Getty Enhanced Interrogation ‘Wait for the Government to Collapse and Then You’re in Power Again’ Liberal writer Jonathan Chait sees a model for Democrats in the Trump era. His name is Mitch McConnell.

Katelyn Fossett is associate editor at POLITICO Magazine.

Among the slice of Washington that might be writing a book at any given time—a pretty big slice compared to other cities—November 8, 2016 was one of those big upsets that epitomizes the age-old publishing fear of being overtaken by events. Audacity: How Obama Defied His Critics and Transformed America, by New York Magazine writer and liberal pundit Jonathan Chait, is among those that undoubtedly was written with the expectation of a Hillary Clinton presidency, prompting him to scramble on deadline to adapt to the new world of Donald Trump.

POLITICO Magazine spoke with him to ask if he stood by his argument: Would reforms on climate and health care really be so durable in the era of a president who’s promised to blow up so much of the status quo, and particularly the parts of it that belong to Barack Obama? Chait is still optimistic—the book, he says, required only a little reframing. Real policy momentum, when set in motion on such a big scale, is hard to stop, he says. Chait also has one overarching bit of advice for Democrats under Trump: Mimic congressional Republicans under Mitch McConnell and keep cooperation to a bare minimum. “Disassociate yourself from the outcomes, wait for the government to collapse and then you’re in power again,” he says. Simple.


This conversation has been edited for clarity.

Politico Magazine: Your book is about how Obama’s progressive legacy will endure. You had to have had a little bit of a pause about that conclusion after Trump was elected.

Jonathan Chait: The premise of the book is that the depth and the breadth of Obama’s legacy has been underestimated not only by his opponents but also by most of his supporters. So after the election, everybody on both sides immediately jumped to the conclusion that Trump is going to erase Obama’s legacy. I think that conclusion stems from the same mistake that I’m trying to address in the first place, which is a failure to appreciate just how broad and how deep the changes Obama managed to enact were. So I needed to reframe the argument toward that end but I didn’t need to change the basic argument. If you think Obama did very little and that what he did was through executive actions, then your conclusion is “Ha ha, your book has been nullified.” But that’s the thing I don’t agree with in the first place. So that didn’t require a fundamental rethinking of the thesis but mostly reframing the thesis with that in mind.

Politico: But some parts are obviously more secure than others. What is the most vulnerable part of that legacy?

Chait: Clearly higher taxes on the rich. That’s not the biggest part of Obama’s legacy but it’s an important one. He allowed an expiration of the Bush tax cuts on incomes over 400,000 dollars year and he also raised taxes on the rich through the ACA, and the Republicans have clear voting majorities and power to reverse those and perhaps even go further. [Bill] Clinton swung the pendulum toward higher taxes on the rich, [George W.] Bush swung it back, Obama swung it back even harder and Trump is likely to swing it back in the other direction. That seems almost impossible to stop when Trump is president.

Next most vulnerable is climate. I don’t think he’ll go as far as people think, because the argument I think is that technological, economic and diplomatic momentum is strong enough that it won’t be reversed. But his plan was to accelerate that momentum, and that acceleration is not going to happen, and that acceleration needs to happen in order to get the most optimal results in terms of mitigating climate change.

Politico: What do you think is the biggest problem facing Democrats right now?

Chait: The biggest problem facing Democrats is that the electoral system gives disproportionate power to Republicans, through a series of quirks in the representation system at every level: The House, state legislatures, the Senate, the Electoral College all give Republicans disproportionate voting power. To really address the problem will require in the long run democratic reforms of the system. But the thing is, in order to change the system, you have to have control in the system. So they’ll need to win a lot of elections first in order to have the chance to implement democratic reforms.

Politico: So the first step of that is to win enough elections to control that process to some extent. For that first step, what is the biggest piece of political strategy advice you have?

Chait: I think you have to muster effective and clear opposition to the Republican government that we have before us, which I think is highly likely to produce both methods and outcomes that are unpopular. Mitch McConnell’s strategy of withholding bipartisan support and forcing the majority party to have complete responsibility for all outcomes is an effective one for an opposition. That’s the best model. That’s the one that’s most in line with political science evidence about how people vote, and that’s the one that should be followed. I think that if you simply start from the point that the last Republican government, of George W. Bush, was a comprehensive failure and that the problems that produced that failure have all gotten worse in the Republican Party since then … then the most likely outcome of this Republican government is probably another failure, or probably an even worse failure, which is a horrible thing for the country but actually a very convenient one for the Democratic Party. So you follow that strategy, disassociate yourself from the outcomes, wait for the government to collapse and then you’re in power again.

Politico: Would that take four years or eight years?

