Thursday, October 10, 2019

Aftermath

Regular readers of this blog—that would be me—know that I’m of a sunny and optimistic disposition, but even with some auspicious signs and portents lately, I’m having a tough time believing that we get out of this fix without some grave and irreparable harm, beyond what’s already been inflicted, to the polity. Well, “oceans rise, empires fall.” Houses burn and are rebuilt, even as heirlooms are forever lost.

Let’s proceed as though we exit this administration in some plausible best-case scenario, that Trump is removed or resigns, and that Pence runs and is defeated, or that Trump hangs on for another thirteen months, is soundly defeated, and actually leaves office without fomenting insurrection. It’s 20 January 2021 and Chief Justice Roberts, audibly gritting his teeth, swears in President-elect Warren, who took the election along with House and Senate Democratic majorities. We’re not talking filibuster-proof in the Senate—I said “plausible”—but timid institutionalist Senators who might hesitate to abolish the practice would do well to reflect that the GOP will, in a heartbeat, should Mitch McConnell or some future Majority Leader conclude that it’s to their significant advantage.

So: two branches of out tripartite system—in this vision, that may not be quite the lollipops-and-unicorns model that the BernieBros or the Steiniacs would want—which nevertheless constitutes (heh, heh) a marked advance over the chaotic and malignant misrule we presently endure.

But are we talking actual reform here, or merely a reprieve? Because Donald Trump did not spring full-formed from Murdoch’s brow. By the time he leaves the stage, pelted with produce and dragged off with a hook, influential voices will be raised insisting that the man was an aberration, and not the culmination, of poisonous currents in the Republican party going back for decades. Unless the next administration and the 117th Congress understand what has been burned down and what structural changes must be made in the rebuilding, a Democratic victory next year will grant us only a stay of execution. McConnell, or another “grim reaper” as he has proudly called himself, will presently be back, and pissed off. We ought to have learned this with the Obama presidency, and he ought to have learned it from Iran-Contra: “Let’s look forward, not back,” is bullshit when you’re dealing with these people, because they’ll bank the proceeds from their theft and set about stealing more. And we-the-people bear a share of that blame, because Democratic voters routinely exhale after prevailing in the general election, sigh “Well, thank heaven we’ve finally fixed that mess,” and let lapse their attention from the distracting and dirty business of politics. Pro tip: that doesn’t work, and the Republicans figured this out half a century ago.

We as a nation have been sleepwalking into this swamp of Caesarism for decades, and some people are only just waking up to discover our collective selves sternum-deep in fetid waters, with alligators eyeing us meaningfully. Successive slothful Congresses have yielded their powers incrementally to the Executive Branch, and now that branch, in the person of a jumped-up criminal developer from Queens, has quite clearly declared that it intends to take and to keep all such powers as remain, in which case, if he succeeds, self-government endures only as a brittle shell enclosing a near-vacuum, its former essence, such as this ever was, having been first poisoned and then leached away. And while the knuckle-dragging Dominionist Trump-enablers in the House of Representatives may for the moment be ignored, the Washington Post reports that thirty-nine Republican Senators are, as of today, solidly behind him.

But my scenario is supposed to be a ’appy occasion! Somehow the forces of righteousness prevail next year against gerrymandering, against Russian and domestic ratfucking on social media, against hacking of e-votes. The witch is dead! Do I hear a ding? Do I hear a dong? (We’ve been hearing the dung for years.)

Yes, and speaking of witches, Paul Campos made this point over at the “Lawyers, Guns and Money” blog earlier today as I write this:
I suspect, by the way…that it’s going to be OK to treat Trump differently, because it may well prove very convenient to everyone to rehabilitate the Republican party by burning this particular witch. 
If Trump is driven out of office before next November — which at the moment still seems very unlikely but suddenly no longer impossible — it will be precisely for this reason. Suppose next summer rolls around and it becomes blindingly obvious that Trump is going to get routed, and that he’s likely to take the Republican majority in the Senate with him. Under those circumstances, the fantastically powerful lust among the great and the good to get back to “normal’ — to pretending that Trump is some sort of inexplicable aberration, and that we can all get back to enjoying our nachos in Jerry Jones’s box if we just rid ourselves of this turbulent parvenu — is going to be truly overwhelming. Can you imagine the day Trump is ejected from the sacred precincts of the White House, and civility returns to America? David Brooks will have to write his column with one hand.
That’s going to be a problem, the reflexive impulse to declare that the Trump presidency was a “black swan” event—who could ever have predicted such a thing, really?—and that nothing in the soil from which he sprang could possibly account for the toxic blossom that unfurled its garish and deadly petals in 2016. Error! Error!

We have to acknowledge the structural weaknesses in our ancient Constitutional system that have permitted a mad king to assume and abuse the office referred to by the Founders as “Chief Magistrate,” because while Trump is erratic and barely sane, there are surely other, colder, more rational, more calculating authoritarians-in-embryo watching his regime, mapping the rot running through the norms, institutions, barriers, recording what works and what does not. What remains of the Constitutional order is ripe for overthrow, and such a coup will have the enthusiastic support of something like forty percent of those who turn out at the polls—“feral voters.” Absent significant reform—which, it should be noted, the Federalist Society-stacked courts at every level will do their best to thwart—any Democratic presidency will be at best an interregnum, a Weimar administration, before the virus of fascism lays waste at last to the society.

Geez, I appear to have talked myself down from optimism.

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