In many liberal, never-Trump conservative, leftist and centrist spheres, there is a popular perception that the political norms and rules that Donald Trump and the MAGA sphere of conservatism broadly broke during their time in power would begin a process of recovery after Trump leaves office, slowly restoring the political civility and neoliberal consensus of yesteryear. It is comforting for many to believe that politics will slowly begin healing and going back to a world where the day’s political issues didn’t have a deathgrip on day-to-day news and culture. A world in which the sensible centrists of the establishment would retake control from the populism and extremism of the recent past.

This is a deliberate lie — a relieving fantasy for the old establishment politicians and voters.

Viewed charitably, it is misguided optimism for today’s political center. Viewed less so, it is the last hope of the pre-Trump political order of polite grandpa neoconservatives and Aaron Sorkin liberals to restore their lost power. But a frequent and constant flaw with this lie is the fact that the politics of yesteryear began to die out long before Donald Trump was the Republican candidate for president.

While there had always been aberrations in political norms throughout history, such as the caning of Sumner, McCarthy’s communist witch hunts against other branches of government and the shenanigans of the Nixon administration in the 1972 election, it wasn’t really until the 1994 midterm elections that politics in America took a sharp turn away from civility and uniparty consensus. For context, it was halfway through President Bill Clinton’s first term, the economy was on the up-and-up from a recession left by his predecessor George H.W. Bush, a large bipartisan federal crime bill was passed through Congress, and, after a brief military fiasco in Somalia with the UN (the infamous Black Hawk Down incident in Mogadishu), Clinton was experiencing a slight popularity dip going into the midterms. The Republican Party, who, despite having had a string of three presidential terms in a row just before Clinton, had not held a majority in the House of Representatives since the 1950s.

Looking to seize the moment, the GOP turned to one of their most dynamic, dramatic and toxic congressmen to lead the charge into the 1994 midterms — a man so infamous by the end of the decade that he would get a Star Wars villain named after him: House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich.

They campaigned on a staunch conservative platform, a surprising move in an era in which both parties seemed to be more centrist than ever. Arch-conservative radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh — notable for his blatant racism during Obama’s presidency 15 years later — blasted the conservative messaging loud and clear. Even more shocking was the scale of their victory. The Republicans swung the House and Senate, both of which previously had entrenched Democrat majorities. For his effective campaigning, Gingrich was granted the role of Speaker of the House, despite the protests of more moderate colleagues in both chambers of Congress, including Senate Majority Leader and future presidential candidate Bob Dole. This single election completely changed the character of the Republican Party for the worse.

This new Republican Congress hit the ground running, making a ton of enemies. They pledged to enact 10 major conservative legislative wins within the first 100 days of the new Congress being sworn in. He referred to it as the “Contract with America,” and many of its legislative priorities were designed specifically to cater towards the large evangelical Christian population who had proved to be a juggernaut of a voter base during Ronald Reagan’s grip on the White House.

By the time Gingrich was forced to resign in disgrace over a major affair with a 23 year old staffer, his tenure as House Speaker saw a failed impeachment against Clinton over the Lewinsky sex scandal, one of the earliest weaponizations of the government shutdown as a political strategy, and he literally wrote the book (or pamphlet, in this instance) on using partisan language to divide the Republican base from Democrats. His legislative strategy of “Constitutional Hardball” became standard Republican fare to this day — a strategy in which a politician or political party used methods that violated the spirit of the law but not the explicit wording to maximize political success. Also, that’s just a horrible name for a political strategy. Saying “I’m playing hardball” is enough of an embarrassingly corny phrase without involving constitutional law. Get a better-named strategy, Newt.

This “Constitutional Hardball” method managed to win George W. Bush the presidency in 2000 in a highly contested election. The Bush campaign violated their own principles of leaving policy to the states, taking the case of Bush v. Gore from the Democrat-friendly Florida state supreme court to the conservative-majority Supreme Court, which gave Bush the votes he needed to secure the presidency.

Bush was also a product of the new religious right, a largely rural and middle-class voting bloc financed by some of America’s richest. He proclaimed his “Christian” values loud and proud, opposing the rights of same-sex couples to marry, nominating Supreme Court justices who would later overturn Roe v. Wade and authorizing mass surveillance of everyday Americans with the Patriot Act. God is always watching, and God is named Uncle Sam. But the most notable of his Christian acts of love came during election season.

