To Ross Douthat 2
It is September 29, 2024. This is almost done but still needs a little work. Well, we should read it again since we added some more material. And we still need someone to come in here and add the links.
Alright Ross Douthat,
Here it is What Undecided Voters Might Be Thinking. That wasn’t the original title. What was it? “In defense of undecided voters”? No, I can’t remember.
My critique is that it downplays or basically ignores Trump’s 2024 threat to democracy; completely ignores the role of today’s GOP in increasing these risks; creates a false equivalency by pawning off a conservative critique of the Biden administration as a reasonable counterbalance to the concerns one should have over 2024’s GOP; overlooks the conservative movements’ consistent preference for partisan victories over a fair representation of all the nation’s citizens, and how this choice has created our present danger — where we have no credible choice for conservative voters but an electorate so divided and a system so rigged in favor of conservative candidates that the conservative candidate has a very good chance of winning [until, of course, everyone reads this essay I’m typing, and we all decide to stand as one against Donald Trump and those who would enable his criminal intent, and from this shared stand begin to build a workable consensus not on the details of policy (which is neither desirable nor possible), but on the nuts and bolts of how we will defend our shared government from tyranny-from-within]; and, most critically, ignores the distinction between policy disagreements and political evil, while also failing to account for the reality that the most important job of the electorate is not to decide the partisan direction of the nation but to serve as a final check on corruption madness and evil in their shared democratic republic.
1 & 2. The article downplays the risks of this Trump and this GOP to our shared democratic republic, and completely ignores the complicity of today’s GOP in increasing those risks.
I have noticed this in some other conservative opponents of Trump. The notion that somehow it is impossible for him to actually undermine democracy, so we don’t have to worry about a second Trump term ending our democratic experiment. I won’t try to refute any hypothesized arguments (the only argument I’ve heard is that our institutions and traditions are too strong for Trump to undo, which strikes me as naive — as I hope the below discussion will demonstrate), but will merely quote from the article and then make a few remarks, which — with a desperate but not therefore necessarily bad-faith gusto — I hope will suffice.
“His [Donald Trump’s] smartest supporters premise their loyalty on the idea that he’s a huge B.S. artist who probably won’t actually follow through on all his promises, even as his most devout supporters stand ready to excuse excess, corruption and constitutional brinkmanship.”
Before being president Donald Trump had never held political office. In 2016, he went into office staffed with the kind of now “old fashioned” Republican politicians who took it for granted that in the United States of America, we hold fair elections and abide by those results, because the peaceful transfer of power is a cornerstone of representative democracy, and of course even the losers in a democratic republic are better off than the winners in an autocracy. This mindset also did not consider litigating election results as a credible tactic for winning elections.
Though there have always been bad actors and sometimes even real incidents of partisan interference in election outcomes, there had been a broad consensus in the United States that fair play and the peaceful transfer of power was more important than winning any given election. (Do you remember when the Supreme Court rather questionably stepped in to stop Florida’s vote counting and declare Bush the victor? Do you remember that Gore decided to let the matter rest rather than litigating their decision? For the sake of national unity and moving forward. It wasn’t that long ago! [find link]) The Republican Party’s habit of governing without the majority’s support perhaps weakened the Republican Party’s commitment to this basic component of a healthy, functioning democracy; but Donald Trump’s two great political discoveries — (1) at least in today’s divided nation, you can just keep lying and not worry about fact checkers, and your fans will believe you over everyone else, while many others will decide “reality” doesn’t exist in today’s politics; and (2) at least in today’s divided nation, you can openly attempt to undermine the will of the people to game the system for your side, and pay no real political price — have taught the Republican Party to abandon the old pact of prioritizing fair elections and a peaceful transfer of power over winning in any given election.
Donald Trump has shown today’s GOP that a will to the evils of lying-as-political-strategy, winning-at-all-costs, and Machiavellian internal politics (that is to say: us-or-them Realpolitik not just vis-a-vis foreign policy, but as fundamental feature of domestic politics) are how he does politics. Their response was not to reject him from their ranks, but to let him lead the party and set the standard for what they stand for (a politics of grievance, and us-versus-them, lies and conspiracy theories as standard party talking points, and winning at all costs). This is political evil. Where it is headed is where political evil always goes: To tyranny, to the background evil of top-down crime: a government that routinely commits crimes against its own citizens to remain in power, and where citizens must chose between protecting their loved ones and standing up for truth, fair play, good intentions, and competency in government. Even without helpful hints like how he plans on using the government to go after perceived political enemies and the media, and statements about how he’ll have to be a dictator on day one and how he’ll fix things so his supporters don’t have to worry about voting in the future; even without such helpful hints, you don’t need to be a political scientist to see where Trump’s natural trajectory leads. The direction of his will and his style and his actions thus far — all that is clearly headed towards a nation where more and more people shrug their shoulders and say, “Well, I have to look out for me and mine”: A nation that selects for the worst behavior and punishes the best behavior, where public virtue and private virtue cannot coincide, where you and I and everyone else choose to go along with evil for the sake of good things like the love we have for our families. To take an imperfect but still functioning democracy down that road is a crime against humanity.
