All eyes are naturally fixed upon Joe Biden in the aftermath of last week’s “debate”. Will he stay in the race or bow out? Yet there is another, smaller political drama playing out inside the American political system at present, one that is at least tangentially related to the debacle that took place a few days ago.
Steve Bannon is expected at some point today to report to a US prison to start serving his sentence for contempt of congress. His four-month sentence is not in itself the end of the world for Bannon, but there is perhaps a greater symbolism at play. In the early days of the 2016 Trump presidency, Bannon was often seen as the political visionary behind the operation, with many on the Right looking to his heterodox mix of issues and reforms.
For him to go to prison might, therefore, be seen as the end of an era in American politics. We are talking about a period of around half a decade, starting a bit after Trump descended that golden escalator. It was the era of people enthusiastically trying to reform the US political system from the right. Like mushrooms after rain, the success of Trump’s outsider campaign gave birth to a whole ecosystem of organisations and ventures intending whether to capitalise on or assist in the sea change that was surely about to take place. From organs such as American Compass and American Moment, to media ventures such as The Realignment podcast or American Affairs magazine, the early years of the first Trump administration had, at least for the Right, a real sense of “springtime in America”. This was the time where senators such as Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio talked a big game about the Republicans now being a “multi-racial working-class party”; Bannon might have been one of the first people to see a new dawn of opportunity opening up in the wake of Trump’s surprise presidential bid, but many, many others followed in his footsteps.
It is for that reason that Bannon’s trip to prison serves as a convenient bookend for an era that is now well and truly dead. All the hope of reform that existed in 2016 and 2017, the talk of “draining the swamp”, or reindustrialising, or putting an end to new and stupid “forever wars” — all of it ended up amounting to very little in the end. The factories did not come back, the swamp was not drained, and Trump’s administration got bogged down fighting a two-front battle against sabotage from within the state apparatus on one hand, and then its own dysfunction on the other.
To therefore say that 2024 lacks much of the energy and optimism of the 2016 election would be a massive understatement. Eight years ago, Trump publicly humiliated all of his Republican primary competitors by pointing out that, as politicians, they were essentially for sale, ready to decide American policy based merely on who paid them the most. Today, by contrast, Trump has been reduced to the most high-profile beggar in all of the United States; he is reportedly in negotiations with the widow of Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson for a cash injection of around $100 million, in return for supporting future Israeli attempts to annex more of the West Bank.
Many commentators today seem convinced that the various attempts at lawfare against Trump have amounted to nothing but failure, but the truth is probably a bit more complex: while his polling numbers are still robust, the financial strain Trump has been placed under has in many ways turned him into a very conventional politician. Increasingly, the role of many of his supporters — including politicians such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, as well as Bannon himself — has become one of trying to explain that the King himself is a very good man, but one surrounded by evil and feckless ministers; if only the King wasn’t tricked and led astray by those around him, things would be fine. But this narrative can only survive for so long before people truly start losing faith.
Beyond the failures of the Trump administration, there is now a dawning sense that America itself might be fundamentally unreformable. The debt is skyrocketing, and nobody seems to have a plan to address it. The reality, of course, that unpayable debt can only really be dealt with in one of two ways: either defaulting on the debt entirely (which will never happen), or destroying the value of every individual dollar in the system to the point where any debt denominated in dollars becomes worthless. Such a situation would be a true social, political and financial apocalypse, throwing the country into chaos and destroying the savings and buying power of hundreds of millions of Americans. But nobody has an alternative; the problem is now simply too big to solve. Thus, American pundits and elites sit around discussing future plans, like opening new shipyards or colonising space, even as they all know that the system is bankrupt, both literally and figuratively.
Elsewhere, if Trump’s biggest “sin” in 2016 was denouncing the Iraq war (an act of sacrilege which was rewarded mightily by a grateful electorate), in 2024 he seems unable to really articulate a strong resistance to the next war that many in Washington DC now see as inevitable: a battle with China over Taiwan. With the shrinking of the fiscal horizon, the American political system is reverting to autopilot, hoping that more sanctions, more trade embargos, and more warfare will restore some semblance of control. The era of dreaming of meaningful reform is now mostly over. From Left to Right, there is a sense that the ship is sinking, and that it is simply too late to try to do anything
But another era in American politics is also coming to a close, one that in some sense ties together the future fates of both Joe Biden and Steve Bannon. That is, the era of small-“r” republicanism in the United States.
As far as Bannon is concerned, the partisan lawfare that has led to his prison sentence is merely a small piece of a much bigger resurgence of using the courts and the judicial system as a political weapon. America once had very powerful norms against this sort of thing. Trump may have violated those norms in spirit when he nodded approvingly to chants of “lock her up!” regarding Hillary Clinton, but when he ascended to the presidency, he quickly changed his tune: trying to go after political opponents would simply risk destabilising the entire democratic system, leading to a vicious cycle of tit-for-that prosecutions. Trump respected this basic taboo in deed if not always in word, but this clemency would not be repaid during Biden’s tenure. Lawfare and counter-lawfare, trying to imprison one’s political enemies only to be imprisoned in turn as they return to power, is a lethal kind of poison to any sort of republic or democracy. It is, however, simply the ordinary mode of business in corrupt oligarchies around the world.
Which brings us to Biden. If one considers his atrocious performance during the debate against Trump, and the near-unanimous consensus that the man simply isn’t lucid enough anymore, there’s only really two ways the Democrats can go from here. Either they let Biden stay in the race, at which point it’s merely natural to ask: who will really pull the strings here? Or they dump Biden and pick another candidate just before the Convention in August, but this too leads to the very basic question: is this really much of a democracy anymore? The Democrats conspired to prevent there being a real primary and railroaded Biden through the process; now they are suddenly discussing railroading Biden out and getting someone else to take his place.
Once upon a time, Benjamin Franklin famously replied to a question of what kind of system he and his companions had created for America with “a republic, if you can keep it”. And, despite some ups and downs, the American republic has had a pretty good run. Now, however, it seems very doubtful that anyone is really interested in the “keeping it” part. Neither Trump, nor Biden, nor anyone else inside the American political system can be bothered to play anymore. The game, it seems, is over.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/