Kicking out of office of Mr. Biden is just one event in a series of events, e.g. Canada's Trudeau, Germany's Scholz, France's Macron failed recently in the West. Biden's case is easiest to understand though.
"Philadelphia -- When historians are invited to hold forth on current events, they often find it hard to be humble. Allen Guelzo at least puts in the effort. "Why do you want to talk to me, a historian of 19th-century America?" he asks during a postelection interview at the Union League of Philadelphia. "You've got 6,000 pundits out there."
It's Nov. 10, five days after Donald Trump's election, and the answer is obvious to me: You need context to understand the present. Nobody knows the future, including Mr. Guelzo, who emailed me on Nov. 3 that he expected Kamala Harris to win. But as a scholar of the Civil War, Mr. Guelzo, 71, knows the past. "I'd like to describe myself as a Lincolnian," he says. "I like what Lincoln did for us, and I would like us to emulate more of Abraham Lincoln." Who better to weigh in on the direction of the country and Lincoln's party in an era when America again seems divided?
To be sure, those divisions aren't as pronounced in 2024 as they were the last time I interviewed Mr. Guelzo, in June 2017. Unlike in 2016 or 2020, nobody this November was questioning the legitimacy of the election results. When I observe that we have just had the first normal election in 12 years, Mr. Guelzo agrees: "It's been an almost complacent moment." Subsequent events bear that observation out: On Jan. 6, 2025, the prime minister of Canada resigned. He made more news that day than anyone did at the U.S. Capitol.
Early in Mr. Trump's first term, people were asking if America might be on the verge of another civil war. Mr. Guelzo's answer in 2017 was a firm no, and he spoke of what he saw as the deep continuities between the Republican and Democratic parties of the mid-19th century and those of the early 21st. Our 2024 conversation runs along similar lines. The main theme that emerges is how Mr. Trump fits into the traditions of the GOP.
Some of the comparisons are familiar, some less so. Nineteenth-century Republicans from Lincoln to William McKinley were "tariff men," like Mr. Trump. The party's isolationist strain has come to the fore from time to time, including before and immediately after World War II. Lincoln was known to complain about Democratic election fraud in his home state, Illinois.
Most interestingly, Mr. Guelzo characterizes Lincoln's GOP, like Mr. Trump's, as a working-class party. "People underestimate how deeply threatened workers in the free states felt by the possibility of competition with slave laborers," he says. "Those weren't bankers and lawyers. They were 22- and 23-year-olds just trying to get a start -- clerking, doing office work, farming. They understood slavery to be a direct threat."
Our discussion concludes with an appeal to Lincoln, but this one is more an aspiration than a parallel. Mr. Guelzo says he hopes Mr. Trump's victory "is not something which affords a temptation for retribution and revenge." Although Democrats pursued Mr. Trump and his supporters with criminal prosecutions and lawsuits, "I really think one of the best things that the new administration could do, both for itself and for others, would be a kind of amnesty," he says. "Somewhere along the line, you have to say, 'Malice toward none, charity for all.' "
Three days later the president-elect announces that he plans to nominate Matt Gaetz as attorney general. That and other provocative personnel choices lead me to wonder if the interview is being overtaken by events. Mr. Guelzo wonders too, and by Dec. 7 he's sure it has been: "The events of the past thirty-two days," he says in an email, "have rendered a good deal of what I said then obsolete." We agree to a follow-up interview, which we finally schedule for the afternoon of Jan. 3.
On a Zoom call this time, I ask what's on his mind. I expect a reply to the effect that he was too complacent in November and some of Mr. Trump's nominations and other actions have him worried. I quickly realize I completely misapprehended him. As it turns out, Mr. Guelzo has been rethinking his interpretation of the November result.
"I was at first inclined to think of this election simply as a repudiation election," he says. He now suspects that Mr. Trump's victory might be a "tectonic election" -- one that marks a permanent structural change in the American electorate and political parties.
He characterizes only three past elections as tectonic -- 1800, when Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams and the Federalist Party quickly withered; 1860, when Lincoln's victory established the Republicans as a major party that would dominate presidential politics for seven decades; and 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt trounced Herbert Hoover and cemented the modern Democratic coalition.
If your name isn't Donald Trump, the idea that 2024 could join this list may strike you as counterintuitive. Kamala Harris carried 19 states and received more than 48% of the aggregate popular vote. Mr. Trump didn't even manage a majority. (Neither did Lincoln, but he had three significant opponents.)
"It's not a landslide in terms of numbers," Mr. Guelzo acknowledges, "but it is a landslide morally speaking. What I mean by that is that the DNC was running against a presidential candidate that everybody was convinced was unelectable against nearly anyone. They could have put up almost any candidate and the confidence was that the country was simply not going to buy the idea of a return of Donald Trump to the White House."
There was some basis for that assumption, which proved accurate four years earlier. Then again, Democrats took Mr. Trump even less seriously in 2016 and he won. But Mr. Guelzo is certain that "Trump's first election was not tectonic, it was a fluke of campaign tactics."
