Coup de Grace for the Coup D’etat
Two days ago in our nation’s capital (and Capitol), one of America’s two great modern political parties committed an act of unspeakable cowardice. That this party had been my political home from 1983 to 2016 has no objective bearing on the corrupt, unprincipled act and the slow suicide of this Party; it just makes it more personal. It resembles I imagine, watching a friend or family member slowly decline from addiction, but in this case, I will not raise a finger to stop it. I will remember what once was, and hope for better things in the future.
What we witnessed was not a protest. It was not a demonstration. It was not activism. It was not a riot. It was an attempted coup; insurrection pure and simple. All effort should be made to identify the (happy to be identified) participants, and they should be prosecuted for their crimes.
That these traitors were allowed to access the Capitol as easily as they did is a matter for review. The levels of security provided during a KNOWN THREAT event were laughable. One could watch the proceedings while monitoring Twitter and almost track to the progress of the disloyal mob toward the chambers. This was an embarrassment and a crime.
The President invited his co-conspirators. He incited his co-conspirators. He then directed them toward the Capitol. What followed is almost entirely the fault of this most horrible, small man, desperately clinging to power that he never should have been granted. But he shares blame for the death of one of his lied-to followers and the embarrassment of a great nation with his enablers, chief among whom were Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley. In service to their own pathological ambitions, they repeated the President’s lies and fed them to his underinformed, undereducated drone force to nourish their existing sense of grievance. There is nothing to their claims
The President and his hapless legal team have filed numerous lawsuits, none of which have found merit within our legal system. Careful not to raise issues that might result in disbarment, the suits never quite get around officially to addressing what the President and his toadies allege publicly, and that is massive, widespread, justiciable fraud. Ever mindful of the protections afforded by the cozy confines of our Capitol and its immunity to threat of such sanction (not to mention slander), Republican members of both the House and Senate last week took to the ramparts of social media to pledge their eternal loyalty to their embattled Chief Autocrat in the hopes of currying favor with what they believe to be the key element of the Republican electorate in the 2022 midyear election and 2024 Presidential election.
Most laughable in their brave defenses of the President treated so unjustly by the (Constitutional, legal, electoral) system is the charge that courts have not had the opportunity to address the “merits” of the President’s case (see “Hawley”, “Cruz”). This likely has something to do with the inconvenient fact that court after court at the state and federal level—irrespective of the political leaning of the official responsible for nominating the judges involved—reached the same conclusion: that the questions had no merit. They reached this conclusion through one or both of the following generally accepted legal principles: that the person or persons bringing the suit did not have legal standing to do so, or that the relief sought by the petitioners was not warranted by the evidence presented to bring the case in the first place. Another word for these findings is that the cases had no “merit”.
I should like to see what the reaction of Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley would be to a well-funded campaign of legal action taken against them PERSONALLY by entities charging harm from their public statements. Would they stand up and support the questions going to trial as the means of determining their merit? Of course not. They would cite such obtuse and arcane concepts as “standing” (with which they no doubt became familiar during their legal training and time arguing cases before the federal bench) in urging the suits be dismissed. And they would be correct in doing so.
The Republican herd is moving in a particular direction, one where slavish devotion to our disgraced soon-to-be-ex-President and his unconcerned-with-the-arcana-of-our-legal-system followers is the overriding principle. It will be interesting to watch whether this is a smart political move, or if we are watching sheep approach the edge of the cliff. I hope it is the latter.
Trump’s March Through Georgia
A sane and honorable man, when presented with obvious defeat, would have turned his attention toward the last outpost of influence his party would have in the government and apply his estimable energies to its protection. He would have campaigned against the excesses of liberalism, and he would have raised the specter of all manner of ill that would attend to the Democratic Party presiding over the entirety of our political branches. But that man is not President.
Instead, Donald Trump activated a battalion of hucksters to clog the federal judiciary and the courts of a handful of states. His relentless campaign of undermining the confidence in that election had the entirely predictable result of suppressing turnout from “his base” (a vile phrase I cannot wait not to consider anymore), and lo and behold, two seats in the Senate are lost and the GOP is a minority Party, again. Heckuva job, GOP.
So, what does one-party control of Washington portend? Should we be prepared for confiscation of property and a life of collective toil in soybean fields? Probably not, and here’s why. First, while the GOP has beclowned itself mightily over the past five years, it is not “dead” as a political actor/force. It will have internal battles and some of them will be epic, but it will congeal around a common opponent or series of opponents, and it will find minimal capacity to shape the political dialog.
