WHAT WOULD MACHIAVELLI SAY ABOUT GEORGIA AND DONALD TRUMP?

 

10/29/21

The GOP loss of the Senate in Georgia back in January through the sheer ineptitude and self-obsession of Donald Trump has been roundly and nearly unanimously regarded as a huge political blow to the Republican Party.  As the monumental Democratic overreach of a spending bill currently called “Build Back Better” wends its way through the legislative sausage making process, yours truly has concluded that, at least from the GOP’s political perspective, losing the Senate may have been an admittedly heavily disguised blessing.

If Donald Trump had not suppressed the GOP vote in Georgia through his self-centered pouting about his “stolen” re-election bid and the GOP won at least one of those two seats, the Republicans would now have been in control of the Senate.   President Biden and his fellow travelers in Congress would not have even considered such a monumental reshaping of the American economy and society as that contemplated in the “Build Back Better” program; such a program would have been, to use a vastly overused expression of the last, oh, thirty years or so, dead on arrival in the Senate.   The President’s, and his Party’s, aspirations would thus have to be throttled back a notch or seven to a program that would have been far more modest in its aspirations and thus far more acceptable to the American voting public, or at least that portion of the American voting public that constitutes the “middle” and decides elections.   Democratic prospects in 2022 and in 2024 would thus be far rosier than they appear to be at the moment, with a public that just wanted to get rid of Donald Trump facing the prospect of a vast, expensive, and unprecedented remaking of American society by a party with the barest of majorities.   So, from a political perspective, which is the only perspective that seems to matter to those who hold virtual lifelong sinecures in Washington and insist on calling themselves public servants, the Republicans should be delighted that they were able to provide only a modest check on the lascivious ambitions of the Democrats, and that only with the help of a couple of apparently sober Democrats.

From a policy perspective, of course, Donald Trump’s undermining his own Party by means of his customary childish fit of pique has been a disaster.   Without his suppression of the Republican vote, the GOP would have held the Senate and President Biden thus would have been forced to deal with the Republicans when crafting legislation, which thus would have been far more modest in its ambitions and therefore more cognizant of seemingly bygone considerations like market economics and political consensus that have done so much to make this country great.   Further, one does not have to have libertarian instincts to realize that the country historically has done better when the government is divided; think, in recent memory, of the Reagan/O’Neill collaboration of the ‘80s and the Clinton/Gingrich collaboration of the ‘90s.   Things are better when neither Party is in complete charge, which says a lot about human nature and the character of those who rule, er, sorry, govern us.

What also says a lot about the character of the people who govern us is that a lot of Republicans, once they figure this out, will probably be agreeing with me that losing the Senate was probably a good thing because, after all, it gives their Party a chance to avoid self-immolation and pick up at least one of the houses of Congress in 2022 and, maybe, the White House in 2024.  And what could possibly be more important to our public servants than their own career prospects?