The Return of Boring

Thoughts on a post 2028 world

Friday! Brooklyn! Come to Unnameable Books on 615 Vanderbilt Avenue and hear me read from Colossus. Here’s what Bret Easton Ellis has to say about my new novel: “Barkan is reaching back to the past, to a traditional kind of novel, one much closer to Richard Ford and John Updike ... We are seduced as readers by Teddy Starr, enough to find him sympathetic, relatable, a victim, which I don’t think Ross Barkan cares about as much as is he interesting? And yes, he is.” Buy it wherever books are sold or get it on audiobook.

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The present can be a cage. Now is always now, and the future is a great fog. This is especially true when the times feel dire. Can it ever not be this? American politics can feel, for all the volatility, like it’s reached a dark stasis: Donald Trump in power, and always in power. I was talking to a Canadian friend recently and he asked me how I felt, as an American, about Trump as my representative on the world stage. I explained, as best I could, there are two conflicting currents. One, Trump is not America because he has never, even at the apogee of his popularity, won over more than half the country. His 2024 popular vote share was barely 50 percent. His approval ratings haven’t ever edged much higher. At the same time, any liberal who declared—and, to be fair, you hear less of this talk today—this is not who we are is plainly deluded. In three national elections, Trump won many millions of votes. He is a three-time Republican Party nominee. He embodies deeply American traits, and makes honest the venality and savagery that has, along with our ability to inspire hope, characterized these 250 years. He has joined history. There will be no discussion of the first 25 years of the 21st century without Donald J. Trump. In terms of impact on the body politic—his ability to, like a demented sun-king, assert himself over daily life—he is a rival to Reagan, Nixon, and Roosevelt.

A mistake we might make, however, is assuming it will always be so. Just as Trump was once treated as an impossible president, an aberration who might make noise in a primary but never seriously contest the presidency against Hillary Clinton, he must not be assumed to be eternal. It’s not just that he’s 80, and the odds are quite long he finds a way, as a widely hated octogenarian, to seize an illegal third term. Age is but a number; the legacy of Trump is what we must start to care about now. And there are real questions about what MAGA will look like when he’s off the stage. Who can knit the disparate coalitions together? Who has the moxie, the verve, the mania? Not the guy who can barely make it through an interview on “The View.” A better question might be whether another politician can run the Trump playbook and win, or be a reasonable facsimile of the 45th and 47th president. Hasn’t Trump proven the American hunger for an entertainer-in-chief, a born showman who thinks purel in the terms of a 30-second TV hit? Perhaps. No one can argue with that record.

Allow me, though, to hazard a prediction: the next president will not be like Donald Trump. The president after that one might not be like Trump, either. The politics of dull predictability—even, dare I say, technocratic governance—might just return to the American scene. Boring is coming back.

Can I really predict this? After the chaos of the 2010s and 2020s? If I have one theory of modern American politics, it’s that everything boils down to the two p’s: polarization and the pendulum. A two-party, winner-take-all presidential system where the parties are ideologically distinct—liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats are mostly extinct—guarantees that polarization is not leaving us. The era of the landslide popular vote victory is dead. No one can break 60% like Nixon in 1972, or Reagan’s 59% in 1984. A Democrat won’t approach the 2008 Obama margin. We simply do not live in that world any longer. Fewer voters are willing to ticket split or cross party lines. The Senate is a good example of this: consider how few senators are left who belong to one party and represent a state that supported the other party’s candidate in the last presidential election. There’s a reason, even with all his scandals, Graham Platner has to be considered a slight favorite to defeat Susan Collins in Maine.

The pendulum is an even simpler concept: in this polarized landscape, American voters get tired of one reality and want another. Trump was once novel and fresh. The jokes landed. Enough voters thought, over three successive elections, he was worth a shot, especially in 2024, when he had been out of power for four years and 2010s nostalgia took hold. It helped, too, that the alternatives offered were Joe Biden (doddering, barely able to speak in public) and Kamala Harris (substandard political talent who dropped out before the 2020 primaries). But Trump’s act, in 2026, is played out. Unless you are one of the shrinking number of MAGA foot soldiers who will follow Trump into the abyss, you understand there is very little to celebrate about this second term. Interest rates are high, gas prices are elevated, and housing costs too much. The Iran War is a disaster. DOGE needlessly eviscerated the federal government. ICE is the most hated federal agency in America. It is all chaos for the sake of chaos, and the underlying conditions of the country are poorer, for working and middle-class people, than they were in 2019. It’s all very tiring. The Republicans will get immolated in the midterms; that’s a foregone conclusion. Democrats will have power again because the Republicans squandered it.

A decade of Trump is a very long time. As the pendulum swings away from him, it might swing towards a politician who promises normalcy. This was, of course, the Biden campaign of 2020, but Biden’s problem was age and poor timing. His mental acuity had devolved too rapidly to attempt another term, and he was barely able to sell himself while in the Oval Office. The timing aspect was Covid: he entered office in 2021, just as the pandemic era inflation was taking hold. This phenomenon, global in scope, unraveled incumbent governments across the world. Biden/Harris crumbling in 2024 didn’t look so different than the Conservatives getting swept out of power in the United Kingdom or Macron’s coalition taking a beating in France. Biden’s anti-Trump messaging, though, wasn’t wrong. Americans were prepared to move on from Trump in 2020. Four years was enough. His handling of the pandemic was shambolic. The quirk of history was that Trump lost and got four years to refresh himself while benefiting from a Democratic president who was lying to the American people about his mental fitness. Trump got to feel new again.

That’s all gone. I won’t predict who the next president will be. What I will argue is that competency and predictability will be values more cherished by the 2028 electorate. This is less about optimism and more about the pendulum. A presidential candidate who promises to fix the mess of DOGE (I will hire Americans!) and keep the U.S. out of idiotic, destructive wars (We won’t invade Iran!) will go far. It would be nice if a presidential candidate promised something more transformative or even delivered on it, but I’m not sure, in the short term, how necessary that will be. Not-Trump could be enough. After that, who knows what will happen. Perhaps, because I’ve made a quick trip to Canada, I’ve been thinking about Mark Carney and his success as prime minister. Carney is a technocrat with some muscle. He promises the management chops of a Keir Starmer but appears far less feckless—and more committed to a concrete policy vision—than the UK Prime Minister who might be chased from office soon. Do Americans want a Carney? Is anyone like that running in 2028? I don’t know. I do think, though, that any candidate who seems like they can run the United States reasonably well is going to be strong. The Democrats do not need a generational political talent like Barack Obama, but they do need to stop nominating gravely flawed politicians. Odds are, after 2016, 2020, and 2024, this will happen. The dynasties are dead and the establishment is too fractured. The Clintons can’t put their fingers on the scale. Neither can Obama. No one wants to hear from Bidenworld ever again. The 2028 primary will be the widest open since 1992. For most Americans, that’s an exciting prospect. We’ll get to enjoy democracy for once.