One of the most telling moments in American history was when Senate Republicans had the opportunity to be rid of Donald Trump once and for all. All they had to do was convict him on his second impeachment, and tack on a ban of seeking future public office. Almost all of them chose not to do so. That action spoke louder than anything they said at that time or any other time. It said they were fine with the possibility of Trump being reelected. And...here we are, with him back in power. They got what they wanted. Now we see what happens.
Mitt Romney has spoken about private conversations with other Republican Senators who expressed legitimate concerns that if they voted to convict themselves and their families would be under serious threat of physical harm, up to and including murder. Romney can afford to pay for private security for all the people he was concerned about, but others aren't quite that financially well off.
I think electorally the backlash would have been more significant than you do, but I don't think it's possible to know for sure. But the physical threats are also something that has to be be acknowledged when discussing their actions.
To be clear, I think they should have voted to convict. I think it was cowardice not to given the charges. I just mention the threats to highlight that they need to be a part of the discussion of what was motivating some senators' behavior.
One of the things that I find significantly underdiscussed is the extent to which people act like Trump and his supporters are a credible threat to their lives when they are manifestly *not*! There are literally at least dozens of, if not 100 or more, people who have personally sued, testified against, presided over cases against, explicitly insulted, etc. Donald Trump and who are still walking around in perfectly good health. Like, if there were several instances of prominent Trump critics/opponents ending up severely injured or dead, I could see the reason to be fearful, but there's no such track record.
I mean, they were feeling that way in response to a large scale assault on the Capitol where members of the crowd had zip-tie handcuffs, set up gallows outside their place of business, and generally threatened to murder anyone who didn't fully support Trump's agenda. I think you're minimizing the extent to which the actual election and certification of the election outcome was dramatically different to his followers than the other things you're comparing this to. Not to mention that we don't have access to the specific threats they were receiving and how credible and legitimate those threats were.
TLDR: The election was significantly different than a court case testimony, allegations in civil suits, etc.. January 6th is a memorable date for a reason.
ETA: It's also pretty easy to google instances where Trump supporters have engaged in violence and cited Trump and their support for him as one of the things that motivated their activities. Claiming that threats of violence are not credible or anything to be concerned about just because high profile individuals haven't been attacked (many of whom have actual security protecting them) just seems to be intentionally downplaying the issue beyond what is reasonably called for by the evidence.
"they were feeling that way in response to a large scale assault on the Capitol"
Except that I remember numerous instances of people acting like Trump was a mob boss going around having people "rubbed out" long before January 6, 2021.
Not to change the subject, but this is one of the things that infuriated me most about the fawning over Luigi Mangione.
There was so much energy spent decrying Trump and the maga ecosystem for "enabling" acts of violence. I think it's debatable how effective any of this was, but I do think it's mostly accurate.
But when you completely ignore this the moment someone uses violence for your political goals it's the equivocation of "well this was bad, but highlights the underlying issues" from politicians and straight up hero-worship from the masses.
As soon as you do that, you give up all credibility when it comes to taking a stand against things like Jan 6th.
“Lame whataboutism?” I disagree with you. It a clear, longstanding position by some to decry violence, but always adding BUT. If the purported, underlying cause is deemed worthy, anything goes.
It's sad how their fear made them do that and then go on national TV repeatedly to call everyone else with those fears a hysterical idiot. While no one should have to live in that fear, I really have no sympathy for them. They've just given him the power to do worse and when they're on the receiving end I really hope they regret what they've done.
I'm not so sure it would have been short-lived. I think establishment Republicans (McConnell et al.) saw it leading to an intra-party civil war that they would almost certainly lose. MAGA or something like it (John Birch Society) has long been part of the coalition, but Bush wrecked the credibility of the establishment wing so bad that the MAGA coalition is decidedly in charge now.
Trump is an important part of that, but the bottom line is that's where the most engaged Republican voters are at now. It's not just a one-way flow of influence (Trump to MAGA). Consider Trump's biggest substantive achievement (Operation Warp Speed) - he doesn't even mention it or get any credit for it from the MAGA base, because anti-vax is a core belief. It's one that Trump doesn't even seem to hold, but he's captive to them on that.
I firmly believe that in the alternate universe where Trump is actually impeached and stripped of the ability to run again, he becomes this folk hero of a small splinter group, but is overall officially branded a "loser" and the GOP tries not to talk about it and just move on, like they didn't want to dwell on Nixon. The apologia for the rioters that had a chance to grow in the days and weeks and months after 1/6 doesn't have room to grow because it means backing a loser.
I agree with you to an extent. A lot of Republicans falling in line behind Trump is a result of them seeing him as a winner, whereas the establishment (e.g., McCain, Romney) weren't. They want to back the winning horse. In your hypothetical where that aura was sufficiently dispelled in 2021, he might lose most of his influence.
My main counterpoints would be that exactly one Republicans senator (Romney) voted for his impeachment, so we were VERY far from making that hypothetical a reality. You're describing a fundamentally different party. Also, I don't think a Trump-less party would revert to its previous state. However much you want to credit Trump vs. others, a lot of that transformation of the Republican base is baked in now.
This may be true but is besides the point, imo. They swore to protect and defend the constitution. That is their no. 1 job, and, at the risk of sounding pompous, their sacred duty. Soldiers, police officers, fire fighters, risk their lives on a daily basis. A senators job is way way more comfortable than any of those, and we should expect more, not less of them. Claiming they failed in their most solemn patriotic duty in what may well be one of the greatest watershed in the country's history because of cowardice makes them look much worse, not better. It is the opposite of an excuse.
Thanks! I'm not "really" back, but since I had an annual subscription I figured that I might as well keep lurking here more low key until it runs out (gradually weaning myself off lol). I have searched far and wide and must admit that I could find no substack that comes close to either the quality (and quantity!) of Matt's writing nor especially to the comments section here. Nevertheless I don't think I'll renew when the time comes. I just feel that Matt crossed a red line of mine and if the consequence is that I end up spending a little less time online that's not the worst thing either ;)
The impeachment was also very broad and rolled in things Trump had done in the preceding months, things these members had participated in.
I don't want to let Republicans off the hook, but in a what-can-I-control sense, the Democrats should have had an impeachment bill holding Trump responsible just for the events of January 6 and banning him from holding office, and that bill should have been sitting on everyone's desk at 8am on January 7, and the impeachment headed up by the most centrist-of-the-GOP member they felt could do it. Instead of taking days to dither and figure out the strategy to maximally squeeze the GOP.
On one hand, this is true. On the other hand, this is a democracy and our political leaders always reflect their constituencies in the long run - if they won't do it out of cowardice, then someone else will do it out of genuine agreement. This doesn't excuse them. But the root problem isn't cowardly Republican politicians, but the fact that a substantial percentage of the American people is fine with authoritarianism, and has feelings about liberal democracy and the rule of law that lie somewhere on the part of the spectrum between indifference and contempt. This isn't specific to America, it's just part of the human condition. If anything, Americans are more committed to liberal democracy and the rule of law than people in the average country are, since those concepts are such a core part of our cultural identity and historical memory, drummed into many of us throughout our childhoods. But while Americans are more supportive of those principles than average, they are less supportive of those principles than I personally believed they were for most of my life.
The reason why our commitment to liberal democracy seemed so rock-solid throughout the postwar era wasn't because there was actually an unshakeable supermajority supporting it, but because there was an elite consensus supporting it, with no ability for dissenting views to form a nationwide critical mass through the forms of mass media then in existence. But that mass media and elite consensus no longer exist, and once you introduce a person like Trump to the voters, a fairly large percentage of them realize that they're generally fine with (or at least not repulsed by) his views on overturning elections or pardoning people who attempt to subvert the law on his behalf or the rest of it.
I know its fashionable to consider our Founding Fathers as flawless demigods whose Constitutional legacy is unquestionable to us today. But they were REALLY wrong in failing to put into place an actually-effective impeachment mechanism. It is and always has been practically impossible to hold an American president to account, especially when the legislature is likely within his party's control or at least is split. That's a puzzling oversight for men who designed the whole thing around checks and balances and the *default assumption* that power corrupts and that having an unaccountable king (like George III) was the worst thing.
But, hey, it was Democracy 1.0, so who could blame them for f*cking this one thing up? It's really our fault for not rectifying this via a Constitutional amendment in the quarter-millennium since. And for fetishizing and freezing in amber what was supposed to be a living, evolving legal document. Which, again, might have been the Founders' mistake, given how practically impossible they made amending the Constitution (especially once the number of states legislatures involved in ratifying any such change ballooned from 13 to 50!). Most every other democracy in the world has refreshed their constitution many times. I've lived in two very functional European democracies (Ireland and Sweden) where they've rewritten the whole damn thing in only the last 20 years, and not even because of some crisis, but just because it was optimal!
The parliamentary model is superior in its ability to hold the Executive to account for malfeasance, as legislators can hold a vote of no confidence against a rogue prime minister or just one who has lost their popular mandate. That better balances the powers of the Legislature (which in the US Constitution was supposed to be the primary branch) in being able wield effective accountability mechanisms toward the Executive.
But even the UK Parliament struggles with holding a PM to account when the elected legislature is part of the same party and holds partisan advantage over legal, constitutional, or public-interest concerns. We saw that in action many times during the soft constitutional crises of the Boris Johnson premiership. Not an easy problem! Ideally, you would then get around this dilemma with some kind of non-partisan or bipartisan independent commission or standing Congressional committee to at least investigate allegations, perhaps actually tried by a specially commissioned independent impeachment court (as per a Danish precedent).
"Which, again, might have been the Founders' mistake, given how practically impossible they made amending the Constitution" That's the thing, until relatively recently in this country's history this wasn't really true! Like almost immediately, there were amendments to address very clear flaws in the constitution. The Founders (many of who were holding elected office in 1804) realized very quickly the system for electing President and Vice President was seriously flawed after the 1800 election fiasco. It's really only since the 70s that amending the constitution became functionally impossible.
This by the way is one the many reasons why i think we underrate how terrible "originalism" is as a judicial philosophy. Like the very Founders that you supposedly venerate when deciding how to decide cases who saw pretty quickly how flawed the constitution they created was? But while most voters are not constitutional law scholars I do really think a sizable chunk voters have heard of originalism. I actually don't think it's a mistake that originalism as a judicial philosophy arose almost in conjunction with the rise of the modern religious right. The rise of seeing "the Founders" as quasi religious figures (and therefore making absurd arguments about the role of religion in the country's founding and see the Constitution as itself religious text is not a mistake to me. It's also basically an "get out of jail free" card to get around judicial precedent and just decide to rule however you feel like.
Which by the way gets to the part Matt is leaving out here; the corruption of the courts and real worry about how far SCOTUS is willing to go to rubberstamp Trump's authoritarian impulses. Those SCOTUS judges watched Jan 6th as well. And unlike House members and Senators who at least have the excuse of saying "if I don't go along with this revisionist history I'm going to get primaried", SCOTUS judges don't have to worry about facing the voters, saw Trump's actual actions in office and said "yeah we should give Presidents astonishing amount of leeway to basically murder their opponents legally". There are basically two guaranteed votes to make trump and his sons dictator fore life. There are threes others I'm at least mildly worried about. And you know who thinks SCOTUS may allow him to be dictator? Donald J Trump. https://jabberwocking.com/trump-already-planning-to-break-the-law/
I am once again begging people who hate originalism to at least outline the alternate theory of constitution theory they prefer. And specific to this case, the theory of constitution applied by these justices that will be better at stopping Trump's authoritarian impulses.
I honestly don't get why "Living Constitution" is so problematic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Constitution. The key thing about it to me is pragmatism. I don't think it's without flaws, but it seems all in all a pretty good template for looking at the law and Constitution generally.
Honest to god, ever since I was politically aware, the "judicial activism" charge from originalists I have found wanting. And I gotta say the last 10 years, my opinion has only sharpened on this. Given the wonton actual "judicial activism" of conservative judges, the fact this charge is leveled at scholars and judges who believe in "living constitution" I find basically Orwellian in its farce.
