I try to avoid making predictions. It’s hard enough to explain things that have already occurred. Trumpism could remain potent within the Republican Party. Whether it does will depend on the quality of leaders that emerge, the ideas and forces prevalent within the opposing Democratic Party, and other variables so far around the corner that we can’t even name them in 2021, much less predict how they’ll affect politics over the next decade or two.
The past decades as well as the current events in the US show a deep divide in the country. How in your view does this divide reflect a rift in terms of the American Constitution as well as of the values of the American Constitution?
The Constitution, as the operating manual for the American state, presupposes the existence of the American nation. The first words of the Declaration of Independence say that it had become necessary, by 1776, for one people, the Americans, to sever the political bonds that had connected them to another, the British. But this nation-state is not a viable proposition if the nation itself no longer coheres, and if people do not have the sense that, whatever our political or cultural differences, the thing that matters is that at the end of the day we are all Americans.
No constitution, however well constructed, can work if the people who are on the losing side of an election feel like they are being governed by an occupying army rather than political adversaries.
This, however, is the attitude many Democrats had after 2016, and many Republicans have after 2020.