Reflections on having been a political scientist during the Trump era

 It's done.  Over.  He's out of office, and he will probably never hold office again.  There is something real to celebrate, but before anyone rejoices the revival of American democracy, remember all of the warnings I have repeatedly given.  The damage that Donald Trump has done to the country will range from "long-term and difficult to heal" to "permanent and possibly fatal to American democracy in the long-term."  Most dangerously, Donald Trump has mainstreamed lies and conspiracy theories in a way that no other political figure ever has.  Was there precedent?  Yes, but Donald Trump lied and spread conspiracy theories on a scale so vastly different that the difference in scale became a difference in kind.  And without a common understanding of fact.. without fact, we cannot have civil politics.  The events of January 6 were, if not the ultimate culmination of Trumpism, then that speaks only of the danger of what may be to come.

No one person has ever done more damage to American democracy than Donald J. Trump.  The only question is whether or not the damage will, in the end, turn out to be fatal.

And he has changed how many of us, political scientists, do our jobs.  This morning, I'm-a-gonna ramble a bit about how he has changed what it is to be a political science professor, from my weirdo perspective.

Four years ago, Donald Trump beat the polls, but basically performed about where a generic Republican should have performed when the Democrats had won two presidential elections in a row with a GDP growing at good but not astonishing rates.  Alas, most of us were blinkered, and watched the polls, disregarding our own models.  We suck.  So, the day after the election, we wandered around in a daze wondering, basically, "what the hell?"  Also, "what do we say now?"

My scholarly writing has been affected by Trump, but I'll refrain from elaborating here.  'Cuz it ain't in print yet.  It should suffice to say that Trump has bent and broken so many political institutions that many of us have wondered about the extent to which existing models still worked.  While I will not elaborate on my current real writing here, though, this general difficulty has created many problems for us as teachers and "public intellectuals," although I would hardly count as that, since I'm just some schlub, shouting into the void.  (Hello, void!  Are you there?  It's me.  Schlub.)

Yet that, itself, is a response to Donald Trump.  I never thought to do any of this silly "blogging" nonsense until Trump came along.  When I started the predecessor to this void-shouter, The Unmutual Political Blog, I had a primary purpose related directly to Donald Trump and political science models.  According to most political science models of presidential nominations, he wasn't supposed to get the GOP nomination.  For reasons that never made sense to me, a terrible book called, The Party Decides became very famous, and treated with almost religious reverence by many adherents in a few years leading up to 2016.  According to that very bad book, an outsider like Trump was supposed to be so thoroughly toast that Trump himself would question his own candidacy's citizenship.  It'd be so blackened he wouldn't rent an apartment to it.  He'd say it's from a shithole country, and demand its SAT scores.  There are very fine people who agree.

Sorry, still getting this out of my system.

Anyway, the point is that Trump was supposed to get his ass handed to him by, like, Jeb or someone.  Did you even remember that Jeb ran?  So... that didn't happen.  It took my political scientist colleagues a long time to come to grips with the fact that Trump was-a-gonna win.  I started The Unmutual Political Blog to say, "hey, y'all!  Trump is winning because your models suck!"  I wrote a long series called, "Trump to Political Science: Drop Dead," in reference to "Ford to City:  Drop Dead."  Without that, I wouldn't be doing this whole, "shout into the void," thing.  Or... maybe not.  Maybe I would, but that was the impetus.  I intend to continue, because writin's fun, but let's just make another observation.

I wiped the slate clean and started a new blog.  A big part of it was the frustration of writing regularly about the daily and weekly politics of the Trump era.  We, political scientists have a preference.  We like to talk about bland and detached models.  Me?  I like math.  Surveys are fun.  Game-theoretic models.  I like being pedantic and pompous and all of that.  What most of us don't like doing is the apoplexy thing.  It is inimical to scientific analysis.  OK, there is some perverse pleasure to ranting about a bad book I read, or various other affected performances, and I do some of that here, but apoplexy in professional analysis is... not something we enjoy doing.

Part of my original goal with In Tenure Veritas was to shift away from day-to-day politics in favor of some bird's-eye view commentary and assorted randomness because of the dangers of Trump-induced apoplexy, but as election day approached... well, I'm a political scientist, I study elections, and it got harder.  Godfather III sucked, but we all know that line.  The thing is, once again, I am sick of writing about Trump.  I want him out of my life.  One of the things that actually does bring a smile to my curmudgeonly face is the thought that we shall be moved.  We shall move on from Trump.  He shall not be the story.  Yes, I am doing a retrospective, but I am not writing about his latest outrage, or whatever the hell he is doing today.  There's still the impeachment trial, and all that, and yes, he will hog the spotlight as much as the annoying, little narcissist can, but he is no longer the most powerful person in the world.  Therefore, we can shift attention.