If you can't tell my opinion of "originalist" judges is astonishingly low. I actually have more respect for conservative House members. As much as I disagree with many of their political choices, at least they have a small excuse; most are from pretty conservative districts and part of their job is to reflect and represent the views of their constituents. And even with some of their policy positions I actually find more to defend. I've maintained for awhile the more damaging SCOTUS and legal decisions are matters of economic concern. I've really come to believe that a lot of these decisions are just flat out corrupt.
Fundamental question for you is that if every conservative member of the court suddenly said they were strong proponents of a living constitution theory of jurisprudence, what change would it require in their decisions? Is there any conservative judicial activism that would be stopped by them adhering to a living constitution theory?
I'm no expert at all on this issue so I could be persuaded otherwise. But whenever I hear a description of "Living Constitutionalism," it just seems to put way too little discipline on how the Constitution should be interpreted. The range of possible "contemporary, practical" interpretations is vast. There's a considerable degree of wiggle room for justices to rule however they feel is ex-post optimal in terms of policy outcomes.
A lot of the Constitution, however, is a list of pre-existing *commitments* by the government *not* to change certain practices or impose particular laws even if the entire government thinks it would be optimal from a policy perspective. Allowing justices to freely reinterpret commitments however they want ex-post considerably weakens the force of those commitments.
"I honestly don't get why "Living Constitution" is so problematic."
Because laws meaning shouldn't change based on who the judge is. If we want a different policy that's the political branches not the judges who should be changing the law.
There is no way to have the law's meaning not change based on who the judge is. Even Scalia, Thomas, Alito, etc., disagreed with each other on occasion. Originalism doesn't guarantee an objective outcome- we're still dealing with humans who are motivated, consciously and unconsciously, by a wide array of factors when they try and reach a decision.
The funny thing is, a “living constitution” is more in line with traditional common law in which American jurisprudence is founded on while originalism (and textualism) is way more akin to the Civil law practices found in places like France.
One odd thing about the constitution today is how much it’s venerated; many of the founders not only thought it had flaws but believed it should be updated consistently
This is indeed a probably the best standard we can get. I'd offer one amendment. Lower-case originalism to augment textualism. Textual interpretation can be weak, without historical context. Often we have explicit commentaries by the contemporary authors on what they meant in the text. That said, where big Originalism gets it wrong (or as you suggest, are not fully honest about their methods) is extrapolating beyond the historical context. There are some larger philosophical points (in the same way the Plato can still be relevant today) that transcend time - but there are plenty of novel situations still. In fact many of the cases making it the high court are exactly this novel cases, and while we should use the text where they can, otherwise they need to extrapolate from the principles of our judicial tradition, including common law and civil norms.
Originalism doesn't mean the founders are perfect. Nor does it mean we can't make changes.
It means look at the text of the document, and apply the common words meaning of the words at the time of the enactment. If that doesn't get you the policy result you want it's not SCOTUS's job to twist the constitution. It's the political branches job to amend the constitution.
The corruption of the courts is what happened during FDR when SCOTUS started acting like a rubber stamp.
Instead congress needs to do it's job. That means compromise between the parties. That means not letting the executive step in when congress hasn't specifically authorized it.
How does that work when we apply the Fourth Amendment to telephone booths and conversations? Does the First Amendment cover common law libel in states? What exactly is double jeopardy, and what kinds of mistrials trigger it? Does it apply when two indictments have slightly different elements?
There's a vast amount of law that doesn't simply follow from the text, but from saying "hey, this is what these cases are trying to do, and this is how we should apply it now".
A lot of the times Congress has made broad delegations to the executive and the courts are reaching to claw them back (Major Questions doctrine, Chevron vs. Auer, etc.)
As I was reading your post it occurred to me that to have earned an A+ on prescience, the Founders should have set rules in place to make it *gradually easier* to amend the Constitution over the long reach of time.
Eg…they could have specified that every 50 years the required votes to ratify an amendment gets reduced by some fraction of states or legislators. (So instead of 2/3 of states it gets reduced to 2/3 minus 1 state per 50 years after initial adoption, with some floor fraction specified - maybe 3/5.)
The idea being: at least they successfully anticipated that changes would be needed, but what they missed is that as time marches on, the need for change actually increases. So the ability to make changes should keep pace.
The document looks less useful / more out-of-touch with the world it has to provide guardrails for…and since the divergence increases, gaps get bigger, the amendment process should become more powerful. (Evidence for this is the increasing reliance on the court system to resolve big picture questions).
It’s an interesting thought experiment - and maybe something to keep in mind for Constitutional Convention 3.0…which is inevitable IMO - it’s just not sustainable as is. So many anti-democratic concepts built in that people are losing patience for. (Trump has accelerated the process without a doubt). Maybe it happens in 10 years, perhaps in 50 years. - just hoping enough people can realize it before total societal breakdown happens.
Something to keep in mind is that if amendments could pass easier we would very likely have a balanced budget amendment that almost passed in the 90s and a gay marriage ban that probably passes in the early 2000s. Probably many others as well.
This is a fascinating idea. Why not call for a generational refresh of the Constitution every 30 years or so? Clearly, conditions will have changed significantly in that time. Even in the comparatively "slower" historical era post-independence, you had only a 12-year interregnum between the "First Republic" (1777 Articles of Confederation) and the "Second" (1789 Constitution) in the new United States. And after that there was a rapid-fire series of Amendments that quite fundamentally shifted the Constitutional order.
Between 1776 and 1806 you had a very different situation in the new Republic, such that erstwhile forbidden things like having a standing army or navy or national bank seemed essential. And, of course, importing slaves was now illegal.
By 1836, Congress had already seriously considered the direct election of Senators several years prior (which wouldn't actually happen until 1913) as well as the Jacksonian Era or Second Party System in politics, which ended the previously elite-dominated system of republican governance with universal white male suffrage, more populist retail politics, and many re-written state constitutions including direct election to courts.
By 1866, we're in the bloody aftermath of the Civil War and Lincoln's Assassination, all sparked largely over constitutional questions. Might we have avoided the whole mess with a refresh of the constitutional design instead of engaging in our deadliest-ever war that didn't even really resolve those questions to everyone's satisfaction? In any case, we "re-wrote" a lot of the Constitution at this time via amendment, (passed without the real democratic participation of all Southern states!)
In 1896, things are radically more different, still, with the United States *gasp* on the verge of becoming itself a colonial power, with all the Constitutional dilemmas that would bring.
And so on...
I didn't have the faintest idea what 2024 would look like politically in 1994 and not just because I was in grade school. And I cannot claim to have the foggiest idea of what social and political conditions will be like in 2054, either. I do know that whatever they will be, we'll probably need at least an evolved constitutional understanding. And, maybe by that time, to your point, we'll have it, with a new Constitutional Convention. But if that happens, it'll be because we probably decided to side-step the ossified Constitutional order today out of necessity and desperation.
It's possible we don't amend the Constitution as much because on the whole we're satisfied with the government we have and are concerned about unintended consequences. The American people are a pretty conservative lot when it comes to how government is structured and the kind of far-reaching policies they would like to see implemented.
It's possible. Humans have an innate conservative loss-aversion bias, generally. And it's rare that we opt for change when the status quo is at least good-enough.
But remember that any implicit choices are mediated by what participants think is possible: I've never witnessed in my adult life actually amending the Constitution, despite pretty much everyone I know professing dissatisfaction with the resulting governance system, and certain aspects of it, in particular, such as the bewildering Electoral College. So my Overton Window for what is possible in American politics just assumes that the Constitution is immutable.
But, then I think back to various other things that I used to consider "impossible" and they include having Donald Trump elected to the White House *TWICE* and all the other stuff that's happened since that have together rendered the word "unprecedented" cliched and meaningless.
And lest I focus only on the bad, other things happened during this eventful period after 2008 that also seemed to me to be "impossible" prior to that but shocked me (in a good way). A Black president. Stimulus packages to actually help people weather a recession. Big infrastructure spending.
So, we've been through a generation of big swings now and they cut both ways. I do long for the simpler, easier world of the 1990s, but I also realize that we had to walk away from that. And whatever your partisan lean today, I'm sure we can all agree that Congress is very dysfunctional, that politics are too divisive, and that the average American feels too alienated from the system as it is. That cannot continue so we're going to have to do something about it, despite the risk. I think a lot of Trump voters kind of thought of their "risky" choice in that light.
Recently Ezra Klein was asked what he was most wrong about and he answered that he grossly underestimated the impact of regulations on our ability to do things. For me, it was grossly misestimating how much the American electorate (well, half) valued the things in America I find precious. How else could they put someone like Trump in office?
But the answer is that Trump doesn't matter much in their lives. His threat to the democratic order is theoretical. I mean, we had that bit of tomfoolery on Jan. 6 and yet things just went along fine, didn't they? And sure he's an obnoxious person you'd never want to be your boss, but he's not your boss and as long as times are good (or you've been convinced times are good), it's fine that he's President.
In general, Americans ignore politics (except for us benighted souls) and don't want it to do much, except in times of great crisis when they want it to do a lot. Thus the relief spending during COVID when the economy was in a coma. But otherwise, leave well enough alone, and ignore the frothing of political agitation that always goes on in Washington.
Americans are good at ignoring crises until they turn into real crises. Why do we have the Electoral College? Because it's never burned us. Once that happens, then the hue and cry about changing it will be deafening. How could we elect a Black President? Well, he seemed a decent guy with a lovely family and the economy was in free fall, and it's after two terms of a Republican, so not a big surprise. And maybe the barriers to electing a Black weren't as big as we feared; we'd never tried it before. And is Congress dysfunctional? Sure -- because it's so narrowly divided and there are big gains from tiny switches in support. But to say "that cannot continue" is true only in the sense that nothing continues forever, not that it's necessarily that bad for it to continue. A paralyzed Congress is not inconsistent with Americans' revealed preferences.
If the Americans were really truly unhappy with our system, I think we'd see some real efforts at change. At least, take down a Bastille or two.
Given Jefferson is arguably the most important Founder (at the very least one of the most important), it should give us pause as to how difficult it should be to actually amend the US constitution. Or whether the Founders themselves actually saw the constitution as some sacrosanct text.
They almost got there with impeachment, the trip up was requiring a supermajority for the Senate after only a simple majority in the House.
Obviously it's been way too hard to pass amendments--only 17 after the Bill of Rights--but there have been plenty of indirect tweaks made by SCOTUS. It certainly has been a muddled mess with that, though.
I really don't have an answer to how accountability for an executive could be truly "objective," given the now-obvious pull of partisanship. Anything governance related, including lifetime appointments to the courts, inevitably is touched by partisan bias.
That's a dynamic else that the Founders also discounted naively, in retrospect, given their preoccupation with the perils of "faction." But why didn't they foresee that political parties would exist, given that such parties already existed in the UK Parliament with the 18th Century rise of the Whigs and the Tories? Maybe in accepting the inevitability of partisan faction, they could have engineered ways to sublimate it better?
Making the impeachment a matter of simple majority would help. I think that the US Constitution makes too many things a matter of supermajority, which really decreases policy agility and renders many important policy mechanisms moot (e.g. impeachment or constitutional amendment). The threat of overstepping or derailing governance with simple-majority legislative oversight isn't dire enough when compared with the threat of system ossification and a lack of accountability to power when you make everything stuck until you have supermajorities. Especially if you can't just dissolve the legislature and call for new elections to actually reflect an emerging popular supermajority.
Arguably, Trump could have been held to account with mere simple majorities of both houses of Congress. Those ten Republican House Members who voted to impeach Trump and seven Republican Senators who voted to convict him might have voted otherwise, though, if they had thought that it would actually go through. Or maybe they would have been joined by more Republican colleagues who felt that "If you come for the king, you'd better not miss!" It's hard to read, given all the contingency of the situation and how "flexible" the Republicans have been in embracing Trump even after his disgrace.
I'd like to not have to rely on the cynical selfishness of Members of Congress who only turn against their party's leader when it seems political expedient to do so. But what's the alternative? Even Bipartisan Commissions on various important things have been poisoned in the eyes of a partisan public. The courts certainly aren't seen as neutral arbiters, the Supreme Court least of all. Any independent commission or court would be viewed skeptically in our low-trust climate as some "Deep State." So what, then?
