Facts not in Evidence man

The establishment didn't build a coalition. It made a series of Faustian bargains, and the devil has finally shown up to collect. The Dude abides.

So I’m into my second White Russian of the evening, half a spliff left in the ashtray, and I keep hearing this story the political commentator types keep telling each other. You’ve probably heard it too. Goes something like: once Trump is gone, the fever breaks, the adults come back, and the Republican Party gets to rebuild itself into something coherent and respectable.

Man.

I don’t know what they’re putting in the water over at those think tanks, but I want some, because that is a genuinely beautiful piece of fiction they’ve got going there.

The restoration fantasy, as I’ve started calling it in my head, requires you to forget basically everything that happened in the last sixty years of American politics. It requires you to believe there was a healthy, functional Republican Party that Trump corrupted and hijacked, when the evidence pretty strongly suggests he just harvested a field that had been cultivating itself since roughly 1964.

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The Bargains

Here’s the thing about the Country Club Republican establishment. The golf shirts, the Chamber of Commerce lunches, the capital class that actually writes the checks. They never had the votes to elect anybody on their own. Never. The whole project of the modern Republican coalition has been a series of deals to bring in people who could provide the electoral mass the establishment couldn’t generate.

The Southern Strategy was the first deal. Nixon’s people looked at the map after the Civil Rights Act, saw a lot of angry white Southern voters with nowhere to go, and made a deliberate decision to go get them. You can read the memos. They knew exactly what they were doing. And it worked, which is the thing about Faustian bargains - they work, right up until they don’t.

The Religious Right was the second deal. Jerry Falwell’s people got into the tent in the late seventies and eighties, and the arrangement was pretty straightforward. The Chamber of Commerce crowd got their tax cuts and deregulation. The evangelicals got cultural legitimacy and the promise of Supreme Court seats. Everybody was happy.

Then the Court seats finally came through with Dobbs, and the establishment discovered something awkward. Winning on abortion didn’t demobilize the religious base. It disoriented them. Because the grievance was always the point, man. Not the resolution. Winning left them without a purpose, and a coalition partner without a purpose starts looking for a new one.

MAGA is just where that road goes. The working class white voter who got promised for thirty years that their economic and cultural anxieties would be addressed, who kept getting a promissory note instead of payment, eventually stopped accepting the note. Trump didn’t manufacture that voter. He found them sitting there, correctly read what they wanted, and gave it to them. Or performed giving it to them convincingly enough that the distinction didn’t matter.

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The Fantasy

The restoration narrative requires you to believe these coalition partners can be reassembled under more respectable management after Trump leaves. That the establishment can take back the wheel.

This is where it falls apart. About forty percent of the American electorate has shown itself to be genuinely durable Trump support across multiple cycles and actual crises. A pandemic. Two impeachments. A criminal conviction. January 6th. The floor didn’t crack. It calcified. Those people have material and cultural interests that are not served by a return to pre-Trump Republican governance, and they lived under it long enough to know it. They’re not going back because someone puts on a nicer blazer and talks in a more reasonable register.

The establishment can write checks. It can fund think tanks and run consultants and produce position papers. What it cannot do is move those voters, because those voters have correctly identified that the establishment’s policy agenda was never actually for them.

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The Pendulum Isn’t Doing What You Think

There’s a related piece of received wisdom that deserves some pressure. The idea that the electorate swings between chaos and competence, and that after sufficient exhaustion with chaos, voters reach for the safe and stable option.

Biden was the test case for this theory. He won in 2020 because Trump was the alternative, not because Biden was compelling. The whole Democratic coalition that year was organized around a negative - stop this specific person. The moment that negative was removed, the coalition’s internal contradictions became the whole story. He governed competently, managed a genuinely difficult economic environment, and got blamed for pandemic residuals that had technically resolved on his watch. Then his own party pushed him out.

The electorate isn’t oscillating between chaos and competence. It’s oscillating between flavors of intensity, with exhaustion interludes that keep getting misread as an appetite for normalcy. The information environment won’t let the exhaustion phase last long enough to produce the reset the restoration crowd is counting on.

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What’s Actually Coming

What the evidence points toward is a prolonged and ugly civil war inside the American right, with the establishment losing most of it. Not a restoration. A slow renegotiation of what the Republican coalition is actually for, fought out over multiple cycles, with the establishment’s institutional advantages gradually eroding against the numerical weight of the base it spent fifty years cultivating and can no longer control.

The useful parallel is the Democratic Party after the nineteen sixties. That rupture took the better part of twenty years and some genuinely brutal losses to work through, and the party that came out the other side was considerably different from the one that went in. No reason to assume the right navigates it faster or more gracefully.

The pundit class has been confidently wrong about this coalition at every turn. They missed 2016. They underestimated 2020. They didn’t see 2024 coming. Expecting them to be right about the post-Trump restoration, when the structural evidence is running this hard against them, requires a faith in their analytical track record that the analytical track record does not support.

The clean sheet doesn’t exist. The tab is coming due. And the people who ran it up are very busy pretending they didn’t.

The Dude abides.