Let's Make a Deal (finale)
It is, after all, our deal to make
Previous missives of this three-parter are here and here.
When last we left our intrepid heroes, we’d just been hit with the Reagan Political Compact. Everyone’s got a plan until they get hit in the mouth by the Reagan Political Compact. That compact, recall, is an articulation of the American Deal and Reagan’s particular pledge on how America will honor that Deal, and what we all have to do in order to get the Deal ourselves.
The Deal:
America is a place where if you work hard and play by the rules, you will have a good life. That means comfort, and security; through fair wages for honest work, you will be able to own something (a home; a retirement account) that will contribute to your security and legacy for your family, even when you are not working. If your children do as you have done - work hard and play by the rules - they will enjoy even more comfort and security than you do.
America is not quick to fight, but when we do, we fight on the side of righteousness, and we win.
Reagan’s promise of how we get it:
Small government
low taxes
strong military
performance of belief in the Deal
The first three are commonly-understood planks of the GOP platform since Reagan’s time; the last is an unspoken but nonetheless socialized and enforced reaction to the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War protests: “You are not allowed to suggest that the Deal does not apply to everyone, or that the country is conducting itself in a way that violates the Deal. To do so shows you never believed in the Deal in the first place, and are not One of Us.”
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The term ‘complex system’ is a specific and technical one. It means ‘a group of many related objects or elements that interact with each other in a non-linear way’. This is as opposed to a ‘complicated system’, which is a group of related elements that interact with each other in a linear (or predictable) way’.
The assembly process of a smartphone, for example, is a complicated system - hundreds (nay, thousands) of steps from start to finish, many of them comically, forbiddingly technical, but each following the previous in a sequence, with a predictable outcome (and if you mess with one step, you can accurately forecast what the damage will be). But the ecosystem of a tropical river, say, or the financial market itself - those are complex systems, millions of interacting and interdependent variables that change with each other. Someone can become pretty good at forecasting the health and behavior of that river or the market, through study and technical knowledge, but no one can ever really know either with certainty.
Political narratives are complex systems.
I say all this because the present, disastrous interval in the American story is the result of decades in which multiple versions of that story strove against and within the Reagan Political Compact, even as that compact itself fell apart. There is no way to fully describe the interactions of those narratives in the last thirty years, much less their origins, at anything less than book length. Nevertheless!
We can trace how we got here, if we agree to compress and cut a fair bit of stuff that in a world of infinite time we’d get into in detail. Strike up the band!
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The Reagan Political Compact and indeed the Deal itself sustained three blows in the 2000s that, combined, proved fatal. The first was the Iraq War. For those of us who remember the widely-performed exuberance (substantially in media and to a lesser degree in daily life) of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and its first few months, it can be hard to also recall that the war was never especially popular. It’s worth noting that the Gallup satisfaction survey, which measures the country’s mood, was basically 50/50 on whether things were going in the right direction immediately before the invasion, sank like a stone afterward, and - critically - never really recovered.
There’s a strong argument that the Iraq War broke American politics in a fundamental way. When I say that satisfaction, as measured by Gallup, never recovered, I’m talking about the standard range of expressed satisfaction. Americans have, at various times since, expressed more satisfaction with the country than they did in March 2003 (after all, as David Cameron once said by way of dismissing a question about why the financial markets were bad after his election when he’d promised they be good: “number go up and numbers go down” [!]); on the whole, though, the mood of the country has been darker by about ten points since Iraq. That isn’t completely to do with Iraq, but the invasion certainly got us started on that path.
It isn’t hard to see why: here was the elected government of the United States, about to do something genuinely abhorrent and which violated one of the absolute terms of the American Deal that underpins our national identity, and any public objection was treated as a betrayal of the national interest because of the fourth element of the Reagan Compact - you are not allowed to question the validity of the Deal. As the occupation of Iraq ran on, the plurality who were offended and outraged by it became a majority.
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The second blow was the Great Recession. The harm this did to the sanctity of the Deal does not require lengthy explication - a bunch of people found out, quite suddenly, that they could work hard, play by the rules, and lose everything. There was (accurately, I believe) a sense that the financial system had been rigged to leave regular people holding the bag; the people who rigged it were never punished. The first part of that - the rigging - occurred under Republican and Democratic presidents. The failure to punish the violation of the Deal was a Democratic one. One could forgive an ordinary person for wondering if either party was especially committed to the Deal.
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The third blow, I would argue, happened before either of the others. It was so small, at first, that we barely noticed it; a freak scratch - in fact a series of scratches - that somehow nicked an artery. I’m talking about the constellation of policy decisions and financial developments that have led to a condition where a comfortable life in America is now twice as expensive as it was in the year 2000. I’m talking about income inequality, and not just in the sense that a small number of people make cataclysmically more money than almost everyone else combined, but in the more accurate sense that that small number makes its cataclysmic money from everyone else combined. By god there are books and books on how this sorry state of affairs came to pass, and yet it persists and will get worse before it gets better, I fear.
This problem has worsened across administrations Democratic and Republican. It’s been worse under Republicans, but jesus wept if the Democratic Party proves unable or unwilling to accept its awesome responsibility in this, then it’s time for us - including and especially members of the professional political class like me - to ask what the hell the party is for at all.