The Jan 6 Commission has compiled many many hours of interviews that anyone is free to watch (or read excerpts from), in which Republicans from Trump’s own administration describe the various ways that they resisted Donald Trump’s month-long attempt to overturn the 2020 election results — attempts he made not because there was any credible evidence for an election-swinging amount of fraud (or even a results-budging amount), but because he didn’t want to lose, didn’t want to be a loser, didn’t want to lose power and have to give up being president.
How did the larger GOP respond? With political evil. There is no other way to describe the actions of Mike Johnson and the rest who took off running with a lie designed to undermine our representative democracy. How could you, Mike Johnson? It is evil to harm a system that keeps hundreds of millions of citizens safe and an order that protects billions. How did Mike Johnson damage our shared representative democracy? He latched onto unfounded conspiracy theory after unfounded conspiracy theory before settling on a specious constitutional argument.
We go more into the details of Mike Johnson’s maneuvers in section four of What we know. Here we’ll just note that Mike Johnson’s “constitutional” argument would disenfranchise the citizens of a few critical swing states’ (enough states to swing the election to Trump) by using a novel interpretation of the constitution to ex post facto disqualify those states’ results even though (1) prior to the election most all the states in the union (including many that elected Republican congresspeople!) adopted rules in 2020 that were contrary to Mike Johnson’s novel post-election interpretation of the constitution, and (2) even though the number of votes that would have violated this novel, after-the-fact interpretation of the constitution would not have been enough to change the outcome of the election in any of the targeted swing states (I can’t bring myself to go back to find the exact quote, it’s so spiritually caustic; but the gist of Mike Johnson’s quote on this subject is something like it’s the theory of throwing out a whole batch for the sake of one bad apple), and (3) even though our current right-tilted Supreme Court has since ruled against the interpretation of the constitution upon which Mike Johnson’s arguments.
Point (3) demonstrates the degree to which Mike Johnson had been attempting to contort the constitution to ex post facto undo the targeted states’ election results (because even our right-leaning Supreme Court disagreed with his underlying logic); it is also pertinent because Mike Johnson continues to use this anti-constitutional use of the constitution, even though the conservative Supreme Court — though refusing to hear the case MJ was championing — ruled against the principle years ago now.
I will tell you what’s going on here: Mike Johnson found a way for the GOP to avoid contradicting Donald Trump’s big lie within the cloak of a specious but adequately confusing (and thus politically serviceable) “constitutional argument”; and they ran with it; and now, years later, moderate Republicans (excepting a few model citizens) still use such contortions to avoid admitting that their party’s presidential candidate is using a reality-inverting “hey, that [consistently found by independent observers to have been fair] election was stolen from me!” lie — the kind of lie autocrats use to legitimize stealing elections — as a pillar of his election campaign, while more and more 2024 Republicans just straight up lie along with their leader.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to drop hint after hint about how he will use the standard tools and practices of dictatorships — the kinds of tools and practices he already sampled in his first term in office — ; and his GOP has silenced and sidelined Republican politicians who would speak out against Trump’s antidemocratic hints/threats/promises, against Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen, and/or against Trump’s various attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Today’s GOP has responded to Donald Trump’s crimes against our shared democratic republic by silencing dissent within the party while elevating those Republicans who would sanctify and/or echo Trump’s anti-democratic rhetoric and his lies about 2020.
What do you think is going on when a president makes jokes about extending his term limits so he can keep being president over and over again, or makes comments about fixing things so his supporters never have to vote again and then obfuscates when asked to retract those comments, or when he keeps talking about how he has a right to and will use the power of the presidency to jail political rivals and silence dissenting media voices? Maybe the better question is: What do you feel is going on? What I feel is an abuser feeling his way down his victim’s shirt right there in front of everybody: he is testing how far he can get away with it right then and there (a little farther all the time, America!, you little minx, you!), and he is getting everyone ready for the fact that he is going to keep going further down your shirt, and you are going to take it, and everybody else is going to either watch him and say nothing or they are going to cheer him on: And that is how things are going to be.
That’s what is going on, America. You need to stop fussing and fighting long enough to feel his sweaty palms on your naked shoulder.
And then there’s the kind of colorful language like how immigrants are poisoning the blood of the nation, mixed in with anti-immigrant and nakedly racist lies like cat-eating Haitians. A sneering backdrop of meanness and contempt for our shared humanity that Donald Trump swirls into his swaggering rebellion against the rules, norms, and standards of our shared democratic republic.
