DONALD WHO?:

The past four years exist as the Titanic exists for ocean liners: a cautionary tale about catastrophic blindness and hubris-- nothing more.

You might think the lesson to be learned is that the political right should not nominate or elect a conman, a criminal, a demagogue, or a nationalist. You would be wrong. That is not a lesson we need to learn because it is something we already knew, but which a plurality of the electorate flouted.

Or perhaps you think we should take more seriously the electoral importance of working-class whites; that we should mind the dangers of rapid cultural change, economic insecurity, and status anxiety.

This is wrong for two reasons.

First, Trump did not expand the party's base by running on these issues: he shrunk it. His appeals to working-class whites sounded too much to other Americans like racist demagoguery and angry populism and drove them away. Whether you agree with this characterization of Trump's rhetoric is irrelevant -- what matters is how it was perceived. If you want to win elections -- not just one in an erratic year but build a durable political regime -- saying things that sound like racist demagoguery to a majority of voters is imprudent.

Second, while every voter deserves to be taken seriously and policy should address real grievances, arguing that we should pay attention to working-class whites because we're afraid of the damage they'll do otherwise is tantamount to giving them a heckler's veto on the right's agenda. The right will be forever captive to the politics of fear and resentment if it makes "coddling working-class white anxiety" its central organizing concept. If the right continues down the path of becoming the party of white identity politics, they will deserve to lose. The right should address working-class whites with real policy solutions, not treat them like a convenient pool of roiling anger to leverage against the left.

Perhaps your gloss on the Trump era is that the right has become too beholden to corporate interests and tax cuts, that we should re-center the right's agenda on being pro-family, pro-community, and pro-patriotism. I agree -- but again I ask, what part of this is new?

These aren't lessons of the past four years: they are the talking points of the social conservative right for the past four decades. The right has been proclaiming itself pro-family for 40 years; it has been wrapping itself in the flag against the left's supposed anti-Americanism since Vietnam. Nothing in the past four years makes this agenda new, fresh, or timely.

The past four years do not teach anything because nothing profound happened.

They were wasted, empty years that left nothing of lasting meaning, importance, or permanence, except a legacy of mismanagement and criminality. The 2016 election was a statistical fluke, not a realignment. The ensuing presidency was a rolling mess of infighting, shortsightedness, and scandal, not a transformational engine of generational change.

Tweet   @brothersjudd