The worst part about teaching college students is that you keep getting older and they stay the same age.
I’ve been thinking recently about a former student of mine, Scott. He pops up in my social media feeds from time to time. Scott was in my fall 2016 strategic political communication class. He was, IIRC, 21 at the time. So the 2016 election was the first time he cast a ballot in a Presidential election.
Fall 2016 was a tough semester to be teaching that class. I begin every week with a discussion of recent headlines. We break down the news and relate it to strategic concepts from the readings. So that meant we didn’t have much of a buffer. We couldn’t look away from the Access Hollywood tape or the Comey letter.
The conversation got heated a few times that semester. I had to rein people in more than usual. They understood. I did too. It was all so surreal. Trump ran an awful campaign. He won anyway, and by a margin so small as to invite endless second-guessing. It was difficult to make sense of, and the substantive stakes could not have been higher. None of us knew what would come next, and for 2.5 hours every Monday that semester, the lesson plan included a whole lot of dealing with it.
Scott is 29 now. He’s married. He has a career. He is, in every meaningful sense, a grown-up. He has been for awhile now. And Donald Trump has been the Republican Presidential nominee for his entire adult life. The Republican Party has been the Party of Trump for as long as he could cast a Presidential ballot.
I wonder what that must feel like. I find it unsettling.
I was 29 when Barack Obama was first elected. The 1996 election was six weeks before my eighteenth birthday. My first Presidential ballot was for Gore. My second was for Kerry. I was pretty well-seasoned by 2008. If you had told 2008-me that I was too young to know what normal politics looked like, I probably would’ve punted you across state lines. I had campaigned pretty damn hard for Gore. I served on the board of a major nonprofit that endorsed Kerry and Obama. I had a clear sense of what normal looked like from the Democratic and Republican Parties. I had been around long enough to develop an impression and to have it repeatedly, incrementally adjusted.
For Scott, and certainly for everyone younger than him, this Republican Party is not anomalous. It is normal. The Supreme Court is controlled by a party that rules through sheer force and doesn’t care to be subtle about it. Trump is a convicted felon, and the biggest surprise is that it means he finally wasn’t able to indefinitely delay one of the four criminal trials he is facing. The entire leadership of his party has wasted no time declaring that convicted felons are good, actually. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller are not evidence of how far the political class has fallen. They are the standard against which the political class is evaluated.
The historian Rick Perlstein mentioned in his New Republic column last week that the best summary of his work on American conservatism comes down to “There’s always more, and it’s always worse. But it’s never new.” He continued:
The most important part of that formulation is the “always worse” part. Right now, that means three things. First, there is no going back to some more innocent conservatism of the past. Second, if Donald Trump wins the majority of electoral votes and accedes again to the White House, this will obviously be very bad. But third, if he does not win the majority of electoral votes—well, it might be worse. I’ve heard that the secret to politics is repetition. Can you stand for me to repeat it one more time? The question is not just how many votes Donald Trump gets, but how many are willing to take up arms for him if he loses.
He’s right, of course. (Perlstein is basically always right.) But I keep getting hung up on the temporal rupture.
Part of what sustains my sense of outrage is the constant reminder that it isn’t supposed to be like this. Republicans in Congress. The Supreme Court majority. Trump and his lieutenants…. Sure, there’s a historical lineage. You can draw a clean throughline from Nixon to Reagan to Gingrich to Rove to the Tea Party and then to Trump. The gap between the Supreme Court that decided Bush v Gore and the Roberts Court that has decided it would simply be uncouth for Donald Trump to face a criminal trial before he has the opportunity to pardon himself and punish his enemies is merely a difference of degree, not a difference in kind.
But my sense of outrage is perpetually replenished because I am accustomed to American Democracy functioning at least marginally better than this. The Trumpist Republican Party is indeed worse than the Bush II Republican Party or the Reaganite Republican Party. I still calibrate political normal against the political behavior of my 20s, and this keeps registering as worse-than-back-then, trending downward.
What must it look like to Scott and his peers? What would you think of our political system if you were approaching 30 and, for your entire adult life, Trumpism had simply been the way things were in the Republican Party? The unending rage. The administrative incompetence. The lack of material consequences. The sheer absurdity of it all.
I suspect I’d be numb. I imagine I would probably look around, see the world getting worse, and think that institutionalist politics was a dead end. Not just because the levers of government don’t presently seem to be working, but because they had not worked for my entire adult life, and there was no indication that things were on the verge of improving.
I was reminded of this point again last week when I saw a graphic from the latest Pew survey (h/t Paul Musgrave). It identifies a precipitous decline in young Americans seeking out political news.
It’s possible that this survey result is just a question-wording effect. Young people encounter a lot of political news, but they do so through algorithmic media. They don’t watch the nightly news or bookmark the Washington Post website.
But, also, if you had lived your entire adult life under Trumpism, wouldn’t you be a bit less eager to go looking for political news?
Mind you, I don’t have a simple or elegant solution in mind. I have long been convinced that the democratic project as fundamentally fragile. It only sustains itself through ongoing, collective effort. And people will only put in that effort if they believe that government can and should play a helpful role in their lives.
I remain convinced of that simple truism: the best case for Democracy is made by government working well, and the best long-term comms strategy revolves around trumpeting the ways that the government has, in fact, been here to help.
But time kind of slows to a crawl when you’re a professor in your mid-40s. I’ve been teaching the same set of classes to similar groups of students for a dozen years. The students graduate, and grow older, and go on to live fulfilling adult lives. Meanwhile a new batch takes their seats. They read Alinsky and Schattschneider, I lead them through the very same debates about power and strategy that I’ve honed for decades now. They enter a political world that looks different to them than it does to me. And at some point… maybe one that has already passed, their sense of the world becomes more true, while mine becomes trapped in amber.
Trumpism still feels like an aberration to me. For my students — both past and present — it is the status quo. The route to democratic stability is long and fraught and hard to chart. This one conviction won’t change everything. This one election won’t either. We aren’t about to return to an old, stable equilibrium. We’ll have to build a new one as we go.