A journalist once asked Harold Macmillan, the unflappable prime minister of Britain, what he considered to be the greatest challenge of statesmanship. He replied, “Events, dear boy, events.” Presidential candidates across the pond — and those who endorse their respective programs — would be wise to heed Macmillan’s warning.
Some pundits think the only way to excise Donald Trump and his boorishness from national politics is for him to lose in November. Yet political movements are rarely discredited by election losses. Lest we forget, Trump already lost a presidential election and his bitter populism has not abated. Likewise, the conservatism of Barry Goldwater was not extinguished when he lost a landslide election in 1964, nor was the progressivism of George McGovern eradicated by his 1972 drubbing.
Rather, in American politics, it has been more discrediting to win an election and suffer a failed presidency than to lose and never get the chance. It is always the victor, not the vanquished, who will bear responsibility for circumstances run amok. Let us review the history.
The 1920s saw two presidents — Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge — who administered modest government, uninterested in reordering society from above. In 1928, satisfied with decade-long economic expansion, voters elected a third man who promised limits on government’s reach: Herbert Hoover, a member of Stanford’s inaugural class.
Hoover’s presidency was not eight months old when the New York Stock Exchange cratered, triggering a recession in which one third of banks and money in the country would disappear. The ensuing Great Depression ignited popular demand for federal intervention, which Hoover was ill-equipped to deliver. He lost all but six states in 1932 to his Democratic opponent, Franklin Roosevelt, who envisioned a government that would assume “final responsibility” for the happiness of its citizens when happiness was in short supply. The Oval Office did not have another occupant devoted to modest government for 48 years.
In 1976, Georgia governor Jimmy Carter won the presidency as the first Democrat to run after Watergate tarnished Republicans. Weary of the Cold War’s realpolitik, Carter decried America’s “inordinate fear” of Soviet communism and hoped to achieve a cuddlier foreign policy concerned with human rights. The world had other plans.
Carter’s policy of détente — tranquil coexistence with a belligerent communist empire — fell apart when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. That same year, Iranian revolutionaries captured the U.S. embassy and took 52 Americans hostage. Coexistence was more palpable at home as double-digit inflation and widespread unemployment went hand in hand. Throw in a fuel shortage for good measure, and Republicans had everything they needed to trounce Carter in 1980 — shutting Democrats out of the White House for 12 years. That was enough time for Ronald Reagan to finally end the Cold War by winning it.
Lastly, President George W. Bush won Ohio’s 20 electoral votes in 2004, and with it, four more years in office. He had campaigned on a platform of moral crusades, most visibly in his war to replace the dictator of Iraq with a democratic regime. It turns out the U.S. military can do many things, but nation-building is not one of them. Iraq soon became a bloodbath, not quite a flourishing democracy.
Bush’s second term was bookended by domestic disasters as well: Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the financial crisis in 2008. Ultimately, Bush left office with 73% of Americans disapproving of his tenure. The president’s Democratic opponents took unified control of Washington in 2009, and Republicans have since repudiated his “compassionate conservative” agenda.
As the record shows, history is unforgiving to presidents torpedoed by happenstance. None can escape the weight of national crisis, and their political ideals often pay the price.
Perhaps no such calamities will befall the next president — whether it be Donald Trump or Kamala Harris — for the next four years. Perhaps. But the menu of potential crises is daunting.
As China readies itself to invade Taiwan, an aged U.S. Navy shrinks. According to some research, America may not possess enough munitions to fight a major power conflict, but Ukrainian defenses may collapse without continued military aid. Rising defaults on commercial real estate loans could make 2023 bank failures look like a hiccup. And the national debt now grows by one trillion dollars every 100 days, drawing America closer to an inevitable fiscal reckoning that neither party currently wants to address.
Meanwhile, both candidates chatter endlessly about the catastrophic risk of losing this year’s presidential election. They should begin to think about the risk of winning it: “Events, dear boy, events.”