And where is the push back from today’s GOP? They don’t push back. They throw him a raucous convention where politicians who had decried him as amoral and a danger to the nation before his 2016 election bend down on their knees, gush, and kiss the ring of the man who would be king [link to Atlantic article].
I guess Donald Trump just looked amoral and like a danger to the nation before he tried to use federal funds to bribe Ukraine’s president into digging up dirt on a political rival [link here]; before he attacked the independence of the media and judiciary during and after office [link here]; before he illegally and irresponsibly stored and then refused to return state secrets [link here, I guess]; before he tried to overturn the 2020 election results with conspiracy theories and pressuring his DOJ and Vice President and Republican officeholders in state Governments to help him with a scheme in which he would replace electors from states that Biden had won with electors who would cast their vote for Trump rather than the candidate the state had chosen [link here]; and before he became the rambling old man of 2024 who flits incoherently between anti-democratic threats and race-baiting anti-immigrant screeds [link] who conquered his party with his own corruption [link Atlantic article?].
Are you aware, Ted Cruz, that we have nuclear submarines skulking through the seas and nuclear weapons bases inside our borders and nuclear sharing programs with allies, that Russia has a comparable number of nuclear warheads, and that the president of the United States of America rides around the world in ready reach of the button that destroys the world? Are you aware of this, Mitch McConnell? Because you don’t act like it.
An interview cited in Section 4 of What we Know [link] is another good example of how today’s GOP has risen to the challenge of having a GOP president follow-up a failed coup by doubling-down on lies about how the election was stolen from him and otherwise preparing followers and foes alike for an autocratic second term:
In this interview with [Network and show name] Mike Johnson invites everyone to google his constitutional argument for why people like Donald Trump have good reason to doubt the results of the 2020 election. We would counter that (1) that argument is specious and is a perfect example of using the specific and imperfect tools of our form of government to undermine our form of government and the goal — a leadership beholden to the governed!! — that that government is premised upon; and (2) if you spend a few minutes perusing the Executive Summary of the Jan 6 Commission you will know, thanks to the testimony of Donald Trump’s own administration, that he wasn’t trying to uphold the constitution: he was looking for any excuse to cheat his way back into power.
And then later in the same interview, Mike Johnson tries to sanitize Trump’s line about how immigrants are poisoning the blood of the nation by spinning it as the language of a man who is just trying to give voice to the frustration a lot of Americans are feeling. Oh but you know what, maybe Mike has a point: I think there’s something in the Bible about how the Good Samaritan was the one who found the courage to speak out against his neighbors — maybe his using the term “poisoning the blood of the nation” went a little far, but the impulse was fair and good and furthered the Kingdom of Heaven.
And Trump doesn’t want Project 2025 to speak for him, but that’s almost certainly only because it is wildly unpopular with the voting public. It is staffed by former member of his administration, and it has created both policies and personal rosters to put his dreams of autocratic control over our federal government into action. Maybe that’s an overstatement, but what can we reasonably expect to get when we combine this man — who has learned that he’s more of an autocratic than one of those pussy presidents that leaves office when they lose elections, and who is visibly mentally degrading in front of the eyes of the world — with a political party that has chosen to follow this man and silence those who would speak out against his rampant dishonesty, cruel us-versus-them rhetoric, and anti-democratic maneuverings? How can we expect anything other than an administration handpicked to prioritize pleasing Donald Trump over doing a competent job for the structure and the citizens of our shared democratic republic?
Remember: Donald Trump failed in his attempts to create a constitutional crisis to interrupt the peaceful transition of power in 2020/21 largely because people in his own administration refused to help him in his efforts to steal the 2020 election. Those are the kinds of people that the Republicans are now sidelining. And then there’s Section F, which Trump authorized too late in his last term to make a difference: what is to prevent Donald Trump from authorizing Section F at the start of Trump 2.0, and from packing both traditional political posts and posts heretofore filled with professional bureaucrats with people who understand that in today’s GOP you only get ahead by bending a knee, kissing the ring of the man who would be king, and — as in autocracies since time immoral — putting the Fearless Leader’s whims above all other concerns.
And why not? Isn’t what the Great Leader wishes equal to the good of the nation? And why can’t this happen here? Because our institutions, rules, and traditions are too strong to be overwhelmed by a would-be strongman? But what if that would-be strongman who has already successfully corrupted his own political party, weeded out those who will stand in his way, and attracted those happy to ride on his coattails to absolute power?
Why would you flirt with a risk like that, USA? It’s not just self-destructive madness: It is mean and boring to reward Donald Trump’s attacks on, and his party’s refusal to defend, our shared sovereignty, culture of tolerance, and our principle of equality under the law with the keys to the inner workings of our shared government.