What does that mean for future shouting into the void?  Lately, I've been doing a long-form political analysis post on Saturday, a spin-the-wheel topic post on Sunday, and periodic "quick takes" mid-week, when I have a paragraph or two to bang out about something that caught my attention.  I will probably stick with that format, for a little while, at least, but I dunno.  Fair warning, though:  without Trump-induced apoplexy, I shall probably express more irritation with Democrats and the left.

Now... teaching.

Teaching political science, for the last four years, has been a very strange experience.  The 2016 campaign itself was rather comical.  Right up until the Access Hollywood tape.  That was a turning point in the teaching process.  Prior to that, Trump was just a buffoonish candidate, and as most of us were teaching, we could periodically show students the polls, the map, and so on.  Then, we had to deal with a presidential candidate bragging about his ability to get away with sexual assault.  Some simple-minded fools were more obsessed with the fact that he said the word, "pussy," than with the fact that he was bragging about sexual assault, which was yet another demonstration of my basic point about language.  Linguistic taboos are fucking stupid.  Think about content, or you will make analytic errors, like the dipshits distracted by the combination of phonemes that created the word, "pussy."  Anyway, the Access Hollywood tape really changed the tone of everything in the classroom.

Here's what I mean.  Until Trump, my whole classroom schtick was as follows:  "check your ideology at the door."  I'd even write that on my syllabi.  I would make my own politics completely opaque.  Since my own political principles are idiosyncratic, and I affect the character of a snarky nihilist in the classroom, that had historically been easy.  And the fun thing about snark is that it is so easily confused with nihilism anyway that all I had to do was keep cracking cold-blooded jokes, which I do anyway, that opacity was the natural result.  Prior to Trump, students just couldn't tell anything about my politics, and that was the way it should be.

Normally.

Then, something like the Access Hollywood tape comes along.  To be sure, that tape didn't come out of nowhere.  Trump's history of public, open misogyny, along with racism, was there for all to see.  But it was so enthusiastically violent and evil that, combined with the history, it put everyone in a position.  If you didn't oppose Trump at that point, you were evil.

And I'll just say it that way.

Like, let's be real about rape and college campuses.  I'm not going to elaborate here, because there are plenty of other places you can go for elaboration, but I'm a professor.  I can't just be neutral on this.  I can't feign neutrality on this.  This was the point, particularly on a college campus, on which we, professors, needed to approach Trump differently.  And part of it really was the fact that the environment of a college campus is one where sexual assault is particularly prevalent, for a variety of unfortunate reasons.

So that was the moment.  That was the moment that being a professor changed.  That was the moment that I could no longer sustain the snarky nihilist character, who had no beliefs or opinions that were in any way discernible.  I had at least one discernible opinion.  Donald Trump is the lowest thing in the history of American politics.  Which I firmly believe.

Put him in the antebellum South and he would be the most violent slaver in the country.  Put him in nazi Germany and he would be the most enthusiastic proponent of Hitler's "final solution."

No human being in history has ever been more ugly in his core than Donald J. Trump.

Ever.

History and context define the lower bound of what an evil person can do.

So there came a point at which no decent, intelligent, aware professor could feign neutrality.  We hate him.  With every fiber of our being.  And when the Access Hollywood tape was released, pretending that Donald Trump was anywhere near respectable became untenable.  My character unraveled, to a significant extent.  To be sure, I have closely guarded most of my policy preferences.  I don't share my opinions on core issues like taxes, or abortion.  I continue, where appropriate, to make competing arguments and to demonstrate the value of competing arguments because I see them.  Yet, I cannot pretend that Donald J. Trump is anything other than what he is.  He is a sociopath, and a narcissist.  He is not just anti-intellectual, but stupid.  He lies more than any human I have ever seen, yet he is also so prone to insane conspiracy theories that it is difficult to tell where his stupidity and delusions end, and where his lying begins.  He was an attempted-dictator.

He was the worst president this country has ever seen, and his corruption and incompetence had a body count.

None of these statements, true though they are, reveal anything about my opinions on taxes, nor abortion, nor any other issue on the liberal-conservative spectrum.  Yet, when I make these statements, particularly as a professor-- in a profession known to lean far, far, far left-- an observer (like, a student) would not be making a statistical error to infer that my opinions on other policy issues fall in line with the rest of my academic colleagues.

And to be sure, some do.  Otherwise, I'd be a conservative, and I'm not.  I share some philosophical leanings with classical conservatism, in the tradition from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott, but while I am currently somewhat enamored of Liz Cheney as the epitome of political courage, I have a lot of policy disagreements with her too.

