their lesson, as the GOP did after ’22, or take on the secular weakness they preferred in the ’70s and ’80s.

But for now the Republicans are in power, and that is when maya and self-deception get down to business. They actually have to do something. Closing the border and at least beginning deportations of illegal immigrants, starting with violent criminals; decreasing American exposure to threats abroad; keeping the economy on stable footing: These are the nonnegotiables. A failure on any of these will be punished by the American people without hesitation. Increasing the production of housing and energy—these must be high priorities. 

The stuff of legacies—a return to space? a nuclear power program?—should not be neglected, but it doesn’t matter if the government can or does not actually follow through. Indeed, one of the tragedies of Biden is that he was exquisitely sensitive to but impotent to realize legacy material: the cancer moonshot, the rural broadband project, the electrification of the American auto fleet, and so on. Memes and slogans do not keep you in power; you can, like Biden, compare yourself to FDR all day long. In the end, you have to do something.

These policies must be enacted with narrow majorities in the legislature and against significant administrative resistance in the executive. For better or worse, the Democrats and Republicans are far closer on economic and industrial policy than they have been since the Clinton era, which is a cause for modest optimism (at least so long as the Fed’s credit card holds out). The border is so bad and under such direct executive control that accomplishing visible improvements should be achievable in a quick and decisive fashion. Continuing to devolve social issues to the states offers an avenue for preserving political viability at the national level without alienating the social conservative element of the coalition, which, while not in the driver’s seat, can and (in realpolitik terms) should make intraparty politics very unpleasant if marginalized. 

That all is to say that the new administration can do the things it must do. Electoral victory is just the start, and not the end. The Republicans have not thundered across the rainbow bridge to Meme Valhalla, and must not deceive themselves about it. And, as the abject (and, so far as I can tell, entirely unpunished and still unmeditated) failure of the mainstream press in June showed, the outlets friendly to the new administration must keep sober heads too. Cheerleading makes you stupid; there are no days off for those of us in what Mencken called “the permanent opposition.”

Getting in is the easy part. Now it gets hard.

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