>I know its fashionable to consider our Founding Fathers as flawless demigods whose Constitutional legacy is unquestionable to us today. But they were REALLY wrong in failing to put into place an actually-effective impeachment mechanism.<
They got tons of things wrong. Our madisonian constitution is the worst of any developed democracy, and it's not particularly close.
Ha. I don't know that I'd say the democratic nature of our polity is doomed. For one thing authoritarian spells don't last forever. Going by the experience of Germany, Italy, Spain, Chile, Greece and so on, I'd guesstimate these periods last several decades on average.
And I'm hopeful the dam will break soon (MAGA will start to get decisively and regularly punished by the electorate, thereby forcing the GOP to purge or go out of business and be replaced) before we get to that point.
And meanwhile we possess the most lethal weapons system ever devised by humans, so I doubt imposition of autocracy will come from without.
I just think our Madisonian constitution—first and foremost because of the absurd difficulty of amending it (which makes frequent tinkering and experimentation—something I regard as healthy for any polity—a non-starter) is manifestly inferior to the Westminster model.
I probably prefer a parliamentary system, but if you look over the last 25 years with both Bush Jr and Trump as president, I would still say we have had a better run country than any other large democracy...
I actually agree given the circumstances the Founders look pretty good (with the extremely important exception of anything involving slavery).
The real thing to me is it actually shows that the most important act in this country's founding was George Washington deciding to NOT to try to be President for life or dictator for life. It seems pretty clear he could have chosen that path and all we had to do was look across the Atlantic for an example of a revolution that led to a military hero becoming a dictator.
Agreed. And I recall reading about how the founders explicitly sought a relatively strong executive following the state-level failures of weak executives created during the Revolutionary War era. It's my understanding that numerous states created weak executives, with a focus on committees and congresses, due to their heightened concerns of tyrannical despots as they rebelled against monarchy. Yet those governments were pathologically ineffective, which created their own problems. Striking a balance between effectiveness and accountability is quite hard.
Yes, absolutely. Let me not come off here as some edgy revisionist claiming that the US Constitution was bad, actually. I think the Framers did an extraordinary job under constraints that are hard for us to even fathom today. Not the least of which an almost total lack of precedent for actually-functioning republican democracies.
And the strong executive dilemma is real! The US Constitution isn't even the first version that the newly United States operated under originally, the Articles of Confederation. Those Articles made for such a weak executive that a bunch of angry drunks marching on the capital in the Whiskey Rebellion threatened to bring it down!
Tragicomedic as that seems in retrospect, we also have to remember that the newly-independent colonies were indebted, isolated, and extremely vulnerable to predations even from former allies (like Napoleonic France). It was really touch and go for decades and the average American could easily fear that the European powers would claw back their independence. You could see how the appeal of a strong leader would prevail in uncertain times.
As, indeed, it has ever since.
And that's the real reason that we have such an undesirably-strong Executive. We are meek and easily manipulated when we are fearful. The presidency as designed in the US Constitution theoretically isn't anywhere near as strong as it is in practice today. But every crisis we've ever had has been an opportunity for the then-president to claim more emergency powers for himself and more executive authority that too-often became permanent. We saw that in my lifetime especially under George W. Bush in the GWOT, but you've seen a real expansion of executive power under every president since, with all sorts of then-justifiable reasons. But it's easy to lose sight of the aggregate effects of handing the power to a Caesar "temporarily," only to have that "emergency" continue indefinitely. We tend to look at these expansions through a partisan lens, but every power claimed by one party is then available to use by the other.
Did the Founders set up the Constitution believing it would gird a strong executive? Probably not; they tended to believe that the Congress would be dominant (reflected in their putting the powers of Congress first, via Article I). And indeed, for major parts of our history, the President was very weak and Congress was very strong. It goes back and forth.
The best, closest, and nearly only practical model they had was Parliament, and though the King still "ruled" there was a lot of jealous guarding of powers by Parliament from the King. It looked logical that Congress would be as staunch in maintaining its own power, they just never considered what would happen if the King was also a party/faction member with a Parliamentarian party.
All that said, they're failure to anticipate the effect of political parties was their biggest short sightedness.
It appears to be much easier to be reelected if you do nothing to annoy any constituency. Therefore, cede vast areas of legislative responsibility to the executive and whine when the incumbent does something annoying. Obviously, this single factor isn’t the whole story, but it resonates.
>It said they were fine with the possibility of Trump being reelected.<
I gave your comment the "like" it deserves. But I do have one quibble: It's a near certainty many Republican Senators actually were not "fine" with the possibility of Trump's being reelected. Many of them had serious misgivings about allowing Trump to remain eligible for the presidency. Many of them were surely aware of the grave danger he represents, and how detrimental a Trump restoration would be for the republic. They simply prioritized self-interest more than the national interest. Their cognizance of the risks the country was running by allowing Trump to remain in politics makes their cowardice and self-dealing all the more outrageous.
There were a lot of "well, Trump is finished, he's never going to run for re-election anyway" takes and they were likely sincerely believed given how bad the mood was about Trump in the immediate aftermath. They didn't want to just rip off the band-aid when it was the easiest it ever would have been, cowardly assuming it would just fall off on its own.
I would add this naked self-interest has a very important variable, which is the low-turnout primary. I think that variable is critical to why a majority of the House GOP during January both voted against confirming the electors and anonymously voted to keep Liz Cheney in her leadership role at the time.
And it's important to why Biden's inner circle kept the party in the dark about the basic capacity of the president. Not a single critic of Democrats for doing this craven behavior has a realistic counterfactual of a 2024 Democratic primary that is any less crazy than the 2020 primary quotes Harris was repeatedly tied to in this general election. So if you don't move aggressively to prioritize party activist interests, you can be punished in a primary. And if you do permit a competitive national party primary, your party's activist interests damage your electability for the general election. There's a common variable here.
In different ways, Republicans and Democrats have played with fire to avoid a brutal competitive primary in the 2024 presidential cycle. It's the one common thread from the GOP moving on from Jan 6th to Trump's pivot leftward on abortion vs DeSantis and Haley while not showing up to the debates ... to Biden's unfitness for office being covered up for months or years. It's the low-turnout primary. That's what keeps making usual party men behave in unusually craven ways.
This is totally correct but I also think another slow boring villain is at fault here. Death by overly pedantic Proceduralism. I am absolutely positive that if democrats simply finished the electoral count obligations and then that night, ~1am on 1/7, voted to impeach trump, while the building was still smoldering he would have been convicted. Literally every single person there witnessed what happened. An impeachment isn’t a legal process, it’s a political one with a legal facade. They didn’t need the whole rigamarole of lawyers and arguments etc. we knew exactly what happened. But overtly lawyer brained Dems wanted the full impeachment and by the time it got to the senate, too many senators could plausibly hide behind questions of constitutionality of convicting a non incumbent. This doesn’t justify the gop senators who didn’t vote to convict, but this too could have been avoided and had their feet held closer to the fire. Also I think recent events in South Korea show, maybe impeachments ought to be a blind vote. May help overcome human fallibility.
You are WAY too certain of the outcome of this scenario. Even if the Senate vote took place on 1/7/21 there's a pretty good chance that at least 34 Senate Republicans could've found a way to let Trump off the hook. It's what they're best at!
Maybe, but allowing it to occur weeks later AFTER Trump was out of office is complete bullshit and allowed them the excuse.
Not to mention the articles of impeachment not just being focused on Jan 6th, but also including stuff that occurred before the election thus potentially implicating other republicans
This shows the lack of trust between GOP Senators.
It's basically a prisoner's dilemma where if they all move against Trump none of them take the heat and its in their collective interest. But if they all move against Trump, it would be the self-interest of any GOP Senator to defect to Trump and grandstand against it. And if there isn't going to be an impeachment, then it's really in their interest not be caught voting against Trump. So almost no one goes for impeachment and they end up worse off than if they all went for it.
And for this lack of trust we can point to the cynical opportunistic nature of GOP politics and right-wing media environment. They'll go for self-interested political expediency over high-minded conservative governance. And things will have to get very bad indeed for GOP Senators to be scared for their self-interests, not just have their principles trampled over.
Another remedy that could have been taken (that wasn't) would have been invoking the 25th amendment immediately (the afternoon/evening of January 6th). Not sure if that would have disqualified Trump from running in 2024, but it would have given political cover to allow Republicans to vote yes on impeachment.
No matter what I’ve still got a daughter to raise and bills to pay. I can only worry so much about what the extremely rich and powerful do. I’m just older now than I was in 2016, I’ve seen people I love become total online political brain rot weirdos and I do not want to succumb to dark urges and doom scrolling. I’ve seen what it does and it’s nothing good.
> I've seen people I love become total online political brain rot weirdos
Until recently I lived in Vietnam and had an acquaintance there who was South African and he was ALL INTO American politics. Nearly every time we would meet for beers he would talk about something from US politics. And I would always be like...mate, we're in Vietnam and you're not an American citizen I can't imagine any possible way any of that affects us in the slightest, how many hours a day are you spending on this?
Online political brain rot is wild.
Side note: living in a communist dictatorship obviously has downsides but I can't help but wonder if the curtailment of all this "politics as spectator sport" isn't actually a net positive for a society.
For the same reason, I think people everywhere should pay FAR more attention to Chinese politics, but it's harder because they are much more opaque. It's like Cold War-era "Kremlinology" now following internal developments in the CCP under Xi.
But what China does matters as much if not more than what the US does. Again, we can two elephants whose movements shake the savannah!
American politics matters a lot for everyone--in particular for Vietnam, which stands to benefit from "reshoring" away from China and stands to win or lose a lot from the US-China geopolitical rivalry in the Pacific (and in the South China Sea, in particular).
I'm American but haven't lived in the US for a decade and a half, but everywhere I have lived people are glued to the "America Show" for the very rational reason that when the elephant stomps, the savannah shakes! And, hey, despite my being a dual-citizen of the EU now, it's not like I'm at all unaffected by political developments at home.
There is a vast difference between tuning in to American industrial policy talk that affects Vietnamese restoring (rare to the point of nonexistence in my experience) and paying attention to American culture war issues (which is all I ever hear any foreigner talk about).
They talk about bathroom policies in North Carolina and gender reassignment surgery in California prisons.
There is zero way any of that affects someone living in Vietnam. But that's what they spend hours a day on. Not reading up on why Lego decided to build a billion dollar factory in Bình Dương. Most of them didn't even know that happened if I didn't tell them.
Most of them couldn't even name a single thing about Vietnamese politics or policy so they aren't even political junkies, obviously. They are American politics spectators.
Excellent point—and you’re certainly right. Following the Culture War stuff is just our version of tuning into soap operas weekly. And that’s as true outside of the United States. And I have seen exactly what you’re referring to during my years living in various Sub-Saharan African countries: local people who bizarrely knew some third-degree rumor about gay rights in the United States, but didn’t understand anything about more material developments that directly affected their life. They’d, of course, eagerly ask me all about it, not even really digesting my answers as much as looking for confirmation of salacious rumors. And I’d tell them, “Don’t you think it’s more important to understand the Chinese investment in your infrastructure, or how your own government’s domestic political considerations might spark a civil war?” In places with a more “vibrant” media like Nigeria, coverage of local politics was similar to the American style, with cartoonish headlines about who’s up and who’s down and how has a mistress and who is invoking witchcraft, etc. I saw Trump’s precursor there in the form of the then-Nigerian President “Goodluck” Jonathon, who issued executive orders via Facebook (which I had to watch obsessively, since these shifting and arbitrary policies affected my work there!).
So, even when I’m following the idiot circus, I’m still looking for angles and advantage. And I can often forget that my style of news-consumption is a minority behavior today. And that most people don’t even follow hard news at all, even as they are doom-scrolling through tabloid-style “news.” Even political “news” is increasingly devoid of actual content, not the least because politicians—especially on the American Right—don’t even bother to talk about actual policy anymore. Instead, they stoke resentments over the outrage of the day in order to drive negative partisanship against foes.
It's only true that American politics matters massively to people living in Vietnam if there is some major difference in approach toward relations between the two major parties. I guess we'll have to see what the tariffs end up being but the broad trend of courting Vietnam seems likely to continue whichever party is in office as far as I can see.
