Frum: Final question: The likelihood is that Donald Trump will lose, possibly very badly. The Republican Party and the conservative world will be plunged into intellectual and moral ferment, even crisis. How scalable are the lessons you offer in Prison Break? To what extent do they offer a guide to Republicans and conservatives who seek change? And what are the real-world limits you expect for them, given that the one thing that will remain true post-Trump is the revelation of the weak hold of the ideology of anti-statism on the Republican rank and file?
Teles: This is a very complicated question. And as a political scientist, the thing that strikes me is how under-determined the response to a very big Trump loss will be. If it’s very large, then it sends a signal beyond the personality of Trump, which is that you just can’t put together a winning presidential coalition on the basis of LePen-Americane. But if it is close, then it could be read the opposite way, which is that if you could just put a less obnoxious face on his coalition then it’s possible for the Republicans to succeed as a purely white-nationalist party. I have to think that if it really is a blow-out, then the authority of the Republicans who embraced Trump has to be weakened, that the NeverTrump people will have a strong claim to have warned their co-partisans that they were joining a sinking ship. But I think that one way to predict what is going on is that you’re going to have real factional conflict in the Republican Party in a way that you haven’t had in a couple of generations. The identity of the party is up for grabs in a way that it has not been in some time.
If it’s true that there’s going to be real factional conflict in the party, then one thing that suggests is that the power of party leaders is going to weaken, especially in Congress. As my friend Lee Drutman has argued, based on conditional party government theory in political science, if the Republicans are split factionally, the only way to govern Congress will be for party leaders to give up power over the agenda, and allow members to make coalitions they want—even with Democrats. That creates the opportunity for more strange-bedfellows coalitions, institutionally—party leaders won’t be in as strong a position to control the agenda. But simultaneously, the authority for party members to shift positions is going to be weakened, because they can’t just point to a consensus group of cue-makers as justification for changing position. So we may be going into a more anarchic sort of future, with shifting coalitions but also a lot of blame-avoidance dynamics among Republicans who are worried that whatever they do, they’re going to get punished and can’t hide behind the party power-brokers any more.
I do worry that if the Republicans go in a more white-nationalist direction—if that’s the interpretation they put on this election, that they can’t ignore the Trump voters and that those voters want statism, but statism used to serve them—then it’s harder to build coalitions of the kind discussed in the book that combine anti-statism of both parties. That makes cutting Pentagon spending, rethinking surveillance, and further criminal-justice reform harder. But it creates opportunities for other kinds of strange bedfellows coalitions, in particular on trade.
My bottom line is that it might be that the dynamics that created the process of criminal-justice reform on the right are Humpty Dumpty, and he can’t be put back together again.