The effect on the American Deal here is clear: it costs too much and pays too little to just be a person in America. Put differently: if you work hard and play by the rules, you not only can lose, but are in fact increasingly likely to lose. Maybe not too badly, but the odds are increasingly against you and your children and their children, unless you’re one of the very small number of people making that cataclysmic money.
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Is it any wonder the Reagan Political Compact fell apart? Small government, low taxes, and a strong military (along with a decaying social commitment to Not Questioning The Deal) yielded a sorry state of affairs with which Americans have been frustrated for almost a full generation. If the Roosevelt Political Compact died in 1986, the Reagan Compact died thirty years later, in 2016, when an annual Pew poll on the role of government showed that, for the first time in decades, a majority of Americans wanted government to do more to solve problems, not less. A decade later, that repudiation of the core of Reaganism is still the dominant position, although the size of its majority waxes and wanes (numbers go up &c).
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We live in the ruins of the Reagan Political Compact, because - unlike the narratives of Reagan and Roosevelt - what succeeded it is not a majority position. What succeeded the Reagan Compact is, of course, MAGA.
Make America Great Again is, from a strictly structural perspective, a brilliant piece of political narrative. I’ll get into the detail on that in another post, but for now I’ll just note that it hits the narrative beats it needs to and is capacious enough to let a large number of people see themselves and their experience in it.
A large number, but, as noted, never a majority. Despite its name, it has become increasingly clear, even to its adherents, that MAGA was never about restoring the American Deal (yes, even to its adherents; you can see it in the public data. i highly recommend g. elliot morris’s excellent newsletter Strength in Numbers on this).
In fact, in its second iteration, Trump II: THE TRUMPENING, MAGA has revealed itself as the clear answer to the question: what happens when a story fails? Absent a clear, compelling alternative, when a story fails, you get the counterstory. The American Deal is broken, and we are living in a political narrative based on its diametric opposite.
Consider the Art of the American Deal, as demonstrated by the second Trump Administration: if you work hard and play by the rules, you’re a fool. Honest work makes money for other people, not for you. Tell your children whatever you want, there’s no chance they’ll end up more secure than you are unless they accept the truth that rules don’t matter if you have money, and breaking them is the only way to get it. Oh, and America starts fights all the time - or at least threatens to - and we barely care enough to credibly lie about the reasons anymore.
If that sounds shameful, appalling, and repellant to you: you’re not alone! Again, the public data is pretty clear: the bottom has fallen out of this iteration of the MAGA project; the coming midterms could be the biggest Democratic year in several generations.
Which leads us to three questions:
How much harm will MAGA/Trump 2 do before they are finally drummed out of office?
How did such a vicious, transparently revolting political project gain power not once but twice?
How long before it comes back again, and how can we break it for good when it does?
The answer to the first is a bit outside the scope of this writing, but it’s clearly: a lot. No point in sugarcoating it or preparing for anything else.
The answers to the second and third are related: The MAGA narrative has dominated American politics for a decade because it was the only coherent narrative in the field. The Democratic Party and its presidential candidates had messaging, which is a sequence of words you incant at voters in the (sometimes valid!) hope that they’ll share your way of thinking. MAGA had a political narrative, which is a powerful system of interlocking elements that combine and interact to articulate where the community (in this case, the country) is at the time of the story’s telling; how it got there; how the community is supposed to feel about where they are; why they are supposed to feel that way; and what to do about it. MAGA ticks all these boxes; no alternative Democratic “narrative” in this interregnum has ever come close.
And yet MAGA has never attained a majority (though it came close in 2024). It has won by default, and when its chief storyteller isn’t on the ballot, its adherents lose, and often in the way that you might say Wile E. Coyote ‘loses’ when he slams into a sheer rock face with a tunnel painted on it and peels off, insensible and totally flattened. The MAGA narrative is not, to put mildly, a surefire winner; it is not the next Political Compact, which - if we manage the next years well - will be the thing that breaks MAGA for good.
The next Political Compact will be the distillation of the next successful political narrative that captures a majority of Americans. My guess is that that narrative will be told by a Democrat, but it doesn’t have to be. That narrative, at the risk of belaboring the point, will communicate how we got here, and why; how we should feel about it, and why; and what to do next. It will do so using characters, timelines, language, and narrative beats that are familiar, and as a result the story will be recognizably True to the people who hear it, who will see themselves and their lived experiences in it.
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And I want to emphasize that our role, as a people, is not to sit back and wait for the next great political storyteller. “Who should we get behind in 2028?” is the wrong question. The next story is as much ours to write as theirs. Resistance to ICE, for example, the way that we are, in ways ranging from the quotidian to the heroic, defying the cruelty of the MAGA project and reasserting that we care about and for each other - that has changed the trajectory of the story. The next political narrative will have to grapple with that, to incorporate it and honor it, because to do otherwise would render the story inert. Through our actions now, we define the terms of the next story.
Political narratives are complex systems. They react to the elements that make them. We, the people, are the most critical element. If we remember that, the next one won’t fail.
It’s our story to write.