Does Anyone Ever Learn Anything?

The election is upon us, and the predictions of Doom are dire. Jeff Blehar writes that we should expect “no deus ex machina to extract the Republican Party from an electoral judgment fully two years in the making.” Dan McLaughlin, as he reads the tea leaves and sees the Senate map breaking away from Republicans, says that “this looks like a big blue wave — maybe a huge one.”

Conservative analysts nearly uniformly see a Republican bloodbath brewing. It’s going to get bad out there. Get ready.

But, as the storm clouds gather, there are three specific essays published in recent days that I would like to commend for your review not because their bottom line judgments on the midterm’s probable outcome are so different — but because their authors run the spectrum on the right from conservatives who oppose Donald Trump to those generally in support.

Peter Wehner, writing in The Atlantic, argues that “the anti-MAGA reckoning may have finally begun. Trump has lost most of the country.”

His hold on his own base is weakening; its members, like everyone else, are suffering because of the staggering incompetence of the president. And many of those who continue to support Trump are exhausted.

In the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan writes that “everyone knows a wave is coming, the only question is size. Will it wash away buildings on shore or leave them standing? Will it be towering or tallish?”

Henry Olsen, in the pages of the Washington Post, writes that “you don’t have to be a prophet to see what’s coming. No serious analyst thinks Republicans will have a good night as midterm returns roll in.” “The open question,” according to Olsen, “is whether it will be merely bad, terrible or something akin to being eaten by a Cyclops.”

A conservative Trump foe. A conservative Trump skeptic, who is often wary and critical of the president and his most loyal supporters. And a conservative who is often quite friendly to Trumpism. Could they all be wrong in their basic predictions? Yes, of course — but the evidence strongly suggests otherwise, and I don’t happen to think they’re wrong. I too think that the wave is coming in — a wave big enough to reflect Donald Trump’s historically bad job approval: 39.1 percent approve, 59.1 disapprove according to the RealClearPolitics average. (For the record, that’s much worse than Joe Biden, Barack Obama, or George W. Bush’s standings on the eve of their disastrous midterms, which indicates that this election may yet be even uglier for today’s incumbent party.)

If a blue wave comes in and sweeps Republicans away up and down the ballot, I do not want to diminish the downside risk of unified Democratic government in 2029. A Democratic trifecta, after all, will turn Charlie Cooke into a “raging insomniac” as he worries about the constitutional mischief the Left would try to push through, including packing the Supreme Court, adding states (and Democratic senators), and abolishing the filibuster. The risks are very real. But in a certain sense, they are questions for later. They are the fights of the future.

The question upon us now is: Will anyone learn anything from this? Specifically, will the Republican Party, will Republican politicians, will the conservative movement, and will the right-wing electoral base learn any lessons from defeat?

If we are to believe that “no one ever learns anything,” then there can be no silver lining to what will surely be a bad night for Republicans of all stripes. Losing will merely be losing. Defeat will merely be defeat.

Of course, the “no one ever learns anything” partisans have a lot of ammunition. People are stubborn. We engage in motivated reasoning. We have a hard time seeing past our priors. We tend to see politics as a zero-sum team sport: They win; we lose. We are, in short, not always rational.

But if this is an election in which, as Blehar says, “Trump has been the author of his own ruin” and everyone with eyes can see it, ought that not force conservatives of all stripes into a serious rethink of their choices over the last decade? I think there’s a good chance it will, and perhaps in a generally positive way.

Noonan, usually the Trump skeptic, writes that “the Republican Party has to get healthy again.” She’s right. Olsen — no reflexive Never Trumper — argues that “the most probable outcome should move Trump and the GOP toward some serious reflection.” One should hope so.

Indeed, Olsen adds, Republicans “face a hard question in the final two years of his term: How can MAGA impulses be reconciled with broader public sentiment?” Of course, facing such questions implies that lessons can be learned.

The best-case scenario for conservatives over the coming years is a synthesis that takes the best of the populist impulse of the Trump years — secure borders, a harder line against Communist China, and a focus on creating a society friendly to family formation — while jettisoning the crudities, cruelties, and turnoffs of Trump himself (and those of his mini-me’s such as Vivek Ramaswamy and Ken Paxton). It should weld the pro-growth economics and the positive American internationalism of the Reagan years to the never-quite-achieved fiscal discipline of the Tea Party to a prudent skepticism of foreign intervention that has developed in the last decade. It should face down the Left, take a stand against antisemitism, and remember that people generally prefer to vote for the friendly party.

If all these things seem incompatible — I’d urge you to read up on the philosophical incongruities of what became fusionism, which conservatives rode to victory in the Cold War. Of course, what we might call a “21st-century fusionism” would have a lot to offer for our era, its problems, and our country.

But does anyone ever learn anything?