Do you feel like “sunlight is pouring over the entire world?”
It probably depends on whether you voted for the man who offered those sentiments about his own reascendance to the presidency this week. That, perhaps, or your personal pharmaceutical regime.
If the glow you’re feeling is an all-natural high, it may be because you believe, as President Trump does, that with his return, you have been freed from oppression: “For American citizens, Jan. 20, 2025, is Liberation Day,” the returning president has said.
If you didn’t vote for Trump, however, you are unlikely to be feeling sun-drenched liberation.
You may instead be feeling nostalgic for former President Biden, or you may feel oppressed yourself. You may be thinking of how you will endure four years of Trump 2.0.
The next four years will probably not entirely reflect the bright sunshine envisioned by Republicans or the dark-night-of-the-soul Democrats fear. With few exceptions, the problems and opportunities that greet every president are not the ones they or the country expected.
Former President George W. Bush was elected to be a caretaker president of modest domestic aspirations, not commander in chief in a global war.
Trump was elected the first time to juice the economy and secure the border with Mexico, not manage the response to the worst public health crisis in a century.
For presidents, history tends to be more about what happens to them rather than through them.
And yet, every time we get a new president — or even an old president who is new again — we get an ambitious new agenda and a race against the clock.
One hundred days, they say, to remake the nation. One hundred days from oppression to liberation. One hundred days from pitch dark to sunlight pouring over the entire world.
Part of this is just human nature and our love of stories of good and evil, of heroes and villains — a nature uncomfortable with the shades of gray in which governments actually paint their pictures.
Part of it is the media, which wants big, bold stories to tell.
But part of it is also in the stubbornly narrow margins in our politics of late.
One of the things that bedeviled American politics this century is our close elections, which has made our parties and their leaders miserly with their political capital.
With the exception of 2008, which ushered in former President Obama and large Democratic majorities in Congress against the backdrop of a financial panic, the 21st century has been a time without big wins or meaningful mandates.
Trump won his current term with just 58 percent of the Electoral College, which puts his win at 44th out of 60 presidential elections.
It was a bigger victory than Trump’s 2016 win and, by a point, bigger than Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020.
But in the grand scheme of things, it was a close election very much in line with a political era marked by narrow wins, narrow majorities in Congress and frequent changes in the balance of power.
You have to go all the way back to the period from 1884-92 to find a time when the party in power was turned out in three consecutive presidential elections.
And like our counterparts of the Gilded Age, we’ve returned a defeated former president to power. Like theirs, our era is not so much like a pendulum swinging in long arcs but a seesaw tipping back and forth.
It might seem logical that narrow majorities would lead to more cooperation, but the reverse has actually been true.
This is due in part to the effects of a narrow loss on the thinking of the defeated party.
When either of the two main parties is out of power, it sees itself as so excruciatingly close to winning it back that it is disinclined to make meaningful changes.
A team that makes it to the Super Bowl and loses by a field goal in overtime isn’t likely to fire its coach and blow up its roster. Instead, it will agonize over the one play that might have made a difference.
If your party loses in a landslide, like the triple-whammy Democrats suffered from 1980-88, it becomes pretty clear that something else will have to be tried.
Today’s Democrats are arguing over which direction to take to nudge the swing states back into their column: A bold leftward leap or a moderate move. By 1992, there wasn't much argument and even bold progressives were ready for former President Clinton’s “third way” moderation.
Winning small also brings implications.
When parties feel that a stable majority is in reach, they have incentives to govern in such a way to make that possible. When 51 percent is the floor and not the ceiling, parties spend more time thinking about attracting support in the middle rather than constantly shoring up their bases. But when majorities are narrow and ephemeral, the reverse is true.
The norm at least since 2009 has been for parties to take power and then busily, eagerly try to cram their entire agenda into as short a time as possible. The thinking goes that a president arrives at the height of his popularity and must immediately get as much for his side as possible. It is, of course, self-fulfilling.
Whether it be ObamaCare, Trump’s family separations at the border, or environmental restrictions under Biden, bold, early actions tend to push away those majority makers in the middle, who in turn deliver a midterm shellacking for the party in power and a repeat of the same cycle all over again.
Political capital, though, isn’t a finite resource. If invested wisely, it can grow. As both Clinton and former President Reagan showed, early reversals can be endured and turned into great returns if one has patience and restraint.
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