Chartbook 359 West Wing for deplorables: America's liberal elites, history and the Trump shock.

The long read in the FT this weekend under the title “Trump and the end of American soft power” is by one of the true doyens of US foreign policy thinking, Joseph Nye. Back in 1990 Nye popularized the idea of “soft power” to characterize the way that countries influence each other by means other than “hard power”. Unsurprisingly, he sees Trump’s “exclusive nationalism” as a losing strategy. Nye concludes that “American soft power will have a hard time during the next four years”. But he stops short of making any wider diagnosis.

Comparing Nye’s piece to my own op ed on the history of US global leadership, which appeared on Friday, I realize that whilst Nye and I agree on many points, there is a fundamental difference.

You might say that Nye is less pessimistic and more focused on the specific dynamics of the Trump Presidency. But at a deeper level, what is really at stake are two rather different views of history. This concerns the general coloration, mine is certainly a darker picture. But the difference is also more general and abstract

My view of US history is not just janus-faced, but developmental. To locate Trump we need to offer a historical account of how we got here, an account that is path-dependent and means that Trump is not just a shock but indicative of a deeper and longer-term trend. You don’t have to start your story-telling “at the beginning”. We all think and speak in “medias res”. But if you don’t see that the coalition that supported US globalism in its liberal variant has collapsed and that that didn’t start in 2024 or in 2016, you are missing the point.

Of course, Nye’s argument is also historical. Indeed, as a policy intellectual, he is truly a figure of the American century. But the mode of his historical narration and the way he situates the current Trump moment is different. It might be described as episodic or seasonal. In rather strong terms one might call it cyclical rather than developmental.

Characteristic moments where the episodic and seasonal view of history in Nye’s article reveals itself, include the following:

• American soft power has good moments and bad - as opposed to a series of interconnected and mutually conditioning phases in a path-dependent development towards illegitimacy.

• After Trump 1.0 came Biden and global confidence rebounded - de facto Trump is the exception and Biden-style globalism the norm.

• Whatever the antics of the White House, there are checks and balances - glossing over the possibility that those might be systematically and progressively subverted not just by MAGA but by trends in US politics more generally, including on the liberal side. Nye acknowledges that all is not well with US democracy, but immediately passes on to the question of “solutions”.

• American civil society is the ultimately decisive force and it is attractive and positive - as opposed to riven by profound tensions and contradictions of which the ugly state of US democracy is a fair reflection.

• Musk is simply a “billionaire” - as opposed to the most extreme instance of a new type of oligarchy that disrupts familiar patterns of elite lobbying and political economy.

This kind of episodic view of history relieves its exponents of the need to actually consider current historical trends and what they signify. You can simply shrug and remark that American soft power has ups and downs and it is currently going through a bleak phase.

In the seasonal variant, the episodic view of history promises that winter will be followed by spring. The GOP sweep in 2024 will be followed by a Democratic Party comeback in the midterms in 2026.

Thinking about Nye’s piece I realize that since the start of the year I have encountered this mode of historical thinking two times “in the flesh” in interaction with Democratic Party elites and also in reading interviews with prominent figures like Jake Sullivan.

The lite version of this quiescent logic was on display at a meeting of the American Academy with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Michael Froman and Anne-Marie Slaughter.

Rather than facing the dramatic, irreversible and historic implications of the second Trump Presidency, my co-panelists shuffled comfortably back and forth between the present and the past, exchanging lessons learned in the Obama administration. The prevailing mood was one of accommodating oneself to the “turn-taking” in Washington - “so the wheel of history turns”.

I was somewhat surprised by this tone, not only because of the relentless pounding by the second Trump administration, but also because of what we know about how the Democratic Party responded to defeat in 2016.

In the wake of the Biden-Harris defeat, with Trump 2.0 still in waiting, I referred to Bidenomics as “Maga for thinking people”. I made that suggestion on the basis of the continuities between Jake Sullivan’s “new Washington consensus and Lighthizer’s trade policy under the first Trump Presidency. That reflected thinking that went on in the Democratic Party camp after the defeat of 2016 that went beyond mere regurgitation. Under the sign of a “foreign policy for the American middle class”, Democratic elites were trying to shape a new script and a new reality. Within the limits imposed by Congress, the Biden administration sought to craft a policy that would provide a new socio-economic basis for the comprehensive reassertion of US global leadership that Biden and Sullivan craved. By November 2024 this had resulted in the three-pronged US engagement in Ukraine, in Israel’s aggression in the Middle East and in the containment of China in East Asia.

