Two Weeks in July

And how little difference they made.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Within two weeks in July, the U.S. received three shocks: the attempted assassination of the former president and current Republican nominee, the sitting president’s withdrawal from the campaign, and the elevation of the current vice president to be the new Democratic nominee. One of these events alone would have upended the presidential race. All of them together in such a brief time are unprecedented in American politics. They have sent partisans by turns into exuberance and despair.

Yet this “transformed” race remains virtually the same as it was when Donald Trump faced Hilary Clinton eight years ago and Joe Biden four years ago: a toss-up in national polls with Democrats slightly favored and a nail-biter in the electoral college. How is that possible?

Americans are distracted by Trump’s operatic personality.

We would like to blame our political schisms on him alone. But even if Trump disappeared from the scene tomorrow, we would remain a divided nation, incapable of forging a governing majority from coalitions of voters. Until a successful coalition is able to govern, we will remain economically adrift and internationally vulnerable. The most striking thing about American politics in our time is how static it has been—and how inconclusive.

We have been ruled by a series of minority presidents since 1992, only three of whom barely gained more than 50% of the popular vote: George W. Bush (2004), Barack Obama (2008 and 2012), and Biden (2020). Congress has changed management often in this period, compared to post-war elections from 1945-1990. Majorities have frequently been razor-thin, as they are now. The U.S. is as divided geographically as it was before the Civil War, with some zip-codes solidly red and others solidly blue. Citizens in rural New York state, where I live, have more culture in common with rural Montanans than they have with city dwellers fifty miles away.

Consider Congress more closely. Our divisions paralyze the nation every day in the House and Senate because of intra-party factions. Twice within a year the House was unable to choose a speaker for days. The Republican party was too divided within its own caucus to elect a speaker in a floor vote. Even when a majority of Republicans chose a candidate, a tiny minority thwarted the party’s will. Democrats had the same problem in the Senate, which is even more vulnerable to the demands of individual members. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrstin Sinema of Arizona were repeatedly able to stall President Biden’s agenda, sometimes together, sometimes alone.

Voters created this situation. Governing majorities are formed when voters see their interests joined with others. But today’s voters have been increasingly factional, unable to make common cause.

This is true around the world.

Israel had five general elections between 2019 and 2022. Five. Each one left the country with frail party coalitions. Germany’s center-right coalition governments were held together from 2005 to 2021 by the formidable talent of Angela Merkel, but the current left-wing coalition under Olaf Scholz is considered rickety. France’s Emmanuel Macron won a second term as president in 2022 but lost his absolute majority in parliament, losing his ability to form even a coalition last month. The same disarray threatens Japan this week, where Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced his retirement after only three years and consigned the LDP party back to one of its opaque leadership contests.

Great Britain has not experienced so much political instability since the 1970s. In the fall of 2022, the nation had three prime ministers in less than two months: scandal-soaked Boris Johnson, stumbling Liz Truss, and plodding Rishi Sunak. The new prime minister Keir Starmer won a massive majority of seats in the House of Commons last month. But his Labour party received only a third of the popular vote, less than when it lost the last general election to Conservatives in 2017.

If we consider the last thirty years in the West, the picture comes into focus: political elites are struggling to understand large proportions of the people they claim to represent. The free-trade consensus that governed the Reagan coalition after 1980 began to dissolve under its leading politicians in 2008. Polls were notoriously blind both to Brexit and Trump’s victory in 2016. The blank refusal of large populations across the U.S. and Europe to countenance more immigration has upended governments in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, France, and not least Italy. Popular rage over inflation, crime, and woke obsessions is at a full boil.

When a democratic society fails to produce governing majorities, it is proclaiming that the interests of the majority of its people are not aligned. That is a potentially ruinous situation.

Here are a few observations about American evangelicals in this state of affairs.

First, evangelicals are as distracted by immediate political nonsense as every other block of voters. Evangelical leaders only offer insupportable rationales to vote for one candidate or another. Their agonized commentary about the future of our country, tied so tightly to the candidates, is only interesting to those who already agree with them.

Second, if evangelicals looked well past the next election, beyond the base of true believers, and around the barriers that segregate voters into interest groups, they would see a fascinating picture. Voters show signs of breaking through the barriers themselves. They are increasingly skeptical of racial appeals. Some candidates are piecing together unusual local majorities, like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez or Eric Adams. Evangelicals are uniquely positioned in the U.S. to do the local spadework that is crucial for coalition-building, with deep networks in every part of the nation.

Third, the demands of building a coalition would bring out the best in evangelicals and mortify their fleshly desires. Building a coalition demands a rhetoric of persuasion rather than insult. It demands listening with skill to the interests of others. It demands negotiating face-to-face, delivering on promises, and sacrificing factional priorities for larger success. Fundamentally, it demands that a group forswear its paranoid accusations against outsiders and think the best of them.

Fourth, many are engaged in coalition-building right now. Some do so by making rational arguments and refusing to countenance factional cant, like John McWhorter. Others are deploying social science to puncture woke fantasies and give people tools to improve their neighborhoods and schools, like Jonathan Haidt. Still others are building news organizations to promote free debate, like Bari Weiss. And those are just examples coming from the political left. Evangelicals can step into what may be the most fruitful political environment in decades if they recall that they are quite good at outreach.

Without successful coalitions, liberal civil society is prey to radicalism of all kinds. Self-government is hard work, but it really is the only alternative to despotism.