Inertia and institutional damage in politics

Inertia and institutional damage in politics

Trump has done substantially less damage to our institutions than even his supporters expected at the time of his election, and this is a testament to the antifragilty of our (normally-dysfunctional but extremely stable) political establishment. This is what I predicted back in 2016, in my counterargument against those discordian elements who supported him on the grounds that he would demolish the government (and in this more-eliptical post). Even shutting down the government for months only resulted in a lot of broke & angry government employees and a slightly increased risk of food recalls — not in any catastrophic disasters.

This is because the state is a stable self-regulating system. The state can persist without and even despite a dysfunctional chief executive, in the normal case: as we saw during Obama’s presidency, a highly motivated chief executive (regardless of their actual goals) is constantly fighting against established resistance (both elected and unelected) and must be clever in order to make changes. Those changes are liable to be subverted or rolled back, regardless of their content. (No president has been less politically radical than Obama, whose legacy is primarily one of expanding the logic of the neoliberal order supported by a quarter decade of previous administrations, and yet he nevertheless encountered enormous amounts of friction — from people and institutions fully ideologically aligned with him. Friction does not need rational justification.)

Trump’s erratic nature — the very thing that caused a lot of people to support him as an anti-establishment candidate (and, unlike Nixon, something that does not apear to be a put-on) — prevents him from effectively acting against the establishment (or, indeed, in favor of or against anything). Any action that the president does not have the right to take by fiat will require brinksmanship to execute, & he does not have the requisite attention span for brinksmanship. A random walk does not reliably get one anywhere. As a result, we can expect Trump’s legacy to be one of low-grade embarassment and no lasting impact: a dark mirror Jimmy Carter.

The primary danger of a Trump presidency is that he could be convinced (by staff or media) to order a single military action — say, to nuke a foreign country. He has control over the nuclear football, so he could, and nobody has legal grounds to stop him. Luckily, two years on, this hasn’t happened yet — which means that the people trying to control his behavior are not dumb, crazy, or desperate enough to do so. I wish these cat-herders luck: low-grade embarassment and no lasting impact is the best result we can reasonably expect from this administration.