”The usual rule is this: when Democrats win elections, they wield power. When Republicans win elections, they seek, or at least agree to, compromise.”
I will take it a step further and state the Democrats know how to leverage power, in the form of transient electoral majorities, for their long-term strategic advantage. To paraphrase Rahm Emmanuel, the Democrats do not let a majority go to waste.
The great historical examples of the past 100 years are FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, each enacted after electoral landslides that conferred Democratic control over the White House, Senate, and House. Social Security and Medicare, enacted during the New Deal and Great Society, are the twin colossi of the welfare state both in terms of dollar amounts and their political invulnerability. With their existence, the Democrats gain a structural political advantage over the Republicans.
Since 1980, the Democrats have held the White House, Senate, and House three times for a total of six years. In 1993 and 2009, they invested their power into the attempt to create the next great entitlement by nationalizing health care. It didn’t matter that they spent little time in the preceding presidential campaigns pushing that idea, they had power and they were going to use it. Both efforts failed and those failures went a long way toward the Republicans’ scoring of victories in the 1994 and 2010 elections
Fast forward to the third period of Democratic control, 2021. The Democrats pushed a massive spending and regulatory program that would have placed future politics on their own favorable terrain in the same way that the New Deal and Great Society did in the past. The spending program, the Build Back Better Act, was initially ticketed at $3.5 trillion, and they would have gotten away with it too if not for a razor-thin Senate majority and that meddling Joe Manchin. Other parts of the regulatory program not only included crushing the fossil fuel industry, but also trying to pass various voting reform bills which would have required states to adopt such measures as same-day registration and no-excuse mail-in balloting, which would have enshrined electoral fraud.
The Democrats understood in 2021 that the historical evidence showed their majorities were transient and that they held perhaps a once in a generation opportunity. The fact that they failed to fully implement their agenda and ended up losing the House in 2022 doesn’t change the fact that they decided to act boldly in their long-term interests.
The Republicans have held control over the White House, Senate, and House for eight years since 2000 and what have they passed besides a tax cut?
The Republicans are at a disadvantage in relation to the Democrats. While the latter’s raison d’être is the expansion of government and creation of new and politically dependable clients, the Republicans as the (very) nominal conservative party have little room to maneuver, since they can neither be seen as proposing government expansion nor are able to muster enough support to reduce government, and so are reduced to implementing tax cuts.
The Democrats therefore understand that the ratchet of government only works in one direction. With the exception of the period from 1980-2000, the Republicans have been playing on the Democrats’ turf and are in reality more Tory than actively conservative.
So now the Republicans, thanks to the Trump Resurrection, once again control the three political parts of government. How will they invest that power, which more than likely will not extend past the 2026 Election?
Trump seems to understand what the GOP and conservative establishment does not: that while the heart of politics might be compromise, this extraordinary power must be invested to achieve lasting results. The fact that game theory dictates that the past four years of abuses dictate that the Democrats must learn the great lesson of FAFO (fool around and find out) is merely incidental. With the creation of DOGE and the appointment of various cabinet officers to oversee departments with which they hold a grudge, it’s clear that Trump plans to go after one of the key Democratic power bases, which is the federal bureaucracies. We should expect him to continue appointing reliably conservative and probably originalist judges to the bench.
There are some other opportunities as well.
Trump through DOGE and Congress should look to cut (if not send back to the states) organizations such as NPR and various grant programs, which sustain a wide network of non-profits and various leftist causes that are a substantial part of the Democrats’ power base.
He should reform the student loan program, which in the past few years has proven to be not only a debt trap but a Democratic vote-buying scheme. Getting the federal government out of the loan business and placing it back in private hands would not only correct a bloated higher education system, it would be an enormous blow to a very large Democratic constituency in the form of university faculties and administrations.
Finally, he should appoint key people to both Justice and Education (for however long DOE lasts) who would push a nationwide voucher program, either through legislation or through litigation as a civil rights issue. They can start with Democratic strongholds such as Chicago and Baltimore, which have both the most powerful teacher unions and worst performing schools in the country. Black children should not be, as a matter of civil rights, trapped in poor public schools. The fact that teacher unions such as NEA contributed tens of millions of dollars, almost all to Democrats and various leftist causes, has nothing to do with it (prove me wrong).
Power is to be used, not held.