Project 2025’s Section F plan removes all credibility from the underlying conservative ideas. The existing conservative idea was that much of what the Federal bureaucracy does should be either done by congress or not done at all. But Project 2025 does not shrink the size of the federal bureaucracy and it does not add more congressional oversight to the executive branch — instead it simply removes as many career bureaucrats as Trump wants to remove and replaces them with political appointees. Trump has disclaimed Project 2025, but what is to prevent him from following through with those parts of the plan that suit his ambitions, and conform to previous actions? Surely, we should expect him to fill his new administration with political yes-people — those are the ones who he elevated the last time around (Kash Patel is an infamous and conspicuous example; but let’s also recall here and now real quick that Trump wanted to make Jeffrey Clark acting attorney general because Clark [an otherwise unimportant member of Trump’s DOJ] was willing to send a letter to Georgia’s legislature erroneously advising them that the DOJ had found reason to doubt Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results; and that Trump only backed down from thus elevating Clark when his entire DOJ leadership threatened to resign)? And what is to prevent Donald Trump from enacting Section F immediately, thereby replacing all those annoyingly competent and pro-democracy bureaucrats with people whose primary vetted qualification will be a willingness to do whatever Donald Trump asks of them?
How does this not end in disaster, Ross Douthat? Is not the best we can hope for from Trump 2.0 a four-year desperate struggle to retain enough of the apparatus of a functioning democracy to be able to recover it adequately in a post-Trump world? And is not the worst we can hope for a reasonably-likely Trump autocracy?
What is the point at which you would have the citizens of the United States set aside partisan quibbles and stop a would-be dictator? It seems to me that if the would-be dictator is a Republican, the point is after it is too late. But imagine for a moment — as we asked of you in One Reality — that the shoe is on the other foot. Would you not be sounding all possible alarms? Would rallying around a Trump-like figure not be the absolute and final proof that liberals have no spiritual center and are therefore tossed about by their own desire to dominate? Look at the foot the shoe is on, Ross Douthat. That’s the one that is gangrened; that is the one that has allowed one man’s corruption to corrupt his political party; that’s the one desperate to spread the rot throughout the whole body. Pardon me for mixing metaphors, but you get the gist of what I am saying: It is the GOP that is doing this, but pretend for a moment it was the Democrats: imagine how you would feel and act then, and then ask your self why you are taking Trump’s corruption of the GOP leadership and most all of its rank and file with in such easy, loping, to-the-store-for-cigarettes-and-milk strides?
This candidate and this GOP have clearly stepped into the realm of political evil. If they win, there is a very real chance that we the people lose control of our government to a man and an organization that are more than willing to use any means to maintain power.
Also: Voting for Donald Trump is voting to give this clearly mentally disintegrating man — who was never morally fit for the high-stakes job of president of the most powerful nation in the world — the button that blows up the world.
Come on! It really isn’t a difficult decision. It doesn’t matter how much you think you’re sacrificing in terms of policy. You can either choose a basically functioning democratic republic that is willing to work with the people to try to shore up the nuts and bolts of our shared democratic republic; or you can hand the keys to a known enemy of democracy and a political party that has over the last four years evolved to cater to his wonts.
This is not a tough call, and it is beyond disingenuous to paint a reality in which it is.
Anyway: “His [Donald Trump’s] smartest supporters premise their loyalty on the idea that he’s a huge B.S. artist who probably won’t actually follow through on all his promises, even as his most devout supporters stand ready to excuse excess, corruption and constitutional brinkmanship.”
And of those categories of supporters, who are the ones who will be joining him in his administration and in his newly Trumpified federal bureaucracy? Mostly the devout ones, would be my guess — he will be in charge, after all. And how much do the “smartest supporters” really believe he’s not going to go for a full dictatorship? And which of them when in power on his coattails will resist him if he does?
At some point if you keep handing a person with autocratic instincts the levers of government while his party organizes itself around his rhetoric and behavior while weeding out those who stand up to his worst instincts, that would-be autocrat is going to fill enough critical posts with lackeys until the system breaks.
There is no a priori reason why this system cannot fail. And the system was predicated on the idea that the population and the bulk of the political players would resist autocracy. At what point, Ross Douthat, do you start to worry? At what point do you stop casually referencing “political brinkmanship” and forcing a “constitutional crisis”, and start saying it’s time for the people to step in and tell this corrupt politician and the party that he has corrupted, “No, you can’t do this”???