That's true *for now,* but was a very new consensus after Trump. It absolutely wasn't the shared policy of the Democrats and Republicans prior to 2016. And I wouldn't be so sure that the bipartisan consensus holds even through the second Trump Administration, given the capriciousness of the cult of personality around Trump and the fickle nature of what he sees as "America First" when it comes to foreign policy.
Trump has consistently been rhetorically tough on China, but he also has another mental model that he often defaults to that strong powers should have spheres of influence in their own regions. Why shouldn't he decide that Xi should have the run of the First Island Chain and the South China Sea, to the detriment of Vietnam and others? Even if he doesn't start treating Xi like he does Putin, he might say one thing and undermine his rhetoric with actual policy, as he did during his first term. Saying that you need to decouple from China is one thing, but what if he doesn't have the faith of his convictions to actually follow through? It would be, after all, more expensive and less profitable to do so.
You may or may not be right in your prediction, but the point you're responding to was that it isn't worthwhile for a South African living in Vietnam to pickle his brain with American politics, and really nothing you've written there is going to be solved by fretting from afar, particularly given it's all speculative and so the only really meaningful question for this person ('would it be better to leave?') does not have a clear answer.
You bring up a valid point about agency: can I actually act on any information I glean from all the doom-scrolling? And maybe not.
I'd still prefer to know if a tsunami is coming, though, even if my chances of escaping drowning are low. Wouldn't you want to know as a Polish person in 1938 that the Nazis would invade? I'd definitely want to be the Jewish German who was "being paranoid" about the Nazis in 1933 and worked to GTFO over the following years.
Now, maybe that's a little too catastrophic-seeming. What about if you want to see opportunities in the changing political winds? If I'm a South African in Vietnam, I might decide that the future is in re-shoring to "friendly" countries (like Vietnam) and I might want to start a import-export business or a manufacturing concern that's taking Chinese parts and assembling them in Vietnam for re-export.
Or I might decide that actually that's a bunch of hype or rhetoric and it's absolutely not something I should invest my nest egg in. And that, actually, aligning myself with the China story economically is my best path forward.
Maybe it's because Americans politics is just a lot more fun to follow. I mean, the German elections will have serious implications not only for Germany but elsewhere, like the future of NATO and Ukraine, but is anyone excited about the race?
Maybe people didn't reject Biden because he's too old (cough *Trump* cough) but because he's too boring.
German politics are very closely followed here in Europe, to be sure. Where Germany goes the EU follows, both politically and economically—and it’s NOT GOOD right now.
Americans don’t follow politics anywhere else much, as a rule. Which, on the one hand is understandable, given the US is the powerful one. But the fact that most even educated Americans couldn’t rattle off all the names of the leaders of Japan, Germany, the UK, France, and India is certainly a shortcoming of the information ecosystem there. Because those places do matter quite a lot for American interests.
That Americans (and most everyone else) doesn’t really understand the Chinese political system is understandable, given how complex and opaque it is. I have to at least hope that most people understand that China is run by the CCP with Xi at its head—but beyond that? More effort to understand the maybe biggest economy on earth and rising adversary/superpower should probably be made by an American population who is certainly affected by China’s rapidly shifting policy environment and increasing competition and antagonism. Maybe it’s pretty boring, though, compared with the 24/7 reality show that is American politics.
You can find the information on foreign affairs and international politics in the American press if you pay for it and dedicate the time (as I do). The NYT, WaPo, WSJ, et al give ample coverage of political developments in Europe and elsewhere. But it’s not the headlines that much interest readers or viewers, so it tends to get buried. And the average news consumer now isn’t paying for anything and gets the majority of their information from TV and social media—where you get exactly what you pay for: cheap to produce slop, zero reporting, and opinion and propaganda posing as “news.”
The book "Politics is For Power" is intended, I believe, to convince people to log off and organize in their neighborhood and such. For me it was much more successful in the first than the second.
The vast majority of online politics is a waste of time or counterproductive. It's also not great for most people's social relationships or happiness.
I agree social media is often bad for mental health and can be counterproductive politically, which is why I don’t have social media anymore. But I read Politics Is for Power and I wasn’t convinced his alternatives would work in the 21st century. He seems really enamored with early-to-mid 20th century machine politics, but there’s reasons machines don’t exist anymore and I don’t think they’re coming back. And I’m not convinced door knocking or small bore protesting or other forms of “organizing” make any difference.
The truth is posting probably does have more potential to lead to influence than traditional organizing. The issue is how to do so without rotting your brain or losing sight of what is effective and what really matters.
Agree. But also, because so much of public policy has been federalized — typically with Democrats leading the charge in pushing for more federal centralization — there’s a limited range of issues to meaningfully address at the local or state level. Local land use and school boards, and what kind of drinking straws are allowed at local restaurants, but not much else. The critical path on so many issues runs through DC that local involvement can seem as futile, and more tedious and hard, than just ranting about stuff online.
I'm not sure. There are lots of things that affect my everyday life that local politics could deal with, but people seem not to care. A few years ago, I became exceedingly frustrated at a forum of City Council candidates because they kept talking about federal issues over which the city has absolutely no control. I don't really care about my council members' stance on immigration or the federal debt. I care about their approaches to things like road repair, ordinances that affect business start-ups, pedestrian safety, and so forth, but I think voters are more swayed by stances on federal issues now because I see more and more of it creeping into local and state office holders' and candidates' rhetoric. This is likely an outcome of online politics as sport/hobby.
I think this is downstream of the drying up of local news. Even if you're interested in local issues, it's genuinely hard to find anything comprehensive explaining what's going on in city hall or the state capitol.
Agreed but local officials need to realize and acknowledge their limited authority and responsibility for their political district as the public will try make them responsible for nation issues based on the public’s present condition of brain rot. Local officials do a disservice spending limited local resources on national issues plus missing an educational opportunity to inform the public that their concerns should be directed elsewhere. Over 4 years locally more than 40 hours of public 2020 election integrity hearings were held at the county level to address the concerns of the federal election. It’s really hard to explain this short of brain rot within the local county commissioners and their constituents. Truth to power at the local level would be a start.
I mean, people are worried because of what the extrmeley rich and powerful are enabling specifically because of how bad that can make things for people like you and your daughter.
Worry does nothing. I voted, I participate in my community, and I give money or volunteer where/when I can. I'm just not into the excessive online doom culture anymore.
First priorities Democrats should make here are making Trump as unpopular as possible as quickly as possible, and making the Senate confirmation of his trifecta of national security goons as painful as possible.
In the House, sounds like Johnson has received marching orders to prioritize tax cuts. Easy opening to message to the public. Democrats should know how to do this.
In the Senate, we need to be absolutely merciless on Patel, Hegseth, and Gabbard. The trick is to make them out to be buffoons, obvious even to the public, not in ways that The Groups merely find offensive. This means NOT pulling a Kavanaugh. Bonus points if we can put them in a position to insult their god-emperor. I think there's enough neo-con energy left in the Senate GOP if we can chum the water with enough of their revealed anti-Americanism we can seed some doubt.
In either way, we need to go full McConnell. Sand in the gears. Zero assistance on anything without humiliating concessions. Constant probing for weakness.
In the Kavanaugh case, Democrats hoped that telling everyone about a rape accusation would be enough to convince them that Kavanaugh was really a rapist, but the GOP did a pretty good job running interference and more or less convincing the voters that mattered that the whole thing was a big political firestorm without substance. The issue is not that the public doesn't believe rape is bad, it's that they don't believe Kavanaugh is a rapist.
Sexual assault in general is (unfortunately) a bad issue for this by its very nature, since it's nearly impossible to prove dispositively without eye witnesses or contemporary evidence.
Yeah I think the whole thing very quickly congealed into whether or not you bought into the "believe women" progressive shibboleth, whereby you just take a woman at her word when she accuses a man of sexual assault regardless of other circumstances or factors. That's very bad territory for Democrats.
That's not to say that Ford was lying, just that the events in question were over three decades prior and most of the parties involved were intoxicated, so it's pretty much impossible to establish what actually happened with any real confidence.
It was also almost certainly not helped by the other less plausible accusations against Kavanaugh from other women, which dragged down the weight of Ford's testimony.
Illustrates the long-term harm of crying wolf in politics at any time. In the moment it’s not just about the opportunity to do maximum harm to your opponent. It’s also an opportunity for the public to calibrate on your credibility.
How effective politically has bringing up sexual harassment been? Kavanaugh sits on the supreme Court and Trump will sit in the oval office in less than two weeks.
If it's brought up you need to humiliate them in their own language. The focus is proving guilt, it's proving either a lack of fealty or weakness. Those are the languages spoken by MAGA.
I think you're excessively focused on outcomes here. The reality is if Republicans lined up behind Kavanaugh they had the numbers to confirm him, which they did. That doesn't mean it was the wrong play to bring up the allegations against him, it just means it wasn't powerful enough to turn a losing hand into a winning one.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Less than credible accusations, like Tara Reade's, probably don't move the needle, but they probably shouldn't and there's nothing remarkable about that. I think it is interesting that Bill Clinton's popularity has held up as well as it has, to say nothing of Trump.
I mean that a substantial part of those "most American voters" likely didn't find the accusations to be credible. And, if you don't find an accusation wrongdoing credible, why would it be a "dealbreaker"?
Having more contemporaneous evidence would be nice. Taking her word for it when her first mention of it to anyone else was apparently 28 years after the fact is problematic.
The other substantially less credible accusations against Kavanaugh also almost certainly didn't help the impact of Ford's testimony, but those have been entirely memoryholed from mainstream discourse at this point.
I'm not sure that part about 28 years is true, but my point is Ken didn't say "unproven", he said "outlandish", because that's what the Republican party settled on as a rationale.
I’m going by Wikipedia which is dangerous. It says she mentioned the assault by an unnamed person to her marriage therapist in 2012. That’s the oldest mention I see.
This is actually a pretty good illustration of what Matt's talking about. After Ford testified, many Republicans said she was credible. After voting for Kavanaugh anyway, they didn't say, "on balance, I consider X more important," they said Ford was obviously lying. What changed? Fuck you, that's what.
This is what I'm getting at - it's not enough to highlight what's a deal breaker for you, you need to find what's a deal breaker for THEM. The GOP did this masterfully when the astroturfed a Me Too about Al Franken and got Dems to sacrifice one of their best communicators.
Shelby used the word "credible" but also praised the prosecutor in the same breath. Other GOP senators were more muted in their evaluations. I imagine a lot of them didn't want to outright attack Ford, who was clearly going through something, whether real or imagined.
I don't think this is accurate as a historical matter. Republicans portrayed Ford as either a sympathetic but confused person taken advantage of by Democrats (best case) or a deliberate liar (worst case) basically from the beginning. There was no real pressure on Kavanaugh, or real sympathy for Ford, from Republicans at the hearings.
One of the great ironies of the SB comments is that people think they are intellectuals for knowing what "ex post facto" means, but basically all of their "Dems are idiots" takes just work backwards from results they don't like.
I agree with all of this. Talking about the things that normies care about that they don't like about Trump and the Republicans is the way to go. And they need to be ruthless about it.
We are where we are largely because of Mitch McConnell largely in my view. If he had put country over party for only the two weeks after 1/6, our government would be much more secure. But, irony is that in any bill or nomination the Democrats need to think, what would Mitch McConnell do?
Democrats need some sort of equivalent Powell doctrine on legal/social attacks.
Clarence Thomas. Kavanagh. Trump.
If you come at the king, you’d better not miss. Either go balls to the wall or dont start. This Merrick Garland starting too late stuff can’t happen.
Of course Biden and Obama don’t even have Powell doctrine when it comes to military matters, as the dribbling supplies to Ukraine recently demonstrated.
Interesting commentary here, though it leans heavily into revenge politics and Trump Derangement Syndrome narratives. Perhaps the Democrats could consider presenting a compelling alternative platform beyond just 'we aren't Trump,' apocalyptic rhetoric, or critiques of his administration's policies.
The reality is that we need two strong parties for a healthy democracy. Today, however, we’re left with two weak ones. Among them, only one appears to be tapping into the sentiments of the broader electorate—and here's a point that might sting: it’s not the Democrats.