Second, because things are so close in both federal legislative chambers, the lure of individual members bucking their own side in order to shape their side’s program will be irresistible. All things being equal, I think this is a moderating influence, and it will empower those members who believe that they are sent to Washington not simply to be faithful and predictable reflections of what 50.1% of the voters in their district think on any particular issue. In other words, there is a wee chance that the unfashionable concept of “compromise” could rise again.
It strikes me as ridiculous to think that the country is in for a dramatic swing to the left. We are, however, in for a shift leftward, and that is what should be expected from the diminished popularity of the party that claims to represent the right. The one thing that Trump accomplished that I uniformly support was the nomination of excellent judges to the federal bench, and so there will be a bulwark against some of the excesses of the left. What there will be fewer of—indeed, an insufficient supply of to stop—are legislators who will reflexively vote against the general program of the government. We WILL see higher taxes, we WILL see more regulation, we WILL hear more about climate and ideas to ameliorate damage thereto, and the bottom line is that given the result of the 2020 election, that is what the country wishes.
With respect to our place in the world, leadership therein, diplomacy and military might, I don’t expect big changes in spending. I do expect there to be a more collegial approach to international relations, I do expect there to be more money flowing to diplomacy and development, and I think the Department of Defense will be under pressure to think somewhat differently. But I know some of the people that are going into the National Security arm of the Biden Administration. They are capable, they are smart, and they get that things are different than they were in 2008. My hope is that a new national security consensus can be forged in the great middle, one that recognizes renewed great power competition and the requirement for the entire government to mobilize.
It is the turn of the Democratic Party to try its hand at this governing stuff. What haven’t I mentioned in this little ditty today? I haven’t mentioned COVID. The virus is still there and we are already beginning to see the joy of last month’s vaccine announcements turning into a mess of distribution nightmares and identity-kvetching about who ought to get what, when. My guess is that things are going to get better on this front relatively soon, both because the system will learn from its mistakes, AND because the guy at the top won’t be looking every logistical question through the lens of how it impacts him politically.
All in all, I am hopeful.
attempted coup? More like a protest that got out of hand. It's fun to pretend that it was a coup attempt because that rhetoric ought to rile up the less intelligent among us. You don't believe that it was a coup attempt, yet you pretend. How about some honesty. The rhetoric is fun, but you're no different than Alerx Jones when you engage in this crap.
My thoughts: I don't think the sheep are going to fall off the cliff. I think they'll reinvent their narrative and be fine. Look at how they're all doing it Thur/Fri/Sat so far. "This was the last straw for me!" I'll give the benefit of the doubt to some of them. Some clearly stayed on to keep the house from burning to the ground. For others, nah: a pure political calculus in which they kept devaluing the risk to the country/their party.
As for the Trump voter, I think they loved Trump a tad more than maga (forgive me for not capitalizing that revered slogan). To continue with what Gunzilla writes here, Trump stoked grievance in his voter. There's an interesting article out there in Politico by James Kimmel [Yale] about the brain on grievance resembling the brain on drugs--it explains how "harboring a grievance (a perceived wrong or injustice, real or imagined) activates the same neural reward circuitry as narcotics". This triggers a craving for more, which Trump delivered on. He also delivered the promise of revenge. In this regard Trump himself was a shiny thing his followers couldn't stop watching: his tone of voice, his flippant dangling of a promise that revenge for grievance was at hand. It was too hard for them to look away or to stop thinking about. And, honestly, is it any different from the rest of us who stoked our own grievances directed at Trump? We wanted our own 'revenge' too. He really kept us all looking at him from two opposing directions. [These are my thoughts, not Kimmels, btw.] Needless to say, this isn't suggesting the two opposing grievances were on equal, factual footing (real vs imagined).
Trump is now banned from Twitter. Parler is in the crosshairs of Google and Apple, and will remain so. Where does Trump go? This is the 64K question for me. Time will tell. My husband and I predict he will fade along with the fervor for him, but who's to know? Folks are already out there working on the problem of how to pick up his base for themselves, no doubt, and of course.
I share your optimism. I think bipartisanship is more likely now. At least until mid-terms start rolling around. Certainly our global interface will improve, but we have lots of 'splaining to do. I tend to land on the side of optimism generally, though some days it takes more effort. These last several years it's been work to keep that up! But this is always good work to be done. I think we'll continue to do it.