[Also, this account here sketched doesn’t even include the wider pattern of autocratic behavior: Trump’s previous flouting of the emoluments clause and indications that he will continue that behavior if made president again (The Intensifying threat of Donald Trump’s emoluments). That will towards kleptocracy played a fundamental part in the creation of autocratic regimes in Russia, Venezuela and other places (Kleptocracy club). His open talk about using the government to punish political enemies (link) The creeping of election deniers and other openly partisan operators into the previously boringly apolitical gears of state election governing bodies (Election certification under threat. The long list of concerns we compiled before the 2020 election (Trump’s Threat to Democracy (2020)). On and on and on: what he said, what he did, what he says, what he promises to do, the people he elevates versus the people he downgrades, the world leaders he gravitates to and what he does to ingratiate himself to them: the pattern reinforces itself over and over: A would-be autocrat. And now with a party increasingly complicit and thus already with one foot in the great crime that any fool can see that their leader and standard bearer Donald Trump is purposing. Here we should also link to current threats about how he will use the government to go after political enemies with past examples of attempting to do so while president. Ditto for current threats against the media and the war on free press report written during his first administration]
At what point?
Unless — perhaps — deep in your bosom you believe that democracy is only worth defending if the alternative is not going to magically be rule by a conservative Catholic aristocracy. But why would Trump’s chaos resolve into that? God lets Russia co-opt its religious leaders to the ends of a cruel dictator — just as God has allowed the commingling of divine and earthly power to corrupt government after government throughout the ages. Why should God not let the combination of church and state corrupt the USA of 2030? The reason why we separate church and state is to prevent people from lying to themselves and others about the most sacred things, and also to prevent them from harming themselves and others by abusing spiritual authority. Even if a man with no interest in divine or moral laws could somehow be the president that brought theocracy to the USA, theocracies tempt both leaders and citizens to lie to themselves and others about the most sacred things, and to justify clear evils (an oppressive government that routinely commits crimes against its own citizens to stay in power) as part of divine Goodness.
Why did Jesus say that the only unforgivable sin was blasphemy against the Holy Spirit? Wasn’t it because when you claim divine inspiration to justify dishonesty, cruelty, unfairness, selfishness, and all that turns souls away from Godlight and towards the never-ending hopes and fears of a material-centered life; you effectively turn Truth on Its head and invite yourself and others to pervert your own relationships to the divine?
[This little throw-away thought of Pudd N Tane’s has captured the attention of our wider project. Please see Worshipping Evil (not yet published as of Monday, September 30) for a consideration of Jesus’s remarks about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Here suffice it to say that all involved — including that tedious agitator, retired-drinker, and would-be scholar Pudd N. Tane — think that our present author waded a little quickly into waters deep and currents swift.]
3. The article creates a false equivalency by pawning off a conservative critique of the Biden administration as a reasonable counterbalance to the concerns one might have over 2024’s Trump his GOP.
Conservatives are extremely critical of the Biden administration. Liberals see it as a success — not the least because it ended up with an above average post-pandemic economy (both in terms of economic strength and inflation) (link comparing US inflation rates with other first-world economies), and because for the first time in forty years, the US government turned away from the Neo-liberal economic policies that have caused the largest wealth gap since the Civil War and the Great Depression (link). Paul Krugman just posted an article about how the post-pandemic income increase outpaced the post-pandemic inflation increase, but that psychologically people find raising inflation more upsetting than they find raising income reassuring, and that in politics “if you are explaining, you are losing”, so the wise thing for the Harris campaign to do is to focus on the future, and not try to argue that all and all Biden did a good job of handling the post-pandemic economy (link); but that doesn’t mean pundits shouldn’t account for such complexities in their critiques of how well the Biden administration thread a difficult needle.
It is also debatable that the increase in immigration has harmed the country — there’s a lot of evidence that immigration helps the economy on the whole, and many on the left would argue that this increase in immigration has created more economic opportunities for US citizens than it has taken away. But the immigration situation has not been politically popular, and there are legitimate (not purely political) arguments for adjusting the current status quo.
In 2024 with the election approaching, the Biden administration worked hard — as is common practice in democratic nations — to bring their immigration policies more in line with the wishes of the nation. To reach this goal, they worked with the Republicans to pass meaningful reform, but Donald Trump clearly for no other reason except his own political gain, stepped in and made his party abandon those reforms. This is another example of how this political party has allowed itself to be corrupted by a corrupt politician. Granted: avoiding meaningful reforms in the hopes of helping one’s candidate in an upcoming election is closer to politics-as-usual than is covering for or outright lying along with Trump’s Big Lie, but it is not politics-as-usual in a healthy democratic republic (where members of congress should be worried that their constituents will punish them for avoiding meaningful reform for the sake of obviously partisan ends), and it didn’t used to be politics-as-usual here.
Ross Douthat’s use of links I also take issue with. How does referencing one academic paper in an unsettled debate prove that Biden’s economic policies significantly increased the pandemic’s inflation rate? And if the paper’s premises are correct and the Republicans would not have passed any stimulus, what would the economic growth have been? Would it have outpaced inflation as it did under Biden? And without the stimulus, you also are without the first meaningful response to the Davos-man’s takeover of our economic and political world.
