In 1804, the Corsican upstart Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself as

France’s emperor. His mother, born Letizia Ramolino, did not attend the
coronation. Informed of her son’s self-elevation, she is said to have remarked
coolly: “Let’s hope it lasts.”

In conversations with conservative friends about the Trump presidency these

last three years, I often found myself thinking about Mother Bonaparte. Before
Donald Trump’s election I made a lot of dire predictions about how his mix of
demagoguery and incompetence would interact with real world threats: I
envisioned economic turmoil, foreign policy crises, sustained domestic unrest.
Having lived through the failed end of the last Republican presidency, I
assumed Trump’s administration would be a second, swifter failure, with dire
consequences for both the country and the right.

In 2017, 2018, 2019, those predictions didn’t come to pass. Trump was bad in
many ways, but the consequences weren’t what I anticipated. The economy
surged; the world was relatively stable; the country was mad online but
otherwise relatively calm. And as the Democrats shifted leftward and Trump
delivered on his promised judicial appointments, many conservatives who had
shared my apprehensions would tell me that, simply as a shield against the left,
the president was doing enough to merit their support in 2020.

To which I often murmured something like, “let’s hope it lasts.”

It hasn’t. Now we are in the retreat-from-Moscow phase of the Trump

presidency, with crises arriving all together — pandemic, recession, mass
protests — and the president incapable of coping. If the election were held
today, the result could easily resemble 2008, the closest thing to a landslide
our divided system has recently produced. Meanwhile across corporate and
journalistic and academic America, a 1968-ish spirit is pulling liberalism toward
an uncertain destination, with what remains of conservatism turtled for safety
or extinct.

In this environment, few conservatives outside the MAGA core would declare
Trump’s presidency a ringing success. But many will stand by him out of a
sense of self-protection, hoping a miracle keeps him in the White House as a
firewall against whatever post-2020 liberalism might become.

This is a natural impulse, but they should consider another possibility: That so
long as he remains in office, Trump will be an accelerant of the right’s erasure,
an agent of its marginalisation and defeat, no matter how many of his
appointees occupy the federal bench.

In situations of crisis or grave difficulty, Trump displays three qualities, three

spirits, that all redound against the movement that he leads. His spirit of
authoritarianism creates a sense of perpetual crisis among his opponents,
uniting left-wingers and liberals despite their differences. His spirit of chaos,
the sense that nothing is planned or under control, turns moderates and
normies against him. And finally his spirit of incompetence means that
conservatives get far less out of his administration than they would from a
genuine imperial president, a man of iron rather than of pasteboard.

You can see the convergence of these spirits in the disaster at Lafayette Park,
where an authoritarian instinct led to a chaotic and violent police intervention,
a massive media freakout, blowback from the military — and left the president
with an impious photo op and control of six blocks around the White House to
show for it.

That last image, the president as a dictator of an island and impotent beyond it,
seems like a foretaste of what would await conservatives if Trump somehow
slipped through to a second term. Maybe he would get to replace another
Supreme Court justice — maybe. (In a Democratic Senate, not.) But everything
else the right needs would slip further out of reach.

Conservatism needs a response to the current movement for social justice that
answers just claims and rejects destructive ones. Trump delivers a
conservatism of Confederate war memorials that vindicates the left.

Conservatism needs new ideas about how to use power, a better theory of the
relationship between state, economy and culture than the decadent Reaganism
that Trump half-overthrew. Trump offers only a daily lesson in how to let
power go to waste.

Conservatism needs a way to either claim more space in America’s existing

elite institutions, or else a path to building new ones. Trump offers a retreat to
the fortresses of OANN, TPUSA, QAnon.

Above all, conservatism, now a worldview for old people and contrarians in a
country trending leftward, needs a mix of converts and sympathisers to be
something other than a rump. Trump did win some converts in 2016, but he
has spent four years making far more enemies, and their numbers are growing
every day.

What we are seeing right now in America, an accelerated leftward shift,

probably won’t continue at this pace through 2024. But it’s likely to continue
in some form so long as Trump is conservatism, and conservatism is Trump —
and four more years of trying to use him as a defensive salient is not a strategy
of survival, but defeat.

©2020 The New York Times Company