Now, Mr. Guelzo sees the plates shifting: "It was not just one of these throw-the-bums-out elections. Really big, vital Democratic constituencies shifted, especially among younger voters. And I think if there's one really big thing which seems to have emerged out of this election, it's a really decisive shift from race to class." Mr. Trump's working-class appeal has shaken the Democrats' support from ethnic minorities.
At the same time, Mr. Guelzo thinks the president-elect has changed. In 2016, "nobody was less prepared for his election than Donald Trump himself. And his first presidency was just, even before it began, was plagued by all kinds of internal confusion." Mr. Trump is now "sadder but wiser . . . and I think he is determined that this time the election should be a tectonic one."
In other words, he wants to govern in a way that ensures the shifts in the electorate are permanent. "MAGA won a campaign, but a single campaign is not tectonic," Mr. Guelzo says. "MAGA has to realize that the 2028 election started on Nov. 6, so they've got to ask themselves: Is everything that we do -- is it producing results? Is it producing results for the constituencies who came our way in 2024?"
The term "tectonic election" isn't a common one, although Chuck Schumer said in 2008 that he expected one in that year's races for the Senate. But the underlying idea is familiar: Think of Time magazine's cover depicting President-elect Barack Obama as FDR. Some Republicans thought their party was on its way to a "permanent majority" after George W. Bush's re-election in 2004. After 2020 even Joe Biden and his court historians fancied him another FDR.
Mr. Guelzo isn't a member of Mr. Trump's court. "I've never met Donald Trump, never talked to Donald Trump, never got a letter from Donald Trump," he says in November, and he confirms in January that he still hasn't. The proposition that this is a tectonic election, he stresses, is only a hypothesis, and it can't even begin to be tested for years.
The test consists of two parts: "First of all, there have to be repeated losses," in this case for the Democrats. That rules out the elections of 2004, 2008, 2016 and 2020, all of which the losing party soon followed with comebacks in Congress and then the White House. Second, the victor's party must be "involved in some really large-scale event, which it succeeds in handling. Maybe not elegantly, maybe not comprehensively, but at least gives the impression of having succeeded."
Hence the need for results. Mr. Guelzo thinks Mr. Trump will attempt to deliver them in three broad areas. "One is a redirection of the entire economy." He sees the debate over immigration through this lens: "That's why the whole business over H-1B visas has blown up the way it has, because we're not really talking about immigration. We're talking about the economy and who has access to success and growth in the economy."
The second is "a major reordering of foreign policy." Mr. Guelzo sees Mr. Trump as following in the footsteps of Robert Taft, who held what is now JD Vance's Ohio Senate seat from 1939 until his death in 1953. "Taft was one of the last major American politicians who really thought that, like [John] Quincy Adams said, going in search of monsters was a big mistake." Mr. Guelzo reckons that Mr. Trump is "very serious about disengagement" and "wants to push that clock on foreign policy way, way back, even to before the assumptions and the consensus of the Cold War."
That will likely mean "an end of the conflict in Ukraine with some kind of negotiated settlement," Mr. Guelzo says."
Mr. Trump's third major ambition is the one he has assigned to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's Department of Government Efficiency. Mr. Guelzo suggests that's a bit of a misnomer: "DOGE is not so much about the budget. It's about disempowering the bureaucracy that is fed by the budget, and that's also a clock-turner." It would "turn things back to the days of Woodrow Wilson."
That won't be easy, Mr. Guelzo says, "because so much of the modern economy is wrapped up with the federal bureaucracy." Agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration and the Food and Drug Administration serve vital functions, even if their performance is lacking. "If this disempowerment is not very fine-tuned, it's going to backfire. And the backfire could undo everything that Trump would like to have done in terms of the election having a tectonic result."
Something else that could backfire -- as it did for the Democrats -- is yielding to that temptation for revenge. "This is something we talked about back in November," Mr. Guelzo says, "and I'm still hoping for that -- I'm hoping for Lincolnian charity." Lincoln, he says, "asked us to see what we have gone through as a way of understanding our own shortcomings, and it was out of that understanding that he could exhort people to have malice toward none and charity for all."
When you put it that way, the 16th president sounds nothing like the 45th. "I know, I know," Mr. Guelzo replies. "I think and I hope that the fact that he can't run for another term means that he wants to concentrate on making this term, this second term of his, as mold-making and as healthy as he can make it. Maybe I'm just reading my own wishes and hopes into this, but that's what I would hope would take place. I can't say that that's what I see. That is what I hope."
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Mr. Taranto is the Journal's editorial features editor." [1]
""This will most likely mean the "end of the conflict in Ukraine in some way of negotiations," says Mr. Guelzo." We, Lithuanians, need to continue living here alone with our neighbors, big and small. The losers "nausėda-type presidents" and other so-called "politicians" who incite hatred among us are doing us a great disservice.
1. The Weekend Interview with Allen Guelzo: Did Trump Just Win a 'Tectonic' Election? Taranto, James. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 11 Jan 2025: A11.
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