But what about if they try to pass something immigration-related? That will just read as Dems being their old, unlikable selves if they refuse to play ball it seems.
"That’s how pluralistic politics works: You agree with people when you agree with them, but you don’t shy away from disagreeing when you disagree"
But that's not how business works! And all the people you mentioned are in business so this is BAU for them.
Okay, sure, everyone has met a handful of enlightened bosses who handle feedback marvelously. But there's a reason HBR has hundreds of articles on "managing upwards".
You might spill the dirt over beer with mates but nowhere remotely close to where a blogger like MY might hear whispers of it.
Yeah, American corporations are very hierarchical to an almost militaristic degree and really call into question the self-concept that Americans have about our society as a kind of democratic (with a small "d") culture with casual, horizontal, meritocratic relationships.
That's why Musk, et al are such a good match for Trump. They both come from a corporate world where "bossism" reigns. Trump's never headed a public corporation, so he's not even used to the same scrutiny that Fortune 500 CEOs face from boards and shareholders. For him, at the head of a private, family company funded by the very shadiest sources of capital, it's what he says goes.
So why wouldn't they assume this is how the country should be run? Trump was never very successful in business (despite his very skilled cosplay as a entrepreneurial genius), but Musk, Thiel, Andressen and friends can feel justifiably smug in their own ability to build impressive companies.
I hear you, but FWIW my military friends feel they have way less power as civilian bosses.
In the military, if you want to get promoted, you need good "officer evaluation reports." But your commanding officer can only give a limited number of top ratings ("top block"). So the best officers compete like crazy to impress their COs. That means proactively trying to figure out what the CO wants and doing it.
In civilian life, the chain of command is way less rigid, and often getting a promotion means leaving for another company rather than getting good marks from your boss. So there's not the same hustle or respect for authority.
Though maybe it's different for tech bosses like Elon (as opposed to midlevel "bosses").
i think this is just a difference of scale. there are lots of pathways for promotion and success in the military at any given time in the country. so many its a common trope to move every year or so in military families. in the business world promotions are just not always possible at any given time. or they require large moves to other departments which people have really soured on in the business world of today. so your best bet is to quit to join a new team at a different company. which i think is quite similar to the military if you think about it.
Someone, polytropos I think, proposed that I write down what scares me in a Trump administration and think of what would have to happen to make this a problem.
And the thing that that exercise really drove home is I’m not as afraid of the government as I am of the wackadoos on my street with the militia flag and the fuck you sign and unpredictable random people being encouraged to be confrontational with liberals and having people like me described as dangerous threats to them. That authority figures will respond with no real urgency.
This is why normalizing has always struck me as a bad idea. It’s bringing bullying, personal violence back into public life when they’d been pushed out.
I came to the same conclusion just by tweaking my media diet to include less blow-by-blow politics. For the most part, unless I read about the abuses of power, corruption and incompetence, MAGA governance probably won't impact my daily life. But all the "47" signs and very-only bumper stickers that I don't understand are a constant reminder that the political movement is very much a part of my daily life. I don't have to think too hard to imagine ways the asshole-honor culture of MAGA can spill over my job or neighborhood or my kids' schools.
Here here... Especially after reading that recent Pro Publica article. There seem to be way too many of these militia group larpers that salivate at the thought of being a brownshirt and committing acts of violence against their fellow citizens.
Not bringing Trump to justice for trying to overthrow the election is mainly on the Biden administration and partly on Fani Willis. Four years is plenty of time if you don’t dither.
The first best thing would have been for the Republicans not to be the craven fools they are during the second impeachment. But I agree that the second best thing would be to run an efficient, minimally competent prosecution. Fani Willis is a terrible person and Merrick Garland is a sad joke.
Yeah, this is where I lost Matt here. By the summer of 2024, normal politics was all Democrats had against Trump, but he should've been in prison (or at least house arrest) at that point, if they had made better decisions earlier.
Waiting as long as they did to start the case on election interference was inexcusable on Garland's part.
He committed serious crimes for selfish purposes and he should've been held to account for that. Impeachment is a broken system, that has proven inadequate for the task of reigning in Presidential abuse of power. There is no justification for letting him off the hook, other than a misguided notion that the President is above the law, which is, for all intents and purposes the rule of the land now, but it didn't have to be this way.
The failure to prosecute him in a timely and effective manner came down to can-kicking and shifting responsibility. Why should voters take the jerimiads about Trump's threat to democracy, when the elites telling them this treat him like a normal politician
Bad: Biden using the DOJ to imprison Trump on 1/21/21 and charge him with treason.
Worse: Trump returning to office on 1/20/25, pardoning every offender, and setting a precedent for every future political leader in this country that they can get away with it.
The scary thing to me is less about Trump himself and more about where this road leads us.
You could have said the same about Nixon until the political winds changed direction and the public supported reforms to prevent Nixon from becoming a positive example for future presidents.
Let’s say that Trump pardons the January Six rioters. And let’s say that they were radicalized during their stint in an isolated wing of the prison. So some of them assume Trump has their backs and then go commit some horrific crimes in his name. Then some copycats get the same idea. Unless and until we become a totalitarian nation like Russia, voters will react negatively to such things, having experienced the foreseeable consequences of their prior electoral decisions.
If the electorate feels negative consequences, whomever they assign blame to is going to experience consequences. The ensuing political grandstanding will result in laws specifically crafted to prevent those negative consequences in the future.
That's an optimistic take (and maybe even likely). The thing is, in this case, the optimistic take depends on more political violence taking place, and voters reacting negatively to that and putting safeguards in place - but that kind of anarchic violence is what we should have been preventing in the first place. We HAD safeguards in place, and now they've been gutted for the foreseeable future; at this point, the optimistic take is that they get put back in place sooner than later.
FWIW, I also think the pardon of Nixon is what led us down this road to begin with: it set a clear standard that the President was above the law that Presidents of both parties ran with and Trump (who revers Nixon) eventually exploited.
I feel like politics used to be more constrained by "but will happen when the shoe is on the other foot". Like, right now MAGA is running around talking about how they're going to put everyone they disagree with in jail, constantly throwing around accusations of treason and law-breaking. But as Trump himself showed us, it's actually hard to put people in jail for "political crime", especially public figures.
At the end of the day Trump was not impeached because Republican senators were scared to lose reelection; Trump is going to be sworn in as President again because he won an election; and the Democratic Party is in the political wilderness because they can't get enough people to vote for them. The electorate can and should decide the consequences of the actions and words of politicians. It's actually a good thing that we didn't have to find out what happens when we imprison a former/future president(ial nominee).
Idk, lots of healthy democracies around the world imprison former heads of state all the time, for the crimes they commit. Trump committed some pretty serious crimes, but the justice system dragged their feet until it was impossible to go after him and partisan. Politics muddied the waters.
I think by dragging their feet, and mostly dropping this stuff until the election, political elites signaled to voters that they didn't prioritize stopping Trump, that they didn't see him as an existential threat to democracy. It was an indirect legitimazation, even if unintended, and the reality is that they thought Trump was done and they could move onto other priorities. However, I do think that peoplefollow cues from elites in some ways, and I think that straightforwardly prosecuting Trump for the crimes he committed around the trying to overturn the election would've crystalized, for at least a decisive number of Americans that he was an aberrantion and beyond the pale of normal partisan disagreements. Failure to adequately punish sedition, like Trump's, isn't unique to the US, but it usually leads to that seditionist pushing farther when they get the chance again.
My uninformed understanding is that successful prosecutions of heads of states in democracies are for "real" crimes committed by politicians. Like Sarkozy bribing a judge for political dirt; bribery is a "real" crime, not a "political crime." It is trivial to demonstrate that bribery is illegal and bribing a judge for any reason violates that law.
Trump lied about the election, tried to strong-arm a governor or two and fomented a riot on Jan 6. None of those are clear-cut "real" crimes and prosecuting it was non-trivial.
The Georgia case was based on racketeering in which a bunch of people obviously broke the law, but pinning it on Trump was non-trivial and it seems like the charge against him would have been for racketeering, not breaking a "real" law.
Trump clearly cheated on his wife with a porn star and then paid her to keep quiet. None of that is actually illegal. I mean, falsifying business records, something, something now it's a felony because election something... that is what you get when you charge a "political crime". Not only does he not see jail time, it energizes his supporters who understandably view it as a trumped-up political prosecution.
Trump hoarded classified documents and then broke a bunch of laws trying to hide that fact from the FBI. Of all the crimes he committed, that one was the closets to just flagrantly breaking "real" laws. Had that one been prosecuted in a timely manner and had he been found guilty, my guess is that one would have been above water in public opinion. But he is the luckiest person alive and drew the under qualified judge he appointed who just tossed the case based on like something Clarence Thomas muttered. And the case didn't get far enough for the public to pay close enough attention for it to matter.
I don't really agree with that at all. Trump knowingly pressured election officials to rescind the correct results. He pushed the fake electors scheme, and was complicit in organizing the January 6th protest as a coherent attempt to overturn the results.
Now how against the law is that? I'm not a lawyer, but throwing the book at him seems reasonable, even if it is an "Al Capone cheating on his taxes" situation, the case for justice is important
The actual substance of the "business records" crime is that he didn't bribe her with his own money, but with campaign funds. He can't be done for stealing or fraud because he is the authoriser of those campaign funds, but it wasn't money he was free to do with as he chose.
Anyone who is a freelancer or a small business will have their business accounts and their personal accounts separate, and, if those business accounts are organised as, say, an LLC, then it's actually illegal to spend LLC money on things that you could completed legally spend your own money on. Trump's crime is equivalent to that.
The January 6 prosecution was like a modern aircraft carrier. It’s capabilities are impressive if it ever makes it to sea, but they take so long to build the war will probably be over before any new ones launch.
The entire justice system has been kowtowed by "trying not to look political" when it comes to conservatives for way longer than Biden. They run absolute defense for the GOP and it doesn't save them at all from Trump just making shit up about how they have it out for him. I really hope that this is a lesson that gets learned if and when we overcome Trump's authoritarian shit.
People near me in suburban Pennsylvania wore shirts emblazoned "I'm voting for the felon." Trump would have run from jail, and he might still have won.
"...between gerrymandering, the GOP’s financial edge, the power of conservative media, and the natural advantages of a higher-turnout coalition, Democrats were doomed to be permanently marginalized."
While true that the permanence was overstated, it was only recently that states like Wisconsin and Michigan have begun to overturn their gerrymanders to become fully-functioning democracies again, with the federal impacts downstream from that. An impact of 18-20 years is, in politics, something akin to permanent.
The conservative media advantage turned out to be even more critical than forecasted because it paved the way for the current social media "news" ecosystem landscape and is now an efficient engine by which stories create themselves and get cycled through the "some people say" machine.
The financial edge (as proven by Harris) was eventually a red herring if not a disadvantage.
Yeah, I agree. The false dawn of the Obama and Biden Administrations (especially in the electoral years of 2008 and 2020) shouldn't distract us from the reality that Republicans have totally stacked the electoral deck against Democrats (a deck that already structurally advantages them in rural areas due to how the Constitution designed the Senate and Electoral College). We're now in an era where Democrats don't win was much as Republicans sometimes lose. And, due to this structural advantage, Republicans only manage not to fail upward when things go REALLY wrong (Iraq War, Great Recession, COVID, et al)!
The 2010 Census redraw, in particular, was a crippling blow with generational political impact. We've only seen a modest correction in gerrymandering since, and only with the (temporary) intervention of courts. We can now forget such legal interventions to restore even a modicum of electoral balance (more on that below).
Compare this with the (in retrospect unbelievable fact) that the Congress (or at least the House) was on lock for the Democratic Party even through the Reagan years, that high-water mark of Conservatism! That's why Newt's 1994 Republican House majority was such a huge, paradigm-shattering deal! Today, the Democrats are lucky to even eek out a slim majority on the coattails of a presidential victory. In my wildest dreams I wouldn't consider a 56-62% Democratic House majority to be possible again under a Republican president, as you saw under the 97th, 98th, 99th, 100th, 101st, and 102nd Congresses under Reagan and Bush. , Especially not with so many of those seats in the American South!