In 2000, when seeking to secure the Republican nomination for the presidency against Arizona Senator John McCain, he called on the political machine birthed by the deceased black prince of negative campaigning, Lee Atwater, for aid. Attack ads were made, and they were full of that evangelical Christian love. Emails were sent out that implied that McCain had sired children out of wedlock with an African American woman, that his time being tortured in a POW camp during Vietnam had driven McCain completely crazy, and that the aforementioned torture he endured at the “Hanoi Hilton” had brainwashed him into a sleeper communist agent bound to destroy the GOP and America. This pattern repeated during the 2004 presidential race, where Bush and his allies funded “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” a “veterans organization” — with the heaviest air quotes imaginable — who dedicated immense effort towards casting doubt on Democratic candidate John Kerry’s service in Vietnam. Because that’s what Jesus would do.

This brings us to the other side of the political equation. In 2008, in the waning days of George W. Bush’s presidency, the subprime mortgage loan crisis slapped an unprepared America upside the head, resulting in what is now known as the Great Recession — the worst economic crisis America has faced since the Great Depression. Countless Americans lost their jobs and houses in the resultant downturn, and many were politically radicalized as the government spent more money bailing Wall Street bankers out of financial hardship than it did helping the working-class American. Suddenly, Americans were comfortable expressing distrust and anger at their country and their government in a manner previously unheard of outside of protest communes in the 1960s. This anger was particularly potent among young people and minorities, who toppled the seemingly predestined 2008 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in favor of a young upstart senator from Illinois named Barack Obama, who was a gifted public speaker and had an intuitive grasp of how to grow and capitalize on grassroots funding.

However, when Obama actually became president, he failed to bring about almost all of the policies that he campaigned on, struggling against rabid Republican obstructionism as well as the Aaron Sorkin-esque liberal need for bipartisan compromise simply for the sake of it, leaving many Democratic voters further upset and angry, drifting further towards the social and economic left. This anger crystallized in 2016, when Progressive Populist Bernie Sanders ran a failed primary challenge against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Many progressives felt as if Bernie had been cheated out of the nomination by Democratic National Convention (DNC) superdelegates, who were primarily establishment centrist Democrats and moneyed Democratic donors who would have been hurt by Sanders’ proposed tax hike for the wealthiest 1%. This anger would continue to brew over the following years when Clinton managed to lose the 2016 presidential election, which almost every pundit predicted to be a landslide victory for Democrats. But for now, let’s check back in with the Republican Party under Obama.

Republicans were angrier than previously thought possible at new president Barack Obama for some mysterious, dark, black, heavily shaded reason. Nobody truly even knows today. Despite a genuine effort made by ’08 Republican candidate John McCain to temper his base’s rabid animus, it was a drop in the bucket against the horde of old folks and rich elites ready to use every resource at their disposal to prevent Barack Obama from getting anything done as president, employing that Gingrichian strategy of Constitutional Hardball to keep Washington gridlocked.

While there is a list a mile long of all the actions taken by Republicans to obstruct Obama, arguably the most extreme and damaging to the democratic system came in 2016, when Republicans barred Obama from appointing a new Supreme Court justice for almost a year until a Republican took office again. They refused to even consider candidates floated by Obama, even when they were as much of a compromise candidate as the politics of the day would allow. All this for an appointment which the Constitution specifically states should be apolitical. Because Republicans just care so much about the Constitution that Mr. Radical Leftist Obama was smashing, of course.

You’ll notice how far we’ve gotten into our little breakdown of history — barring the intro — without even mentioning Donald Trump, one of the most notoriously divisive figures in the history of American politics. Because here’s the core of the matter: Trump is not the progenitor of political division in America. He is simply the crystallization of what this country’s politics have become. Illiberalism and division are the words of the day. Constitutional Hardball has become plain old political hardball. Still an exceptionally corny term, though.

And now, as the Trump administration continues its vile and illegal actions, Democrats and those on the left have been lit with a righteous anger, and candidates like Gavin Newsom — who have made clear that they are willing to get down into the mud and muck against Republicans and actually fight to get things done — are the frontrunners of the 2028 Democratic primaries. There is no compromise in politics anymore. The only thing on which both sides agree is mutual hatred, and that British sausage tastes like it was spiced with the Grim Reaper’s armpit sweat.

So why do people keep wishing upon a star for politics to go back to “normal,” even if they never really have been since the ’90s? Comfort. It’s why Aaron Sorkin TV dramas like “The West Wing” are a rapturous dream for old-school liberals — getting good things done through compromise and mutual agreement. It’s a lie they tell themselves to protect themselves from the harsh and bleak political atmosphere of today. But they, much like the “sensible centrists” whose power has defined DC until the rise of polarization politics, won’t get anything done if they keep lying to themselves. 

So I plead to those who would comfort themselves with this falsehood — get up and do something about the state of politics today. Don’t dismiss Trump as an aberration. He isn’t. If you really want a return to bipartisanship, quit lying to yourself and face reality. That’s the only way anyone has ever gotten anything done.