So, I bash Trump, and a listener or reader may assume I'm some commie whose wall is plastered with pictures of Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  No.  I detest both.  I praise Liz Cheney for her courage, and a reader may assume I'm conservative, but I'm not.

All of this was easier before Trump.  Barack Obama was just some guy who wanted to expand the welfare state.  Wealth redistribution is controversial, and I can make a case either way.  George W. Bush and Dick Cheney enacted tax cuts, and neo-conservative foreign policy, but the idea behind neo-conservative foreign policy is that you do more good in the long term by spreading democracy, even if you have to topple dictatorships through war in the short term.  In political science, the motivating idea is "the democratic peace hypothesis."  If you want an explanation, I can do that.  Bush and Cheney believed they were serving the cause of liberty and peace in the long term.  Controversial?  Sure, but I can make a case either way, and both absolutely believed that they were doing good for the sake of good.

What I can't make a case for is Trump, because everything he did and said was a self-serving lie.  OK, his racism and misogyny are sincere, and he sincerely believed some of the batshit crazy conspiracy theories he spouted, but I still can't defend anything about him.

And when I am unable to defend a president, this puts me, as a teacher, in a different position than I had ever faced before.  The position of a professor who must recognize that the president is just a shitbag, yet in doing so, I wind up misunderstood.

And what has this meant for teaching the rest of American politics?  Trump has broken so many American political institutions that teaching has become strained.  As a simple example that you have seen, consider the process of legislative oversight of the executive branch.  Is this even still a thing?  Right now... um...

Trump told Congress to go fuck themselves, he was directing all executive branch employees to refuse Democratic subpoenas from the House, but maybe they'd talk to Republican-led committees in the Senate, and all of this means that the concept of legislative oversight of the executive branch-- important for studies of Congress, the Presidency, the bureaucracy, implementation of public policy-- this all may just be dead.

Maybe things will be set right.  Going forward.  But that's just one example of Trump throwing everything into uncertainty and upheaval, making it hard to teach.  Because in all of those subjects, we've taught a bunch of stuff about oversight that... just didn't apply.  Do we have to throw out all of those lesson plans, forever?  Who knows?

You see what I mean?

Of course, we came very close to not even being a democracy anymore.  Trump tried every institutional lever in existence to steal the 2020 election, and when that didn't work, he incited an insurrection.  I don't even know yet how I'm going to handle this one.  But remember, just because Trump's attempt failed doesn't mean it'll be the last one.  We may not see another politician try to incite another January 6, but we will almost certainly see more attempts at the institutional theft of an election.  And the next one to try it won't be as stupid and incompetent as Trump.

That should scare you.  And I don't know how to handle that in the classroom.

In the meantime, Joe Biden is President.  Is he Washington, Lincoln, or one of the greats?  Probably not, but all he has to be right now is sane and not a fuckin' liar.  The bar has been lowered so far that all he has to do is let the scientists and technocrats handle a pandemic, and he'll be a national hero.

Remember when they gave Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize for not being George W. Bush?

If Biden were catholic, he'd already be elevated to sainthood.  Then again, maybe an exception will be made for him.  I mean, after all, he has achieved the miracle of presidentin' while not being Trump.

Right now, that's enough for me.

The thing is, the next four years will just be a "normal" mess.  That, we can handle.  There will be legislative gridlock, policy disagreement, and the like.  We, political scientists, are sort of in more comfortable territory, both in terms of teaching and writing.  The question will be about the long-term damage that Trump has done to the country, most of which will require future elections to determine.  Why?  Because we will see it through the Republican Party, which does not control either chamber of Congress, or the White House.  The question is, how crazy will they be when they gain control of an institution?

If Republicans decide that the way to gain control of Congress in 2022 is to go full Trump... we're in trouble.  (Never go full Trump.)  If future presidential candidates similarly decide that the route of lying demagoguery is the path to victory... we're screwed.

And those of us trying to do research and teach wind up back in our old dilemmas.

For now, we can at least claw our way back to some semblance of normality, just as news stories describe politics reverting to a comfortable normality, despite the discomfort of hyper-polarization and negative partisanship.

Ideological opacity in the classroom is much more comfortable for some of us, as is the task of describing a political system bound by rules and described by models that work over time.

Are these anywhere near the biggest concerns of the Trump era?  Of course not.  But they have been the professional concerns of a weirdo political science professor, and I look forward to putting them behind me.  For good?  Who knows?  That's up to the GOP, and whether or not they awaken from madness.  I am less than sanguine, but for right now, at least we have a respite.

Apoplexy, be gone!