I mention this because Ross Douthat throws in a criticism of Davos man into his take-down of the elite; and because, while I don’t know that we need the term “Davos-man”, I do agree that something has to give when we reach pre-Civil War and pre-Great Depression levels of income inequality. But how to make political decisions that contradict the will of the super rich in a nation whose conservative Supreme Court has consistently ruled in favor of the notion that using money to turn your message into effective propaganda is equivalent to the constitutional right to free speech? Where did this bind come from? K-Street, conservatives on the Supreme Court, the choice of both parties — since the 1980s — to pursue economic policies that have favored the wealthiest and have allowed the very rich to become super rich: Is this not the basic formula for our current economic dilemma? And — as extreme wealth gaps are not good for democracies — is it not an appreciable factor in our current political crisis?
But how to get out of this jam? There was an article in The NY Times about how Biden’s economic policies represented the first break from this business-first economic policies, but that he did a poor job of communicating his successes (link). But how do we explain this success (a meaningful first step towards economic policies to fight against this unhealthy wealth gap) without losing the money that has become the lifeblood of our political process? Maybe by pointing out to the super rich that it isn’t so fun to have to surround yourself with your own private security team, that it would be better to just be considerably richer than most everyone else in a more egalitarian society than to be absurdly richer than everyone else as a mega-rich oligarch in an increasingly undemocratic nation?? I think these points make good sense, but I don’t have a billion dollars. One can understand why both the Biden administration and Kamala Harris’s campaign might be feeling a little tongue-tied on the topic.
Finally, Douthat’s use of links to prove his points about the democrats mishandling of education and drug enforcement I found particularly wrong-headed. The links all point to stories about state laws and their repercussions. States are testing grounds for policy ideas. There is little to indicate the Kamala Harris has either the will or would have the votes to try similar experiments on a national scale. And I say let the states try things!
And even the articles themselves don’t make slam-dunk cases against the supposedly disastrous liberal policies. The article on Portland’s troubles since it stopped punishing people for using hard drugs pointed to studies that concluded that the recent increase in opiate overdoses wasn’t caused by the legislation, and to one study that said it was, but the article also cited a local expert who criticized that study (for not controlling “for fentanyl’s entry into Oregon’s drug supply”); furthermore, the article also showed the political leadership of Oregon agreeing that it wasn’t helping the users themselves and that it wasn’t popular and needed some revising. Let the states revise! Let them tweak! It’s not like business as usual on the war on drugs is going great.
The Minnesota article I didn’t read; I don’t have a subscription to the WSJ.
Oh, and then there was the link to demonstrate that the administration botched the trans questions (maybe link to all the articles I mention here). That article gave evidence to support the claim that someone (name and title) from Biden’s administration had gotten age limits for sex change operations removed from an international report. This Biden official is trans and worried that including such limits in the report would be material for the right to attack trans rights (check story). I don’t understand his (check pronoun) logic (of course, I have not heard exactly what it was — it wasn’t covered by that article). But is this a huge deal? Is this an administration-wide failure? That some international report that the conservative members of the US government wouldn’t take seriously in any case did not specifically include age limits on its guidelines for when it was advisable for people to have sex operations? And that there’s good reason to think this omission was because of concerns voiced by people within the Biden administration? This is the kind of giant scandal that makes it understandable why it would be too much to ask of a member of this democratic republic to vote for Kamala Harris against a man whose coup failed largely because people in his own party chose democracy over personal loyalty to him, but who has now purged his party of such foolishly naive operators, thereby ushering in a post-democracy GOP?
[On the trans issue: the way the extremes shape too much of both parties, but national legislation forcing parents to let minors have trans operations is neither something the average democratic voter wants nor something on the horizon; while this GOP is actively encouraging both anti-democratic actions and lies and cruel and un-American rhetoric; the comparison is again not apples to apples.]
On the whole, what I see is a fundamentally successful domestic presidency over which conservatives have many policy quibbles, many of which (on inflation and on immigration) the Biden administration is already attempting to tweak their policies, and which are to varying degrees fair. How do you compare that to the threats we discussed above?
However, it remains true that to the casual observer, Trump’s economy was good until the pandemic hit. But why? Was it his tax cuts, or was it as Obama had said when he took office — that he (Obama) had got the economy raring for him (Trump)? (where was that quote?) And speaking of those tax cuts: What impact did they have on the deficit and therefore on inflation? And what impact did they have on the super-rich’s advantage over everyone else?