Can’t argue with the thesis — but let’s recognize the Big Problem: many of the so-called “Republicans” in the House and Senate are closet Dems and despise President-Elect Trump. There is a reason that CongressCritters are lower in public esteem than used car salesmen! Most genuine reforms require Congress to change laws — and that is going to be very difficult when many of the Republicrat CongressScum are so willing to vote against a Republican President.
We’ll see how much actual power Trump et al are able to wield based upon how many of Trump’s appointee’s manage to actually to assume office. If he can’t get people hostile to the Uniparty in place then the nominal Republican control of the government won’t mean much- and next time around the left will be even more brutal at stomping out dissent. Think Khmer Rouge.
Anyway, you aren’t going far enough. One definition of a state is the organization that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in a territory. It seems to me that it follows that it also has a monopoly on the illegitimate use of force as well. That is, the regime gets to send mobs of antifa around to harass and intimidate Trump supporters- plain violation of the law- while Trump supporters simply have to put up with it. Note how antifa has been able to take over the streets of various cities whenever they choose and issue demands and threats to drivers. On one occasion someone pulled a gun- and the police lickety split arrested them, while completely ignoring the mob occupying the street and illegally directing traffic.
This needs to change. First, antifa needs to be utterly destroyed. This organization has every indication of being a regime tool controlled by the FBI or some FBI-adjacent cutout group. The individuals doing the controlling need to go to prison. Next, the individual footsoldiers need to be hunted down in a similar manner that J6 protesters were hunted. If it’s fine to have J6 protesters in solitary confinement for years without trial then it’s just peachy for antifa. What’s good for the goose, etc.
But that’s just defense. MAGA/MAHA needs the equivalent of antifa, because the left needs to be confronted everywhere. We can’t simply allow patriotic Americans trapped in blue be subject to mob rule whenever the left wants to uncork a mob to burn someone’s house. We need to fight back. For a while the “Proud Boys” were traveling to Portland to engage with antifa- but then the regime treated them as a terrorist group and tarred the black guy in charge as a “white supremacist” and sent him to prison for decades because J6, even though he was nowhere near the capitol that day. Self defense is a right, even in Portland.
Now I don’t like any of this- it would be much better if the left would simply stop stealing elections and stop the violence they direct against dissent- but they made this world and they should get to live in it. They hate me and want me dead- and I object.
Not only that, but Trump needs to emulate the Clintons and get ahold of all the kompromat the regime holds on its opponents. I simply find it not credible the number of times a Republican has run and won on a set of policies and then once elected done a complete 180 for no apparent reason. I also recall how pedophile Dennis Hastert was paying off his victims before he even got to congress and yet somehow became Speaker? Don’t tell me he wasn’t controlled.
Also the Mossad is famous for blackmail and the like. Perhaps Trump could prevail upon Our Greatest Ally ™ for assistance, especially considering the endless river of wealth flowing from the US to Israel.
Now I don’t like this either- my best option would be to release all this info so the public could express outrage and the guilty could be sent to prison- but I didn’t make these rules. At the very least turnabout is fairplay, and if the left got burned by what they’ve done they might be motivated to stop.
I won’t hold my breath, of course.
I think it will be difficult to partner with Congress to shrink government. I see Trump making an effort to woo Mike Johnson (see him at UFC this past weekend), but I cannot see somebody like Thune on board to strike DOE. Maybe it will happen, but it will be problematic.
That means striking DOE or just my dream of the student loan system is problematic, at the very least there will have to be prioritization.
I do expect Trump to use all of his executive power to manage DOGE and other functions that he can do with out the Article I branch. I expect a legal fight over that, but Trump can claim that he is the executive power and can manage the branch as he sees fit. Will be an interesting constitutional struggle.
What I didn’t mention in the post that would be just as effective as DOGE is releasing the various archives, say for the FBI, Justice, or DOE – places he wants to target. I imagine lots of embarrassing stuff there that’s been hiding, especially over-classified in the FBI, that can be used for the tong wars to come.
others have mentioned this but it bears repeating. Trump’s picks are mostly outsiders who have been kicked by the system, they have every reason to go after that not only based on how they were treated by it but also because they aren’t going to be settling into the DC establishment/NGO merry-go-round post-office. From a revolutionary, historical standpoint this is the equivalent of putting the revolutionary guard in charge of the agencies
Also the big boss himself, Trump, is enabling all of this. The Establishment tried to take him down and he is in his last term, no reason for him to be a nice guy and he knows his legacy doesn’t lie with DC or historians in academia who all hate him but rather int he fact that he was – against all odds- re-elected.