In his exit interview with the FT, far from distancing himself from the suggestion of continuity, former NSA Jake Sullivan doubled down.

As our wine arrives, I ask if he has started to think about why the Democrats lost the White House. “I’ve started to, but not nearly as much as I did in 2016. On November 9 2016, I was unemployed on my couch and could just sit and think about it indefinitely,” he says. He thinks the outcome of the 2016 election was “deeply structural” and marked a “delayed reckoning of the 2008 financial crisis and a deep wellspring of anger among the American people that the system had failed them”. “[2024] may just be one of those elections where you have a Democrat running against a Republican at a time of high prices and anti-incumbent global sentiment and the Republican narrowly beat the Democrat and it’s not really about something existential,” he says. “Or maybe it will bear out that it’s something more existential.”

As for the election night itself, the moment at which it now seems that America and the world’s history pivoted, Sullivan admits to have been distracted by more personal concerns.

I want to ask about November 5, when Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump but Sullivan’s wife was elected to Congress. How did he feel about losing the White House? “Honestly, that night, it didn’t fully sink in. I was so excited for Maggie,” he says. “It was a wonderful night, and then a harder morning.”

This blending of personal self-celebration with history was on truly vivid display on January 30th 2025 at a session at the BruxConf2025 under the title “The Perfect Storm”. I had the pleasure of commenting on a panel feating USTR Katherine Tai amongst other Bidenomics luminaries.

What prevailed amongst the veterans of the Biden administration was that same mixture of regret and self-congratulation. The two were resolved in the celebration of “legacy”, “lesson learning” and locker room backslapping. There was no sign, at all, of a clear-eyed assessment of the historic defeat in 2024. Instead, my American co-panelists peddled lessons for their European audience, as if nothing had happened in November 2024. Indeed, they professed themselves particularly proud of documents (“work products”) published in the lame duck period following their defeat. Like Sullivan, the Bidenaughts seemed oblivious to the significance of their own failure.

As former USTR Katherine Tai made clear in her response at the end, what she is most proud of is burnishing her personal progressive credentials (“scars”) for a final meeting with St Peter, personified by gravelly voiced Martin Sheen. By way of Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing - the liberal comfort blanket of the Bush era - actual politics and history are transmogrified into a saccharine theodicy blended with an admixture of Irish blarney.

Since then, MAGA 2.0 has turned out even more unhinged than the first iteration. It blends a very real and jarring adjustment of US foreign policy, above all towards Ukraine, and a savage attack on US institutions, the civil service and the Universities to the fore, with a barrage of policy measures, notably on trade, that seems driven largely by the desire to dominate the news-cycle rather than to generate real effects.

With its nonsensical talk of the “terrible economy” supposedly bequeathed by the Biden administration, MAGA 2.0 takes the post-factual politics of the “big lie” to a new level. It seems bent on creating an entirely alternate reality for the Trump faithful.

Does the radicalization of MAGA 2.0 put the continuity thesis - “Bidenomics as Maga for thinking people” - under pressure? To a degree yes.

But then I remember the exchange with Katherine Tai and her heartfelt evocation of Martin Sheen/St Peter and I invite you to recall the delirious moment in September 2024 - in full election season - when the actual incumbents of the White House welcomed the cast of TV’s West Wing to the actual West Wing and Martin Sheen, in character, actually intoned “Dear Father, let our country awake” …. and I begin to wonder.

If Trump 2.0 takes the politics of the imaginary to a new level, is this a rupture with the supposedly more grounded Biden administration? Or, in light of the exit interviews with team-Biden, do we have to face the fact that both sides are trapped in their own mythologies? In which case, what we living in now is not so much a descent into madness, as a new season of West Wing, this time “West Wing for deplorables”.

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