Waiting for the Barbarians

The older I get, the more temperamentally conservative I become and the less hope I have for politics. The ideological conservatives who support Donald Trump are the exact opposite: They are so angry that the people who agree with them – people like National Review— have failed to enact the policies they desire, that they are going to try somebody who doesn’t agree with them, in the hope that this will work out better.

We are free to say that this is an unrealistic hope, but it is at least a hope, which is more than the other candidates appear to them to be offering. If Trump wins, it will be because of this.

I can actually relate to Trump supporters in a very important regard: I share their disdain for politics, to the extent that I could totally imagine myself, if I were a participant in the Iowa Republican caucuses, voting for Trump tomorrow. It would be the equivalent of a chess-hater’s flipping over the chessboard; it would feel fantastic.

But: I think that if I actually found myself at the caucuses, I would relish that feeling as long as possible . . . and then defect from Trump at the last minute, to vote for one of the other candidates — simply because I know that Donald Trump doesn’t have a magic wand capable of solving our problems, any more than “Paul Ryan-O” or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or anybody else in the current gang of elected officials. The last charismatic candidate who promised us at energetic mass rallies that he would solve our problems by transcending partisanship was Barack Obama. To quote a hero of conservatives: “How’s that hopey, changey thing workin’ out for ya?”

So this is why I think Trump won’t win tomorrow evening. People have already gotten the best part of a Trump presidency: They have succeeded in humiliating the politicians. When it comes to voting, though, they will move on to the next step: choosing the candidate whose policies most closely resemble their own, and who will work to implement as much of those policies as possible in an evenly divided nation, with a strong opposition . . . the exact same way a President Trump would have to do. (Another thing that makes me think Trump will underperform tomorrow is that poll where 40 percent of his supporters said they’d still vote for him if he shot somebody. That’s the kind of thing you say when you want to impress upon people the fact that you’re angry — not what you say if you’re the kind of person who wants to spend a cold Monday night at a political caucus instead of, say, a nudie bar. It’s something characteristic of a venter, not a voter.)

But it’s not just Trump supporters who are frustrated with politics. There are a lot of us, all over the political spectrum, who are sick of the spectacle and really feel like flipping over that chessboard. Which is why, I think, if Trump loses tomorrow evening . . . even many people who dislike him will be disappointed. (Read Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians”: “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? / Those people were a kind of solution.”)