Chait: I don’t know. It all depends on events. It’s more of a when, rather than an if question—of when they fail. I would attribute the failure of the Republican government under Bush to the extremism and resistance to data to the tendency toward corruption that the Republican governing coalition had—which is due to its reliance on business lobbyists and lack of countervailing forces within their coalition, like Democrats have between labor and unions, offsetting businesses’ power. And the lack of curiosity of the president, which again, is much worse now that it was under George W. Bush. And so I think if you look at all those factors, it’s gotten worse, and while we can’t predict with future with any certainty, things are likely to get worse. So, this is bad for the country and the way things go badly might result in horrific tragedies, so that’s a grim prospect, but if you’re simply analyzing the political calculation, that’s available to the opposition.

Politico: So you do think Democrats should follow that?

Chait: Absolutely. There are times they’re going to have to balance their political interests against policy outcomes. So if you have a chance to bargain with the majority party, in a way that averts humanitarian catastrophe, you could trade away some of your political leverage to do so. So if Republicans want to negotiate minor details on Obamacare so that they could call it a deal—if you can avoid subjecting millions of people to hardship, then that’s probably worth doing. Climate would be another area where that kind of bargain is worth doing—giving them bipartisan cover in order to mitigate the damage of the policy agenda. But otherwise, if you’re just analyzing what’s in the political best interest, it’s almost never to cooperate. I think McConnell was totally explicit about that calculus and it has I think borne out.

Politico: You’re a former senior editor at the New Republic, which is an old, reliably liberal institution. This week they published a review of your book that criticized some elements of centrism, or what they called ‘grown-up liberalism’ in your writing. What’s going on here? Is this part of a bigger shift?

Chait: The left and liberalism belong to different traditions. They tended to congregate under the banner of the same party, because the two-party system lumps them together. But the New Republic used to be more of a liberal magazine; it’s now more of a left magazine, like the Nation. You have a faction of the left that was always going to be ideologically hostile toward liberal politicians.

Politico: You’re pretty optimistic about Obamacare surviving, at least in some way. How do you think this fight ends?

Chait: There are a lot of different outcomes, but most of them lead to the same results. But the basic dynamic we’re seeing is that Republicans are realizing that their goal of repealing Obamacare sets them up for enormous political pain because there is no way they can craft a politically acceptable outcome given the ideological parameters that define their party. If you want to give people a terrific plan that keeps their coverage, let alone a private plan satisfies their stated objections to Obamacare, which are high deductibles and high premiums, then you actually need to spend more money than Obamacare to solve those problems. Even to get something as good as Obamacare you’re lucky to spend as much money. But they can’t possibly do that because they’re a tax-phobic party, and [they’re] also against insurance regulations that help redistribute money to people with pre-existing conditions, so they have no way to craft a plan that people will like. So if they don’t take responsibility for the health care system, they’re going to put in place something that people like much, much less than the status quo. So that is their problem politically.

Somehow Democrats have to find a way to leverage that Republican problem into a better policy outcome. Maybe they can leverage it by negotiating with Republicans to get Republicans to make a trade where potentially Democrats give them cover for their plan in return for policies that are pretty decent. Or maybe the Democrats leverage that by sitting back and watching while the Republicans set it on fire, causing a massive catastrophe, winning elections and then passing it alone. One way or another the Democrats have the opportunity to leverage that Republican problem into better policies, or at least decent policies.

Politico: So you think the fundamentals of it survive, or it looks very different?

Chait: I think the fundamentals probably survive, but how you get there is the question. It might be that Republicans realize they have a catastrophe, their replace plan is unpopular, so they negotiate preemptively with Democrats to avoid a disruption, tinker with the system, call it repeal-and-replace, and then you end up with something a lot like Obamacare.

On the other hand, it could be that Republicans delay, then repeal the delay, never come up with their own plan, and then the delay gets delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed, and then it becomes a matter of extending it and then you just keep extending it and then you end up with the status quo.

Or it could be that Republicans try to repeal it and replace it; they’ll fail and then Democrats have to try to use that disaster to win an election and re-fund a plan that Republicans defunded and then maybe tinker with it once they’ve regained majorities. So to me, the plausible paths all lead ultimately to the same outcome; it just depends on the politics and how much humanitarian pain is imposed in the meantime.

Politico: What should Obama do next?

Chait: I think that Obama is probably trying to work through whatever channel he’s got with Trump; clearly they talk. Clearly Trump knows extremely little about politics and less about policy and can be influenced by whoever talks to him and flatters him. That’s unlikely to work because the last person to talk to Trump always seems to win and the people who work with Trump make sure that’s not going to be Obama very often. That’s unlikely to work with Trump, but I think Obama might see what he can do that way and persuade Trump not to pursue disastrous policies.

But that’s probably not going to work. Then the next step is becoming an open leader of the opposition, not providing quotes every day to the New York Times on behalf of the Democratic Party, but being a behind-the-scenes force and giving some high-profile speeches articulating the opposition. He’s in the unusual position of being a youthful, popular, non-disgraced, non-scandalized president who has a successor who’s actively working against his agenda. We don’t have any models for that, and that’s a powerful position for him to be in. He’s much, much more popular than Donald Trump, and that gap is likely to grow. So he’s got a pretty decent platform to give some high-profile speeches and I would hope and expect that he will use it.