Yuval Levin: What is Trump's "Mandate"?

Is Trumpism America’s new governing ideology? Just asking questions.

Trump won decisively by modern standards, meaning for the first time in several cycles nobody is seriously disputing the results, but did he really win bigly? Does he have a governing mandate?

Today’s guest says, not really. Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of National Affairs. He co-authored a paper published just before the election called “Politics Without Winners“ about the inability of either Democrats or the GOP to build a lasting governing coalition in the 21st century.

He recently published some of his thoughts on the election in The Dispatch under the headline, What Trump’s Win Doesn’t Mean, writing “The 2024 election was very much of a piece with our 21st-century politics: It was a relatively narrow win owed almost entirely to negative polarization.” We dig into that negative polarization, whether Trump was given a “mandate” by voters, and how Edmund Burke vs. Thomas Paine is still a relevant divide in contemporary politics.

Sources Referenced:

• 2024 Presidential General Election Results
• Politics Without Winners: Can Either Party Build a Majority Coalition?
• Yuval Levin in The Dispatch: What Trump’s Win Doesn’t Mean
• 2024 House General Election Results
• 2024 Senate General Election Results
• AP VoteCast: How America voted in 2024
  • Is Trump honest and trustworthy?
  • Harris and Trump’s moral character as seen by voters.
  • College vs. no college
• Cleveland-Stevenson Tariff Reform Portrait Handkerchief, 1892
• Levin’s book: The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

Chapters:

• 00:00 Coming up
• 00:20 Is Trumpism America’s governing ideology?
• 00:33 Subscribe to the channel!!!
• 00:54 Introducing Yuval Levin
• 02:22 What is the significance of Trump winning a fairly slim majority?
• 04:04 Given the sweep of all swing states, and the wins in the House and Senate, are you SURE this isn’t a mandate?
• 07:25 Do the parties retain any internal coherence?
• 09:01 Which faction in the GOP is ascendant?
• 13:14 Why did people who called Trump untrustworthy still vote for him? What does that mean?
• 16:38 Comparing Trump and Grover Cleveland
• 24:40 Are we now are we coming out of this electoral results legitimacy crisis?
• 26:09 The history of populism in the Democratic party
• 29:53 The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left
• 42:51 Is the left going to be insanely statist forever?
• 48:04 Why does America consistently produce two major parties?
• 52:16 Is Yuval bullish on Elon and Vivek’s D.O.G.E.?
• 55:39 Would it take for the Democrats to build a lasting coalition?
• 58:40 The Final Question: What does our political system lack?

• Producer: John Osterhoudt

The post Yuval Levin: What is Trump’s “Mandate”? appeared first on Reason.com.