The razor-slim 51% Democratic House majorities in the 117th and 118th Congressional under Biden is more like the *best-case* today. After two decades of Republicans controlling the post-Census redistricting process at the state level, the House districts as drawn today give Republicans a partisan lean of up to 16 seats!
Redistricting isn't as relevant for the Senate, where the Republican's structure advantage is more down to the rural-urban partisan divide that gives Wyoming the same number of Senators as California. And Democrats haven't been smart about overcoming that electoral math in their continued focus on the educated, metropolitan voter. So, the best Democrats can hope for is 51 or 52 Senators out of 100 now, and they've spending most of the last decade down at only 45-46. The Senate map in 2024 was especially bad for Democrats, but it's not much better in 2026 and 2028 because structurally the Senate is a really hard prize for Democrats.
And let's not forget the Supreme Court, which has been Conservative since the 1970s. Even under Clinton, it skewed Conservative. And today we could only wish for such a "moderate" (but definitely Conservative-skewed) Court. It will be a far-right Supreme Court for the rest of my working life, at this rate. And they're the ultimate arbiter of what's legal, so that merely compounds the opportunities for Republican shenanigans up to and including legal coups.
We are not obligated to take on policy stances that hurt us with rural voters. It is a choice! The Democratic party used to be very strong in rural states.
Also, if the voting results from 2024 continue, the electoral college skew largely goes away if more Latinos vote Republican.
I have been saying this for a while. Democrats need to meet voters where they are. If land has greater representation than population, then you should give more deference to those opinions and values.
Land has been pretty quiet for the most part but if, per the desires of the SB community, we ever put in place a Land Value Tax, I expect to see Land rise up in revolt that will put the Tea Party to shame.
Well, personally, I think the structural advantage given to rural voters in the United States is really egregious and undemocratic on its own merits.
And the US Constitution certainly wouldn't (and politically couldn't) have been designed the way it was with the benefit of hindsight, given that rural states in the original 13 colonies had equivalent populations to more urban states: https://brilliantmaps.com/population-density-1775/. The Northeastern "Acela Corridor" was as relatively populated as it is today, but you just didn't have scarcely populated former territories like Wyoming, Idaho, et al whose electoral advantage in the Senate was so egregiously out of proportion to their population. Maybe Maine was the single exception. Places like Georgia and the Carolinas were then major urban as well as rural centers with populations to match (complicated by the fact that much of that population weren't actual voting citizens). Already the political dilemmas involved in this Constitutional design almost tore the country apart during the decades leading up to the Civil War, with each territory accepted into the Union as a full, voting state.
But, them's the rules, and ain't no goin back. So democrats should, could, and have been far better at appealing to rural voters. They stopped doing this because they lost the feedback loop with local parties. But that's reversible. A bigger challenge to contesting the rural voter is the informational sphere in rural areas that are no longer served by legacy media: in their place has rushed in a whole bunch of right-wing propaganda and dumb-dumb social media slop.
The Agrarian Parties of Europe are a good model to emulate here, as they provide for a unique centrist politics that isn't just a sop to big-city monied interests (as much of the American Conservative movement has been, historically) but also has some working-man populism. They also provide nuance around the needs of regular people in rural districts (with a more nuanced policy around Climate Change and environmental protection, for example).
Even here in Sweden, there's a huge disconnect between the urban Stockholmer's understanding of the Green Transition and the reality facing a rural voter in sparsely-populated Värmland where my wife is from, where people work on farms, in forestry, in industry, and in the trades and therefore must by more reliant on fossil fuels for work and regular life. So, the (Agrarian) Center Party here strikes that balance well and often governs in coalition with the center-left Social Democrats or the center-right Moderates, both of whom bring a more urban bias to their politics. The Democrats could have an internal coalition that does the same!
"And the US Constitution certainly wouldn't (and politically couldn't) have been designed the way it was with the benefit of hindsight, given that rural states in the original 13 colonies had equivalent populations to more urban states"
I actually think that if the population disparities between states had been foreseen by the drafters of the Constitution, that would have strengthened their conviction that each state needed equal representation in the Senate for protection of states with smaller populations.
This is fairly anecdotal so YMMV, but i think for many ppl they just view states as junior varsity government and think it’s inherently dumb to give them such equal representation and deference. A quirk in the system. Law school really reinforced to me the underlying sovereignty of states. Those silly lines on a map tracking a river or whatever extremely matter. The state on One side of that river can decide to kill you for the same crime that it couldn’t on the other! The monopoly of violence is the ultimate measure of sovereignty. Our union is just far closer to something like the EU than people fully realize, to say nothing of the latent demographic and geographic diversity. Once you bake that in, the choices for the electoral college and the senate make more sense to me. This isn’t the only way to run a democracy but it is our way.
Yes, I agree with this. I've said for years that the structure of the US federal system makes a lot more sense when you understand that the country is effectively a much more integrated version of the European Union (doubtlessly much facilitated by substantially greater commonality of language and culture).
“A bigger challenge to contesting the rural voter is the informational sphere in rural areas that are no longer served by legacy media: in their place has rushed in a whole bunch of right-wing propaganda and dumb-dumb social media slop. “
This is certainly true in Montana with the right wing urban covid population surge; this once purple state of Citizens United Law campaign finance law, progressive 1972 environmentally and private rights State constitution, in addition to the history of fighting the extractive cooper kings has been forgotten. The advent of UPS, 63 million $ from AR funding for fiber cable and related internet connectivity has enabled an economic boom which is both a blessing and a land use nightmare without zoning. You are correct about a need for a replacement of legacy media (Montana Free Press is a start). Hopefully the Democrats can expand their reduced foot hold before all these new folks turn this “Last Best Place” into the “Yellowstone” movie set they think they moved to.
What's undemocratic is that my vote for president in Florida is worth half of your vote in Vermont due to the way the Electoral College works (helpful explainer map here: https://www.maps.com/how-much-voting-power-does-each-us-state-have/). That's very far from the principle of one person; one vote. The Vermonter essentially has 2 votes for president relative to a somebody who just happens to live in Ohio.
Ditto with the ratio of voter to senator in Rhode Island (1.1 million) vs. Texas (pop 30.5 million). So, my aunt in Rhode Island literally has *30x* the relative Senate representation as my boss in Texas. That's pretty undemocratic!
Most Republicans would agree that giving two senators to the District of Columbia would be "unfair," but why is that any less fair than giving two senators to Rhode Island, which only a slightly larger population? Or to Wyoming or South Dakota, which are fewer?
This is indeed a mathematical quirk of the system. The best argument in its favor, is unlike in many other less federalized systems, Floridians and Vermonters each have far greater autonomy to alter the laws within their own equally sovereign states. There are small p political reasons why so many states end up similar to one another. Reducing transaction costs, inertia, simplicity etc. But the states themselves are constitutionally allowed to be quite different form one another! Nothing prevents Vermont from establishing a parliamentary government with a prime minister, rewriting all of their laws etc. Hell Louisiana mostly uses French Law. So in a narrow sense of pro rata vote for senator you are correct that More Populous states have less representation. But they do not have any less internal sovereignty and their voice in the National Government is proportional in the House and to an extent the Electoral College. But you have largely the same representation in the House and mostly in the EC (which if 2024 trends holds is now at parity if not slightly skewed against republicans) as any other American.
The urban cosmopolitan vs. rural traditionalist split shows up almost everywhere in the world. This seems like something deeply embedded in human nature vs. something political operatives could just decide to ignore.
Gerrymandering is a red herring. With one tiny exception, the party that wins the national House votes wins a majority of the seats. If the Democrats want to win the House consistently, they have to consistently win over the electorate.
It's a red herring in federal elections. In state elections it has been more significant. Due to sorting it'd be hard for Democrats to win the state house in an even election under any map, but under the 2010 maps Republicans could win a supermajority in the same environment.
It's not a red herring because having sufficient representation in the Congress (which, again, is the primary wing of government) is a good in itself. Having a House Member for your district isn't just useful because the president has a simple majority to pass legislation. We only think that if we buy into the media narrative of all politics becoming nationalized and basically something akin to sports. But below the headlines, there's A LOT of arcane policy, amendments, and budget earmarking that gets done in Congress for hyper-local concerns.
"But if I were to say, “It’s fine to vote for Trump while still strongly disagreeing with what he did around 1/6, I’d just like to hear you say that in public,” the response would be that everyone knows it’s best to avoid Trump’s bad side"
While it's true that people want to avoid Trump's bad side, I think the real reason you don't see people argue that "Trump trying to overthrow a free and fair election result is bad, but not as bad as raising taxes on wealthy people" (or whatever justification people have for supporting Trump) is that it's completely non-sensible and untethered from reality. It's really hard to argue that 1/6 is kind of bad. If it was bad, then it was really bad. Billionaires especially know this, even with the wealth they could but probably wouldn't lose under a Harris admin, so instead they go with "1/6 wasn't bad." It’s just more simple and there's no slippery slope they have to worry about.
I think it's possible to ride the line, just very difficult. I see three apologist arguments:
One is that it was patriotic to storm the Capitol because the election was stolen. That would be true if it wasn't a lie, but business people are too smart for that.
Another is that Trump didn't incite the violence (he said "peacefully") and that the mob incited itself. This is the argument you would pick if you were a smart business person who wanted to support Trump but also denounce Jan 6. But the fact that Trump keeps insisting the election was not not stolen makes people in this camp look stupid and naive.
And the final argument is that it's okay to lie to get what you want (talk is cheap, etc). I think this is what pro-Trump billionaires believe. And if that's what you believe, why would you stick your neck out to say the truth in public?
“And to me it seems that Gödel must have been thinking of the pardon power. This has frequently been abused, mostly in banal ways, by lame-duck presidents to pull selfish stunts with no grounding in the public interest. Nothing particularly terrible has ever occurred due to presidential pardons. “
This is where I lose Matt - acting like the Hunter pardon is no big deal and doesnt set a horrible precedent — “nothing to see here” — is disingenuous — If Trump had pardoned one his sons for an 11 year time period, the entire liberal media, including the Slow Boring and it’s readers, would be outraged. Not sure why that is so hard for the left to admit this point. It doesnt refute the broader point of the article, which I generally agree with, but just some very lazy writing.
The Hunter Biden pardon was justified on its own merits, because no reasonable person could look at his situation and conclude that he wasn’t being singled out for differential harsh treatment because of who his father is. That’s not justice.
So this is only convincing if you think that Hunter Biden should have been left twisting in the wind as a sacrificial lamb for the greater good, despite the injustice to him personally.
He was singled out for writing a memoir about his drug addled crimes, then carelessly and publicly allowing more direct, photographic, proof of his crimes to be placed directly in front of Justice Department officials who... Should have looked the other way?
I am a federal criminal defense lawyer, have defended many people from Hunter's specific charges, and have never seen a case brought like the gun case. The ratio of people who indisputably commit those crimes beyond a reasonable doubt to people who get charged with them is astronomical. Those are generally trivially easy to prove offenses so the nature of the evidence in Hunter's case is not unusual (beyond that it's in book versus Snapchat form).
Usually, people who get those charges are gang members who can't be prosecuted for their real offenses for various reasons (through a DOJ initiative called "Project Safe Neighborhoods"). Never ever white-collar recovering addicts.
Without disputing any of that, his laptop was scrutinized by the DOJ, and the evidence, and the fact that the evidence had been in the hands of the FBI, were extremely public. I imagine that it would look pretty bad for such high profile public wrongdoing to be overlooked, especially when the administration is concerned with things like gun control. How could anyone explain not bringing charges?
No, the charges were inevitable because his crimes were so brazen, and it was so clear that the authorities knew about them, that nobody could afford to be seen as ignoring them, because that would look exactly like not prosecuting someone only because of who his family is.
> no reasonable person could look at his situation and conclude that he [Hunter Biden] wasn’t being singled
Unfortunately, I don’t think we can assume voters are sufficiently reasonable in this dimension, or at least that they’re receiving a fair and balanced perspective on the allegations against Hunter Biden. Moreover, while I agree that he’s being singled out, I also believe there’s credible evidence that he’s a criminal who engaged in shady behavior, possibly extending to trading on his family name and connections.
