Still waiting for the Republican disjunction

An important theme over the last few weeks of the Trump administration (it hasn’t even been a month yet!) is how many constituencies his various disruptions are seemingly tailor-made to piss off. Federal workers. Farmers. Immigrants. Researchers. Artists. Recipients of any major entitlement benefits.

It’s likely we’ll see the political fallout from that over the next few years in various ways, though Trump’s overall approval levels remain – not exactly high – but fairly solid for a twenty-first century president. But this kind of thing has been evident in the last couple of elections too. Pundits gleefully catalogued all of Trump’s offenses against various groups in 2016, and though he lost the popular vote, it wasn’t the kind of route that such lists might have predicted. Similarly, in 2020, Biden’s majority was slimmer than expected. And in 2024, when the Harris coalition seemed to encompass an indescribable spectrum from Insane Clown Posse to Dick Cheney, it still fell short at the ballot box. Why does the anti-authoritarian majority keep failing to materialize in presidential elections?

There are a lot of lenses that scholars can bring to this question, and the “empirical studies of the electorate” one has been well-covered – so I’ll change gears and offer a long, contextual, and coalition-oriented view. Though I’ve tried to offer my own interpretation of presidential history that explains where we are now, it makes sense to revisit an old standard: political time.

By the accounting of Stephen Skowronek’s classic theory of repeating patterns in the presidency, we should be due for a Reagan disjunction sometime between now and twenty years ago. In my first years teaching the American presidency, students asked me if the Bush years might represent the end of a Reagan Republican era. It seemed logical in 2008 and 2009 – the administration response to Hurricane Katrina, along with the failure of Social Security reform, seemed to discredit “small government” ideology, with financial crash dealing a death blow. The public turned against the Iraq War. That conflict exposed fissures in the Republican Party, as did immigration. The 2008 nomination of John McCain and his selection of Sarah Palin as running mate just highlighted the disparate factions and what appeasing them led to – embarrassing interviews, pandering, and ultimately an electoral defeat. And Obama’s 2008 victory – Indiana! North Carolina! new campaign tactics! – seemed like it had real potential for political renewal.

We know how that ended, I guess. Obama enjoyed some policy and political successes, but his political opposition didn’t stay discredited for long, Instead, it found renewed energy in the Tea Party movement, and a populist, anti-government movement eventually found its voice in Trump. And Trumpism has proven to be a movement that has electoral numbers beyond its apparent appeal, and political impact beyond its numbers.

What has happened since Trump’s most recent inauguration reaches so far beyond the norms of American political institutions and traditions that it strains comparison at first glance. Yet, it’s worth remembering that the Trump and Musk wrecking ball has aimed at targets identified by Reagan and the early conservative movement: the Department of Education. The federal government’s supposed “waste and fraud.” Programs designed to help women and minorities. Notably, Reagan was met with political limits when it came to meaningfully shrinking the state. Trump’s approach has dispensed with such niceties as Congress and worrying about political consequences. Though this administration has taken executive power to new and alarming extremes, this development, too, reflects a long-standing priority in the conservative movement that has help bolster Trumpism throughout.

Why are we stuck in this grim cycle of perpetual disjunction? The Biden presidency also had disjunctive elements – namely, the inability to align politics and policy, racking up policy legislative achievements and bureaucratic maneuvers while losing any semblance of control over meaning and narrative. While the 1997 book on political time predicts a coming era of perpetual preemption, in which real refashioning of politics and policy proves difficult, I think followers of this theory may have discounted how fine the line is between disjunction and renewal.

There are a few reasons why I think this is the case. The obvious one is that polarization keeps electoral competition close; a lot of political and policy failure doesn’t have the consequences it once did.

Social movements also play a crucial role in era-defining political change. And movement energy on the left has still been fragmented, concentrated in weakened institutions like unions and political parties, around issues that rise and fall off the public agenda*anti-war link, or organized in explicit opposition to Trump. The latter has had some success in building power but also keeps the focus on Trump – allowing him to define the terms of debate even for his fiercest opponents. The cyclical nature of the political time theory conceals the importance of actual political action for moving through the cycle.

Finally, the Trumpist movement has figured out how to make the politics of disjunction work for them. They take advantage of the disconnection between politics and policy, using the conservative communication apparatus to define their project, even as the agenda remains pretty unpopular – largely stalled out in the first term and pursued through executive fiat in the second. Their strongest issue areas are ones in which the connection between politics and policy was already tenuous – like immigration, where political concepts like “amnesty” map very loosely onto legal and policy structures. With rallies and nostalgia, Trump wields a politics of emotion and identity. His policies, this time around, seem to be whatever Elon Musk wants. More broadly, populist politics thrive when politics and policy are mismatched – this kind of environment allows for perpetual grievance.

In other words, moving into a period of disjunction is overdetermined – coalitions become strained, politics and policy drift apart, and ideologies grow stale. But moving out of such a period requires concerted action. It requires that enough people have political incentives and motivation to try something new and to build something instead of just destroying. Until then we seem stuck with the political nihilism that accompanies repudiation without renewal. I have faith we can do better than this, but the last few weeks, months, and years have strained it. It’s my hope that breaking down the problem this way can be of some use.