I don’t know what to think about the issues with Ukraine and Israel. I think maybe it would’ve been better if the Biden administration had given Ukraine more assistance early on, but a Trump presidency was not going to have given Ukraine more aid than Biden did. Donald Trump does not appear to be too worried about letting Putin have Ukraine. Anyway, he likes dictators and he likes the idea that they get to take whatever they want and be big men making big empires bigger. And with Israel, well, everyone wants a deescalation except for the two parties who have the power to deescalate the war and who need it for political cover. And I agree with Thomas Friedman’s take that Netanyahu is incentivized to make the Biden administration look worse: If Harris wins, Okay, they US will still be defenders of Israel; but if Trump wins, then Netanyahu can make the case to Trump that he helped him win, and they can be part of the dictator buddy club together (link; check article). This is not fantastical grousing that we’re here indulging in: this is a fair assessment of Trump’s character — a personality we’ve all had forced on us for eight long years now.
Most democrats don’t see the Biden presidency as a failure, and presenting a conservative critique of the administration as a demonstration of its failure feels misleading. Nonetheless, it is true that Biden is not currently very popular, and immigration and inflation are a factor in this unpopularity. However, the partisan rift and right-wing media alt-reality are probably also big factors. Every time I click on that stupid Microsoft landing page, right-wing sources mix in with the rest of the news and they invariably cherry-pick and/or misconstrue the topics of the day to make Biden look like a failure. It is so blatantly partisan; and their talking heads spin on and on as if Donald Trump and his GOP did not look suspiciously like a post-democracy Republican Party.
Whatever the cause and without trying to calculate exactly where and to what degree the critiques are fair, let’s accept that many people are unhappy with Biden’s handling of inflation, immigration, trans rights, and the war in Gaza.
If — either from the cynical delusion that we’ve already lost democracy, or from the romantic delusion that we can’t lose democracy, or from a cynically lazy and self-obsessed supposition that nothing will change if we do lose democracy — you (A) don’t think Trump and his GOP present a legitimate threat to our democracy; and if you also (B) don’t believe that Trump and his GOP’s recent behavior represents an unacceptable assault on our shared democracy; then you are free to argue that the Biden administration’s policies aren’t working well enough for you, and so you want a change. Again, I would argue that on the whole Biden did a good job. But I am not a conservative pundit. And, of course, I think both (A) and (B) represent serious errors in judgement; and I really wish I could get everyone to feel my critique of (A) and (B) deep inside like I do; because I feel very confident that Trump’s political evil has reached the point of being obviously and glaringly in the red zone — making it is clearly high time for a free people to stand up for themselves and their fellows.
So what do I see? A country divided. A president that could not heal the rift that probably no one could have healed. A nation constitutionally unable to talk about unfair economic policies’ effects on its current woes because in the forty years that these policies have gotten progressively less fair, the ability of the big money to control the political conversation has steadily increased; but even in this environment President Biden took some meaningful first steps towards a fairer economic future; and let’s not forget that many elites helped FDR redistribute the wealth once before, so maybe we can do that again — and this time without fear of violent revolution as one of the key motivators. I see a world where tyranny is on the rise and where established autocrats (Putin) and establishing autocrats (Netanyahu) use war for political gains. I see a US presidential candidate eager to undo the constraints of constitutional democracy who has corrupted his political party from one that could decisively stand up to his anti-democratic actions in 2020 to one that in 2024 most likely lacks both the will and (having shoved out, sidelined, or silenced those who would push back on Donald Trump; and who, in any case, will not have the final say on who Trump populates his next administration with) the means to do so.
I don’t see apples to apples; I see imperfect but serviceable apples to rotten worm-infested apples.
But how seriously does Ross Douthat’s article take Trump’s GOP’s threat to our democracy?
“His [Donald Trump’s] smartest supporters premise their loyalty on the idea that he’s a huge B.S. artist who probably won’t actually follow through on all his promises, even as his most devout supporters stand ready to excuse excess, corruption and constitutional brinkmanship.” That’s pretty much all we get from Douthat on this topic.
And in Douthat’s explanation for why voters are justified in considering Trump a reasonable alternative to Harris, he mentions how those voters might justifiably remark that things didn’t fall apart in Trump 1.0 — with the implicit argument of “so why worry now?” Why, Ross? Why don’t you balance those remarks by noting the glaringly different circumstances surrounding Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0: Trump has learned that he desires to be and can (with the right internal rule making and personnel) perhaps succeed in becoming a real-life bonafide dictator; today’s GOP has witnessed Trump’s march towards autocracy and rather than sideline him for it, they have sidelined those within the party who would speak out against his anti-democratic behavior; Trump has reason to fear legal problems if he doesn’t stay in power forever; and Trump continues to prep supporters and foes alike for anti-democratic actions should he take power again.
