The Day After

Tackling the out-of-control budget and our deteriorating international position require bipartisan cooperation. Can we still achieve that?

We may not know for a while—or we may know surprisingly quickly; no one knows what’s gonna happen—but America will eventually have a new president. That person, whoever they are and however decisive or slim their margin of victory, will inevitably claim vindication for their narrative about the meaning of the election and claim a mandate for change. Based on recent past experience, the loser is likely to refuse to accept the responsibility of loyal opposition, but will rally their supporters to resist a result that they claim does not truly reflect the will of the people or the essential values of our constitution. And so, in a real sense, even though the election will be over, the election will not really ever end.

I hope I’m wrong about that. I hope that if Trump wins the Democrats don’t repeat their delusions of 2017-2020, and I hope that if Harris wins the Republicans don’t repeat their delusions of 2021-2024. I hope the winner and their party recognize that they have to govern the whole country, not just their partisan half, and that they loser and their party ask themselves how they need to change in order to win a mandate to govern, as opposed to thinking that the mandate was stolen from them somehow. I don’t think such a hope is entirely in vain. But it’s still a hope; it doesn’t rise to the level of an expectation. And that worries me.

The United States is in great shape in many ways. We have the strongest major economy in the world, with employment remaining high and inflation finally quiescent. We hold leading positions in a number of crucial industries and trend lines are going in the right direction on manufacturing capacity. I’d rather hold America’s cards than have any other country’s hand to play. But we’re also facing some major challenges that require some willingness not only to work together across the aisle but to be seen to be working together across the aisle, if we’re to overcome them.

One of these is the budget. For the first time since the financial crisis, the United States is operating at full employment and with long-term interest rates back in the “normal” range that obtained before 2008. And yet, the United States is borrowing such enormous sums of money every year that interest costs as a percentage of GDP have risen to their highest level since the 1990s, and have risen faster than they did from 1978 to 1982. Our current course is completely unsustainable—and yet both candidates engaged in a bidding war of tax cut and spending promises.

There was a notable difference between the two; Harris’s proposals were irresponsible, while Trump’s were insane. Their shared behavior is a learned one, however, a rational but destructive response to the reality that electorates simply do not want to support parties or candidates who propose to do what is necessary to tackle longstanding budgetary imbalances. The poster child for that proposition should be France’s epically unpopular president, Emmanuel Macron, but I’d suggest looking across the Channel for the more apposite cautionary tale:

UK Labour Party leader Keir Starmer won a landslide (on the basis of a minimal plurality, to be sure) only a few months ago. Since taking office, his popularity has suffered an unprecedentedly swift and brutal collapse, to the point where UK voters now prefer the previous PM, Rishi Sunak, who even now sports a net favorability rating of negative 31%.

Starmer is not being rejected because he’s being blamed for Brexit or for Covid or for inflation or for the migration crisis or for the poor state of the NHS or for anything else that Britons might reasonably be angry about, because he wasn’t in power when any of those things happened. He’s being blamed because solving those problems isn’t going to be easy or fun or costless, and it is much easier to blame whoever is in power simultaneously for not solving problems and for the downsides of any solutions they propose or implement than to sign on to solving those problems yourself.

I fear that’s the political dynamic that whoever wins today in America will inherit. I’d say the only way out is for both parties to walk the fiscal plank together, but honestly, they’d both be fools to do so given the very real prospect of internal revolt if they do and the opportunity to win on a backlash if they don’t. Which is precisely what worries me.

Foreign policy looks similarly precarious, and requires similarly a cross-partisan agreement that doesn’t exist and likely won’t. I think it’s very likely that the next president will arrange an end to the Ukraine War that is unsatisfying, and that gets denounced by the opposing party—whichever party that is—as a betrayal and a failure. Something similar could obtain in the Middle East, where whatever happens—a continued expansion of Israel’s war with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran, or a brokered cease-fire on various fronts—gets widely denounced by the opposition as weakness and perfidy, the main difference being that I don’t think a brokered cease-fire is very likely at all no matter who wins. And then there’s China, where there does seem to be a high degree of cross-partisan agreement, but where there have been numerous signs that the consensus may be cracking, including Trump’s flip-flop on TikTok and, most recently, Speaker Mike Johnson’s declaration that he would look to repeal the CHIPS Act.

The dynamic, though, is similar to the budget. America is overextended, and needs to take steps to align its commitments with its capabilities, both by expanding its capabilities and by looking seriously to restructure its commitments. Any effort to actually do this, though—as we saw in different ways in the Obama, Trump and Biden years—will inevitably be denounced as weakness and failure. While many self-identified advocates of realism and restraint think that only the permanent national security bureaucracy stands in the way of “rightsizing” our foreign policy, the reality is that the American people are not prepared to tolerate what retrenchment looks like. And, once again, the party in opposition stands ready and able to take advantage of every setback. And you just can’t conduct a foreign policy that way.

Not all issues are like these. On immigration, I suspect policy will turn rightward regardless of who wins, but if a Harris administration will likely try to limit that rightward tilt while Trump will take a more draconian turn (and likely ignite more serious popular protest in response). On abortion, I suspect Harris will get somewhat out ahead of public opinion, which has already been trending in a strongly pro-abortion-rights direction, while a Trump administration will row against the tide, effectively or not. I think we’d make more progress on climate change and housing costs with bipartisan cooperation, but I can picture progress being made on a more partisan basis as well. And on the budget itself, there’s a big difference between a fiscally irresponsible policy that tries to reduce poverty and an even more fiscally irresponsible policy that redistributes wealth upward and promotes corruption.

But the toughest nuts require both hands to crack. So I hope, whoever wins today, that America rediscovers how to get right and left to work together on those issues, even as they fight as hard as they want to tilt overall policy more in the direction of their own conception of the common good.