Hence, I’m totally fine with throwing Hunter Biden under the bus to minimize the bad optics of a pardon—doubly so after President Biden already promised not to pardon his son. Reasonable people can certainly disagree on the tradeoffs being weighed here.
Moreover, it almost certainly won’t matter. I doubt that few, if any, voters will condone Trump’s future, more corrupt pardons but would have condemned those actions had it not been for the Hunter Biden pardon. At most, it just gives another excuse to those already converted to the Trump cult.
Presidential pardons have been used to free pedophiles, drug traffickers, traitors, and a governor who blatantly sold a Senate seat. The optics of pardoning bad people in a President's lame duck period are broken.
I think this speaks to a broader truth that "good government" has been subsumed by partisan and short-term material considerations by voters. We can't rely on voter outrage, legacy media, and politicians' shame to reign them in any more. We need game theory, which would make throwing Hunter under the bus look a bit better, but I feel like the pardon norm is irrevocably broken, of it ever existed.
“…no reasonable person could look at his situation and conclude that he wasn’t being singled out for differential harsh treatment because of who his father is”
That’s funny, because I think I am a reasonable person and I have concluded that Hunter Biden was singled out for unjustifiably favorable treatment because of who his father is. E.g.,
“…throughout the Hunter Biden investigation, decisions were made that benefited the president's son.
“The two whistleblowers accuse Delaware Assistant US Attorney Lesley Wolf, an assistant to Mr Weiss, of repeatedly blocking further investigation into Hunter Biden.”
Then why didn't Biden pardon him instead of allowing him to be investigated? Why did he pardon him for *all crimes* during that time period instead of just the ones you think he is being singled out for.
We all understand why Biden did this for his son, that doesn't make it good.
You’d have to ask Biden to know for sure, but a perfectly rational reason for the breadth of the pardon is that Biden feared that otherwise the pardon would not accomplish its goal of protecting Hunter from a continued vendetta of investigation and prosecution under the second Trump administration.
You said "continued vendetta" implying that Biden allowed a vendetta to happen against his son while in office. The more likely explanation is that Hunter broke the law, published it in a book, and then was charged. If Biden thought the law was unjust, did he pardon/commute anyone else charged/convicted of this crime?
If there's one thing recent history proves, on both sides, it is that the presidential selection is so important to the two parties that their partisans will routinely tell any lie necessary to get their candidate elected.
I think there is. A lot of people don't think the local mayor is important enough to invest themselves in lies if, say, he's caught paying a sex worker with a check.
But the presidency is so important to people that people will say things like "January 6 was a peaceful protest" or "Joe Biden will do just fine in office all the way to age 86".
I keep coming back to the fact that the expected guardrail of "the public sees an attempted coup, is properly alarmed & punishes the party that allowed it" isn't working because traditional journalism -- what we used to call the "mainstream media" -- has totally lost credibility with a huge section of the public. And I can't really blame people for being cynical; from the Covington Catholic mess, through bullshit cancellations, "mostly peaceful" protests, gender affirming medicine etc etc. they've just lied to our faces so many times, how could a rational person trust them at this point?
Even if we agree on basic facts -- an angry mob stormed the capitol -- there's context and framing: How dangerous was 1/6, really? How personally culpable was Trump? There's room for interpretation here, especially if you don't follow the news closely & don't have a lot of context on how democratic republics are supposed to function. We're supposed to have credible opinion leaders to help people make sense of these things, and we just don't anymore. And I don't know how we fix that -- once trust is shattered it's very hard to rebuild.
This view doesn't explain the fact that many conservatives, including die-hard Trump supports in his own cabinet, immediately and very loudly concluded that J6 was dangerous and that Trump was responsible. You don't need to trust the New York Times if you have Erick Erickson saying that Trump should be impeached, convicted, and barred from office immediately.
I just think the level of trust in media is irrelevant to this specific issue, where nearly every non-media person across the political spectrum agreed that Trump had behaved abhorrently and then simply ret-conned that view when it was no longer politically useful. It's like saying Biden pardoned his son because the media has lost credibility -- a complete non-sequitur.
But it was no longer politically useful to hold that view because Trump's popularity endured. I agree that "public officials speak & act with integrity" should always be plan A, but at the end of the day politicians (and by extension political appointees, lobbyists, etc) are beholden to voters. It's very frustrating that they resolved the cognitive dissonance by pretending nothing bad happened, but that's human nature.
In a universe in which the MSM behaves with perfect integrity, it might still be the case that many of Trump's supporters would stand by him & refuse to believe the truth, but surely some marginal segment would reject him. And we'd hope that would be enough to shift the calculus. That's all I'm saying. I can understand if it seems like whataboutism when the focus should be on the contemptible hypocritical behavior of conservative leading lights, but I'm on this hobby horse because it's the root of so many different problems.
That 1/6 took place merely six months after "the events of summer 2020" does seem like very important context if you're scratching your head about why normal people aren't as fired up about it.
People *were* fired up about it when it happened. That that view flipped 180 degrees later had everything to do with partisanship and party discipline and nothing to do with trust in the media, George Floyd or what have you.
So I read the linked Morgenstern memorandum and it turns out that it wasn’t Einstein who interrupted Gödel at the naturalization hearing, when he tried to explain the constitutional loophole, it was actually the examinor.
I can only recommend to read the entire document, I found it very entertaining.
I believe you’ve written about this but I do think it’s relevant that almost no one (besides maybe Liz Cheney & Adam Kitzinger) actually behaved as though 1/6 was a Big Deal beyond its political impact in a red/blue sense.
The Biden admin took every opportunity to (a) tie himself to anti-1/6 policies (worst attack since the Civil War) and (b) to link the GOP generally to the attacks (ultra-MAGA).
I guess people can debate the extent to which Biden himself was responding to the already-in-progress conservative retconning of 1/6, but there really was zero attempt to run any kind of bipartisan unity admin against fascism. The committees work was pretty consistently undermined by the admins desire to score political points off the attack.
It seems pretty clear the Biden theory of the case here was that turning town the temperature and returning to “normal” policies would break the Republicans’ fever and lead Trump to irrelevancy. We now know that failed, and we need to reckon with that.
Definitely. It almost seems like they didn't update their thinking after the election turned out to be much closer than the polls suggested. It's hard to remember now, but it looked like Biden was on his way to winning by 8%-10% points instead of the 4% he actually won by (and less in the tipping point states). If he had actually won a victory that large, maybe a return to normalcy and "rising above" Trumpism could have worked.
Doris Kearns-Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, and Jon Meacham convinced Joe Biden he could be the next FDR with the smallest congressional majorities in American history.
It's pretty clear we're going through a party realignment and trump just allows people (somehow) to plaster their beliefs into him. If he kicks the bucket during his run here it'll be a strange set of bedfellows running the show indeed
I agree with what you write, but I think you ignore an important part of what's going on, contrary to your customs and inclinations. Many of those voting for Trump did so despite disliking and/or fearing the man, because they feared Harris and/or the Democrats more. From my perspective as an elderly conservative Democrat, their concerns are substantial. Not quite enough to lead me to vote for the man, but close. Many of the unpopular Democratic positions grouped as "cultural" seem to me deeply illiberal threats to the country just as dangerous as those posed by Trump.
Hello, fellow elderly conservative Democrat. I was just thinking the other day about the campus protests about the Israel/Hamas war, and how "Maybe let's not nuke the entirety of Gaza" quickly morphed into "Sinwar is a noble leader and Hamas is great," and the echoes of mid-20th century leftists who praised Stalin and actively covered up the atrocities in the Soviet Union.
I could not and did not vote for Trump, but I sulk a lot about current leftist positions too.
One of the most telling moments in American history was when Senate Republicans had the opportunity to be rid of Donald Trump once and for all. All they had to do was convict him on his second impeachment, and tack on a ban of seeking future public office. Almost all of them chose not to do so. That action spoke louder than anything they said at that time or any other time. It said they were fine with the possibility of Trump being reelected. And...here we are, with him back in power. They got what they wanted. Now we see what happens.
I think that at the time, and probably through most of the GOP primaries, many GOP senators did not want Trump back in the White House.
Their inability to cast the right vote was based entirely on fear of trump’s most rabid supporters.
It was unfounded fear, there would have been immediate short term backlash of course, but I have a tough time seeing that last for much longer.
Agreed, it's a shame they didn't display more courage.
Courage among politicians is one of the rarer substances found in nature. And when demonstrated, is often penalized more than rewarded.
Mitt Romney has spoken about private conversations with other Republican Senators who expressed legitimate concerns that if they voted to convict themselves and their families would be under serious threat of physical harm, up to and including murder. Romney can afford to pay for private security for all the people he was concerned about, but others aren't quite that financially well off.
I think electorally the backlash would have been more significant than you do, but I don't think it's possible to know for sure. But the physical threats are also something that has to be be acknowledged when discussing their actions.
To be clear, I think they should have voted to convict. I think it was cowardice not to given the charges. I just mention the threats to highlight that they need to be a part of the discussion of what was motivating some senators' behavior.
One of the things that I find significantly underdiscussed is the extent to which people act like Trump and his supporters are a credible threat to their lives when they are manifestly *not*! There are literally at least dozens of, if not 100 or more, people who have personally sued, testified against, presided over cases against, explicitly insulted, etc. Donald Trump and who are still walking around in perfectly good health. Like, if there were several instances of prominent Trump critics/opponents ending up severely injured or dead, I could see the reason to be fearful, but there's no such track record.
I mean, they were feeling that way in response to a large scale assault on the Capitol where members of the crowd had zip-tie handcuffs, set up gallows outside their place of business, and generally threatened to murder anyone who didn't fully support Trump's agenda. I think you're minimizing the extent to which the actual election and certification of the election outcome was dramatically different to his followers than the other things you're comparing this to. Not to mention that we don't have access to the specific threats they were receiving and how credible and legitimate those threats were.
TLDR: The election was significantly different than a court case testimony, allegations in civil suits, etc.. January 6th is a memorable date for a reason.
ETA: It's also pretty easy to google instances where Trump supporters have engaged in violence and cited Trump and their support for him as one of the things that motivated their activities. Claiming that threats of violence are not credible or anything to be concerned about just because high profile individuals haven't been attacked (many of whom have actual security protecting them) just seems to be intentionally downplaying the issue beyond what is reasonably called for by the evidence.
"they were feeling that way in response to a large scale assault on the Capitol"
Except that I remember numerous instances of people acting like Trump was a mob boss going around having people "rubbed out" long before January 6, 2021.
Not to change the subject, but this is one of the things that infuriated me most about the fawning over Luigi Mangione.
There was so much energy spent decrying Trump and the maga ecosystem for "enabling" acts of violence. I think it's debatable how effective any of this was, but I do think it's mostly accurate.
But when you completely ignore this the moment someone uses violence for your political goals it's the equivocation of "well this was bad, but highlights the underlying issues" from politicians and straight up hero-worship from the masses.
As soon as you do that, you give up all credibility when it comes to taking a stand against things like Jan 6th.
...and yet, here you are changing the subject with some lame whataboutism because of some trolls you saw on reddit
I thought Zach made a valuable if tangential contribution to the discussion.
“Lame whataboutism?” I disagree with you. It a clear, longstanding position by some to decry violence, but always adding BUT. If the purported, underlying cause is deemed worthy, anything goes.
The game-theoretic solution to this working is just to threaten physical harm for any vote that you don’t like.
It's sad how their fear made them do that and then go on national TV repeatedly to call everyone else with those fears a hysterical idiot. While no one should have to live in that fear, I really have no sympathy for them. They've just given him the power to do worse and when they're on the receiving end I really hope they regret what they've done.
I'm not so sure it would have been short-lived. I think establishment Republicans (McConnell et al.) saw it leading to an intra-party civil war that they would almost certainly lose. MAGA or something like it (John Birch Society) has long been part of the coalition, but Bush wrecked the credibility of the establishment wing so bad that the MAGA coalition is decidedly in charge now.
Trump is an important part of that, but the bottom line is that's where the most engaged Republican voters are at now. It's not just a one-way flow of influence (Trump to MAGA). Consider Trump's biggest substantive achievement (Operation Warp Speed) - he doesn't even mention it or get any credit for it from the MAGA base, because anti-vax is a core belief. It's one that Trump doesn't even seem to hold, but he's captive to them on that.