If a would-be autocrat is able to cow his party into submission and keep getting the keys of the government from the people, well: eventually he’s going to break the system; because the system was not designed to be invincible, but to give politicians and citizens of good-will enough leverage over the system that they could safeguard it from bad actors. With the bulk of Trump supporters preferring his lies over our shared reality and today’s GOP’s submission to Trump’s machinations, it is difficult to see how the human components of this system have been adequately doing their job. That is why it is so important for us now in this election to speak with one firm and clear voice and tell Donald Trump and his GOP-enablers that we will not allow them to treat our democracy in this way: Either today’s GOP is willfully marching towards a Trumpian autocracy, or they are willing to subject our nation to the real risk of such an autocracy for their own political and personal gains. Either way, this is behavior that a free people should us their freedom at the ballot box to thoroughly repudiate.
What Donald Trump is up to is a violence against our system of government, which if successful will likely lead to the implementation of our government as a tool for oppressing rather than serving the governed. This is a will to crime on the grand scale, and instead of throwing this man and his tricks out, this GOP has chosen to become his party. That is political evil. And we the citizens of the United States of America have the right and the duty to work together as a final check on madness, corruption, and evil in government. Let us use that power to gently remove power from people who would abuse it: That is the beauty of democracy: We don’t have to use violence to halt violent intentions: We vote the corrupted actors out. We the People still have that power, USA: I suggest we use it here and now and spend the next four years working with the Harris administration to make our democracy more robust and more responsive to the will of the governed.
4. Douthat’s article overlooks the conservative movements’ consistent preference for partisan victories over a fair representation of all the nation’s citizens, and how this choice has created our present danger — with no credible choice for conservative voters but an electorate so divided and a system so rigged in favor of conservative candidates that the conservative candidate has a very good chance of winning (until, of course, everyone reads this essay I’m typing, and we all decide to stand as one against Donald Trump and those who would enable his criminal intent, and from this start begin to build a workable consensus not on the details of government, but on the nuts and bolts of how we will defend our shared government from tyranny-from-within).
Well, we discussed some of this above. Part of the awkwardness of conversing with conservatives is the fact that — with the filibuster, gerrymandering combined with the fanaticism of primary voters (this latter issue is also a problem in democratic states), laws that make voting more difficult and basing those laws on mythic tales of rampant voter fraud, twisting the first amendment to into a weapon against meaningful campaign finance reform, twisting the second amendment into a weapon against meaningful firearm regulation, and with a right-wing media that serves as willing and largely uncritical propaganda for right-wing politicians — conservatives have been pressing their already democracy-bending advantage (built-in issues like two Senators for states with 500,000 or 39,000,000 and the electoral college allowing conservatives to occupy the [increasingly-powerful] executive branch without the support of a majority of the voters) to the point that we have one of the least-representative representative governments around.
Part of the problem here is that the system was designed to account for regional differences and with some of the states-as-mini-countries mindset leftover from the Articles of Confederation; but the world has shrunk and politics has become increasingly national and partisan.
How do I talk to Ross Douthat without noting that the Republican Party has not enacted abortion reform by convincing the people of the nation that abortion reform was needed, but via a Supreme Court that does not at all reflect the political consensus in the nation — a Supreme Court that through luck and Mitch McConnel’s domestic Real-Politik is much more conservative than the nation is.
Oh, but that’s the crux of this section: Increasingly the conservative movement has used Real-Politik within our borders. But that doesn’t work in a democratic republic because democratic republic’s are based on the citizenry and leadership alike sharing a sense of honesty and fair play in their shared government — a sense of all being on the same side. I am not up for writing this section now. I will need a helper. Also: I’m more interested in trying to figure out a way forward than trying to explain how we got into this bind; I mean: I do think the development of our bind is a worthy topic and one relevant to the larger goal of extracting ourselves from said bind, but I only have so much time right now.
5. Most critically, Douthat’s article ignores the distinction between policy disagreements and political evil, while also failing to account for the reality that the most important job of the electorate is not to decide the partisan direction of the nation but to serve as a final check on corruption madness and evil in their shared democratic republic.
I don’t know. I’m tired and disappointed. Even if I could somehow get Ross Douthat to see that what Donald Trump and his GOP are currently chasing is political evil and that the only acceptable response here and now is for We the People to speak with a clear voice and tell Trump he’s no longer welcome in politics and to tell the GOP they need to rethink how they want to pursue power if they expect us to ever give them power: Even if I could this stranger in my strange land to feel this moment with the gut-wrenching clarity that I think I perceive it; still I’ve not reached enough people, still I wander in the margins, still I live and die in largely academic exercises.
Author: Pudd N. Tane
Editor: Bartleby Willard & Amble Whistletown
Production: Amble Whistletown & Bartleby Willard
Copyright: Andrew Watson
Reason: Somewhere in the Soul of Things — for the same Light animates all that is wise and gentle.