It was 20 years ago this week

Michelle Goldberg has a good column reflecting on last night’s catastrophe, and notes that the reaction is likely to be very different than 2016 — we probably won’t see immediate mass demonstrations and a surge in newspaper subscriptions this time. She concludes by remembering another low point of the 21st century, the only other time since 1988 a Republican candidate for president has secured an electoral majority:

Ultimately, Trump’s one redeeming feature is his incompetence. If history is any guide, many of those he brings into government will come to despise him. He will not give people the economic relief they’re craving. If he follows through on his plans for universal tariffs, economists expect higher inflation. Trump’s close ally Elon Musk, dreaming of imposing aggressive austerity on the federal government, has said that Americans will have to endure “some temporary hardship.” We saw, with Covid, how Trump handled a major crisis, and there is not the slightest reason to believe he will perform any better in handling another. I have little doubt that many of those who voted for him will come to regret it. He could even end up discrediting bombastic right-wing nationalism the way George W. Bush — whose re-election also broke my heart — discredited neoconservatism.

For you younger people, 2004 also felt really, really awful, like the United States was permanently on the wrong track somehow. (John Kerry also, IMHO, ran a good campaign that was well-tailored to the battleground states but came up short.) That this election was succeeded by two Democratic landslides is, needless to say, no guarantee of future performance. But Trump is even more incompetent than Bush and is in a position to implement quite a bit more of his extremely unpopular agenda, and it’s now Republicans who are at the mercy of the relentless thermostatic march of public opinion.

Hanging over this is the contempt that Republican elites have for democratic elections, but this is also nothing new — George W. Bush came to power as the result of a racist voter purge and a judicial coup. The fight continues.