Andrew O'Hehir lays out the situation in an interesting post last week:
But for the political and media castes allied with the failing two-party system — who have viewed the deluded and deplorable masses with a mixture of pity, contempt and anthropological curiosity — this decay must be denied or minimized, depicted as a transitory phenomenon that will soon be corrected through the application of politics as usual. In this sense, Nancy Pelosi and Paul Ryan are not on different sides. They are on the same side.
OK, wait, hold on. I’m not saying there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats, or that it wouldn’t be preferable to have one group in power rather than the other. …
What I mean by saying that Ryan and Pelosi are on the same side is that they share the same set of misguided assumptions. Ryan and the rest of the GOP leadership have desperately tried to spin Trump’s flukey, hand-of-fate election victory as a mandate for standard-issue right-wing Republican policies, which on some level they must understand is completely ludicrous. Pelosi and company, on the other hand, will argue that the remedy for Trumpism is to be found in exactly the same awkward, anti-ideological, coalition-management politics that have rendered the Democratic Party so hollowed out, rootless and demoralized over the past decade or so. (I stayed away from the negative buzzword “neoliberal” … except, wait, no I didn’t.) That’s not quite as ludicrous, but it’s close.
So if no realignment with reality is likely to come from either party, what's likely to happen? It's hard for me to believe that Trump can stay in office to finish his term. The chaos and incompetence is just too disruptive, and the power establishment in this country wants stability and will not tolerate chaos indefinitely. Sooner or later, its various factions will come together and find a way to push Trump out. Best case: By 2019 Mike Pence is president dealing with a Democrat-dominated Congress. Pence is a tool and will do as instructed. The Dems are mostly clueless, but they, unlike the GOP, are not an insane cult–they are vulnerable to the pressures brought upon them by reality, to which the GOP has proven itself invulnerable.
There is some reason to hope that pressures brought to bear on the Dem establishment willl move it more toward the interests of ordinary Americans and away from the Yuppie and cosmopolitan elite interests it now mostly represents. Maybe the Warren/Sanders wing of the party can change the party dynamic. Maybe somehow the Democratic Party power structure shifts from hacks to progressive realists on the local level, and starts sending more people like Warren and Sanders to Washington, and maybe this slowly shifts the country back to political sanity and broad prosperity.
I know. Probably just wishful thinking. There's little reason to believe the Dem establishment has learned its lesson or that there is enough energy and commitment on the progressive Left to substantively shift the power dynamics in the Democratic Party establishment. I'm not completely without hope, but if you're a betting man, you put your money on the people who already have the power, and they have little incentive to give in to the populist Left. There will be a few cosmetic adjustments and symbolic gestures, but it will be back to business as usual serving the interests of the top 20%. It's not that these Liberal cosmopolitans think like the ogres on the Calvinist Right that the poor deserve what they get and worse. They feel really badly about the poor, but they care about their own interests more, and will not sacrifice them for the interests of people who are not like them.
So the only realistic best case is that somehow or another we find a way to muddle through.
So what is a plausible worst case? I fear we will look back at the Trump election and the continued insanity of the GOP in the wake of it as the moment that American Democracy died. The rise of Trump and the inclination of aggrieved Americans to send ignorant if not moronic ideologues to Washington to represent them has rendered American democracy incapable of giving the country the national leadership it needs in a complex world. The power establishment in this country cannot suffer the possibility of someone insane like Trump or a group of hacks and morons like the Republicans or most of the Democrats to run things. The best case described above, i.e., returning the country to the old normal favoring top 20% interests, will not return the country to stability. It will aggravate the volatile conditions that brought Trump into power. And this power establishment is not likely to suffer another disruptive populist insurgency from either the Left or the Right.
I believe that the challenge to elite interests is more likely to come from the Right. That's where the energy is most violently intense right now. I don't see the outrage about Trump from the Left surviving his removal from power, but the outrage and resentment that is driving the Right is not going away, especially if Trump is pushed out. The people on the aggrieved Right are a minority, but they are a significant minority, and they feel they have nothing to lose and will not go down easily or peacefully. Its energy source is essentially the same as that which drives Islamic terrorism–a sense of identity loss and humiliation in a complex, modern world that they feel seeks to destroy everything they hold sacred.
Their violent resistance can play out in a number of ways. I think the mostly likely will be intensified, organized Timothy McVeigh-style terrorism from the Right, and with this will come intensified state consolidation of power using the full force of its surveillance and police powers. Terrorism from the Right will ironically produce increasing levels of state authoritarianism, but it won't feel like a right-wing police state. American Liberals and Moderates will largely approve and submit to this increasing level of authoritarianism because they will see it as necessary to preserve peace and stability, and it will seem "liberal" because it is fighting right-wing extremism. The regime will be tolerant about feminist, LGBTQ issues, and clamp down hard on gun ownership in the name of preserving the peace. Do "liberals" really care passionately about any other issues? It won't affect the daily lives of most middle class people in the bubbles they live in, but over time more of these families will find their bubbles bursting as the basic dynamic in play drives increasing numbers of them into poverty. And so then their angry children will form or join right-wing terrorist militias.
A less likely but quite plausible possibility would be a military coup that would favor the cultural values of the Right. It's more likely if there is an international crisis with China or Russia that justifies the hard-edged decisiveness of a "dictator" because of the ineptitude and gridlock that democracy promotes. Either way, we will slowly continue our morphing into a statist autocracy in which our democratic institutions will be mostly a charade as they are in Russia. Right/Left will become meaningless labels except insofar as they indicate hard/soft, and in that sense, the Right will prevail, because those who are "hard" usually win.
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