I firmly believe that in the alternate universe where Trump is actually impeached and stripped of the ability to run again, he becomes this folk hero of a small splinter group, but is overall officially branded a "loser" and the GOP tries not to talk about it and just move on, like they didn't want to dwell on Nixon. The apologia for the rioters that had a chance to grow in the days and weeks and months after 1/6 doesn't have room to grow because it means backing a loser.
I agree with you to an extent. A lot of Republicans falling in line behind Trump is a result of them seeing him as a winner, whereas the establishment (e.g., McCain, Romney) weren't. They want to back the winning horse. In your hypothetical where that aura was sufficiently dispelled in 2021, he might lose most of his influence.
My main counterpoints would be that exactly one Republicans senator (Romney) voted for his impeachment, so we were VERY far from making that hypothetical a reality. You're describing a fundamentally different party. Also, I don't think a Trump-less party would revert to its previous state. However much you want to credit Trump vs. others, a lot of that transformation of the Republican base is baked in now.
Wasn't that the first impeachment? I believe a handful voted yes on the second impeachment
This may be true but is besides the point, imo. They swore to protect and defend the constitution. That is their no. 1 job, and, at the risk of sounding pompous, their sacred duty. Soldiers, police officers, fire fighters, risk their lives on a daily basis. A senators job is way way more comfortable than any of those, and we should expect more, not less of them. Claiming they failed in their most solemn patriotic duty in what may well be one of the greatest watershed in the country's history because of cowardice makes them look much worse, not better. It is the opposite of an excuse.
Agreed. Also, good to see you back here.
Thanks! I'm not "really" back, but since I had an annual subscription I figured that I might as well keep lurking here more low key until it runs out (gradually weaning myself off lol). I have searched far and wide and must admit that I could find no substack that comes close to either the quality (and quantity!) of Matt's writing nor especially to the comments section here. Nevertheless I don't think I'll renew when the time comes. I just feel that Matt crossed a red line of mine and if the consequence is that I end up spending a little less time online that's not the worst thing either ;)
What was the red line out of interest?
The impeachment was also very broad and rolled in things Trump had done in the preceding months, things these members had participated in.
I don't want to let Republicans off the hook, but in a what-can-I-control sense, the Democrats should have had an impeachment bill holding Trump responsible just for the events of January 6 and banning him from holding office, and that bill should have been sitting on everyone's desk at 8am on January 7, and the impeachment headed up by the most centrist-of-the-GOP member they felt could do it. Instead of taking days to dither and figure out the strategy to maximally squeeze the GOP.
This is a real deck chairs on the Titanic kind of take. The "watch out for an iceberg" take might be the more relevant one.
This, as CoT rightly says, is all on the Republican Senators.
I should have remembered the illiteracy of some people and put "I don't want to let Republicans off the hook" in all-caps or bold or something.
You not remembering my illiteracy is all on you and not me. Please don't make that mistake again. My illiteracy refuses to be forgotten.
8am? How about right after the electoral certification?
I don't know if we can keep the elderly people up that late, but if you could run it immediately, go for it.
Exactly right
On one hand, this is true. On the other hand, this is a democracy and our political leaders always reflect their constituencies in the long run - if they won't do it out of cowardice, then someone else will do it out of genuine agreement. This doesn't excuse them. But the root problem isn't cowardly Republican politicians, but the fact that a substantial percentage of the American people is fine with authoritarianism, and has feelings about liberal democracy and the rule of law that lie somewhere on the part of the spectrum between indifference and contempt. This isn't specific to America, it's just part of the human condition. If anything, Americans are more committed to liberal democracy and the rule of law than people in the average country are, since those concepts are such a core part of our cultural identity and historical memory, drummed into many of us throughout our childhoods. But while Americans are more supportive of those principles than average, they are less supportive of those principles than I personally believed they were for most of my life.
The reason why our commitment to liberal democracy seemed so rock-solid throughout the postwar era wasn't because there was actually an unshakeable supermajority supporting it, but because there was an elite consensus supporting it, with no ability for dissenting views to form a nationwide critical mass through the forms of mass media then in existence. But that mass media and elite consensus no longer exist, and once you introduce a person like Trump to the voters, a fairly large percentage of them realize that they're generally fine with (or at least not repulsed by) his views on overturning elections or pardoning people who attempt to subvert the law on his behalf or the rest of it.
I know its fashionable to consider our Founding Fathers as flawless demigods whose Constitutional legacy is unquestionable to us today. But they were REALLY wrong in failing to put into place an actually-effective impeachment mechanism. It is and always has been practically impossible to hold an American president to account, especially when the legislature is likely within his party's control or at least is split. That's a puzzling oversight for men who designed the whole thing around checks and balances and the *default assumption* that power corrupts and that having an unaccountable king (like George III) was the worst thing.
But, hey, it was Democracy 1.0, so who could blame them for f*cking this one thing up? It's really our fault for not rectifying this via a Constitutional amendment in the quarter-millennium since. And for fetishizing and freezing in amber what was supposed to be a living, evolving legal document. Which, again, might have been the Founders' mistake, given how practically impossible they made amending the Constitution (especially once the number of states legislatures involved in ratifying any such change ballooned from 13 to 50!). Most every other democracy in the world has refreshed their constitution many times. I've lived in two very functional European democracies (Ireland and Sweden) where they've rewritten the whole damn thing in only the last 20 years, and not even because of some crisis, but just because it was optimal!
The parliamentary model is superior in its ability to hold the Executive to account for malfeasance, as legislators can hold a vote of no confidence against a rogue prime minister or just one who has lost their popular mandate. That better balances the powers of the Legislature (which in the US Constitution was supposed to be the primary branch) in being able wield effective accountability mechanisms toward the Executive.
But even the UK Parliament struggles with holding a PM to account when the elected legislature is part of the same party and holds partisan advantage over legal, constitutional, or public-interest concerns. We saw that in action many times during the soft constitutional crises of the Boris Johnson premiership. Not an easy problem! Ideally, you would then get around this dilemma with some kind of non-partisan or bipartisan independent commission or standing Congressional committee to at least investigate allegations, perhaps actually tried by a specially commissioned independent impeachment court (as per a Danish precedent).
"Which, again, might have been the Founders' mistake, given how practically impossible they made amending the Constitution" That's the thing, until relatively recently in this country's history this wasn't really true! Like almost immediately, there were amendments to address very clear flaws in the constitution. The Founders (many of who were holding elected office in 1804) realized very quickly the system for electing President and Vice President was seriously flawed after the 1800 election fiasco. It's really only since the 70s that amending the constitution became functionally impossible.
This by the way is one the many reasons why i think we underrate how terrible "originalism" is as a judicial philosophy. Like the very Founders that you supposedly venerate when deciding how to decide cases who saw pretty quickly how flawed the constitution they created was? But while most voters are not constitutional law scholars I do really think a sizable chunk voters have heard of originalism. I actually don't think it's a mistake that originalism as a judicial philosophy arose almost in conjunction with the rise of the modern religious right. The rise of seeing "the Founders" as quasi religious figures (and therefore making absurd arguments about the role of religion in the country's founding and see the Constitution as itself religious text is not a mistake to me. It's also basically an "get out of jail free" card to get around judicial precedent and just decide to rule however you feel like.
Which by the way gets to the part Matt is leaving out here; the corruption of the courts and real worry about how far SCOTUS is willing to go to rubberstamp Trump's authoritarian impulses. Those SCOTUS judges watched Jan 6th as well. And unlike House members and Senators who at least have the excuse of saying "if I don't go along with this revisionist history I'm going to get primaried", SCOTUS judges don't have to worry about facing the voters, saw Trump's actual actions in office and said "yeah we should give Presidents astonishing amount of leeway to basically murder their opponents legally". There are basically two guaranteed votes to make trump and his sons dictator fore life. There are threes others I'm at least mildly worried about. And you know who thinks SCOTUS may allow him to be dictator? Donald J Trump. https://jabberwocking.com/trump-already-planning-to-break-the-law/
I am once again begging people who hate originalism to at least outline the alternate theory of constitution theory they prefer. And specific to this case, the theory of constitution applied by these justices that will be better at stopping Trump's authoritarian impulses.
I honestly don't get why "Living Constitution" is so problematic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Constitution. The key thing about it to me is pragmatism. I don't think it's without flaws, but it seems all in all a pretty good template for looking at the law and Constitution generally.
Honest to god, ever since I was politically aware, the "judicial activism" charge from originalists I have found wanting. And I gotta say the last 10 years, my opinion has only sharpened on this. Given the wonton actual "judicial activism" of conservative judges, the fact this charge is leveled at scholars and judges who believe in "living constitution" I find basically Orwellian in its farce.
If you can't tell my opinion of "originalist" judges is astonishingly low. I actually have more respect for conservative House members. As much as I disagree with many of their political choices, at least they have a small excuse; most are from pretty conservative districts and part of their job is to reflect and represent the views of their constituents. And even with some of their policy positions I actually find more to defend. I've maintained for awhile the more damaging SCOTUS and legal decisions are matters of economic concern. I've really come to believe that a lot of these decisions are just flat out corrupt.
Fundamental question for you is that if every conservative member of the court suddenly said they were strong proponents of a living constitution theory of jurisprudence, what change would it require in their decisions? Is there any conservative judicial activism that would be stopped by them adhering to a living constitution theory?
I'm no expert at all on this issue so I could be persuaded otherwise. But whenever I hear a description of "Living Constitutionalism," it just seems to put way too little discipline on how the Constitution should be interpreted. The range of possible "contemporary, practical" interpretations is vast. There's a considerable degree of wiggle room for justices to rule however they feel is ex-post optimal in terms of policy outcomes.
A lot of the Constitution, however, is a list of pre-existing *commitments* by the government *not* to change certain practices or impose particular laws even if the entire government thinks it would be optimal from a policy perspective. Allowing justices to freely reinterpret commitments however they want ex-post considerably weakens the force of those commitments.
"I honestly don't get why "Living Constitution" is so problematic."
Because laws meaning shouldn't change based on who the judge is. If we want a different policy that's the political branches not the judges who should be changing the law.
There is no way to have the law's meaning not change based on who the judge is. Even Scalia, Thomas, Alito, etc., disagreed with each other on occasion. Originalism doesn't guarantee an objective outcome- we're still dealing with humans who are motivated, consciously and unconsciously, by a wide array of factors when they try and reach a decision.
The funny thing is, a “living constitution” is more in line with traditional common law in which American jurisprudence is founded on while originalism (and textualism) is way more akin to the Civil law practices found in places like France.
One odd thing about the constitution today is how much it’s venerated; many of the founders not only thought it had flaws but believed it should be updated consistently
>"textualism if possible, pragmatism if not"
This is indeed a probably the best standard we can get. I'd offer one amendment. Lower-case originalism to augment textualism. Textual interpretation can be weak, without historical context. Often we have explicit commentaries by the contemporary authors on what they meant in the text. That said, where big Originalism gets it wrong (or as you suggest, are not fully honest about their methods) is extrapolating beyond the historical context. There are some larger philosophical points (in the same way the Plato can still be relevant today) that transcend time - but there are plenty of novel situations still. In fact many of the cases making it the high court are exactly this novel cases, and while we should use the text where they can, otherwise they need to extrapolate from the principles of our judicial tradition, including common law and civil norms.
Originalism doesn't mean the founders are perfect. Nor does it mean we can't make changes.
It means look at the text of the document, and apply the common words meaning of the words at the time of the enactment. If that doesn't get you the policy result you want it's not SCOTUS's job to twist the constitution. It's the political branches job to amend the constitution.
The corruption of the courts is what happened during FDR when SCOTUS started acting like a rubber stamp.
Instead congress needs to do it's job. That means compromise between the parties. That means not letting the executive step in when congress hasn't specifically authorized it.
How does that work when we apply the Fourth Amendment to telephone booths and conversations? Does the First Amendment cover common law libel in states? What exactly is double jeopardy, and what kinds of mistrials trigger it? Does it apply when two indictments have slightly different elements?
There's a vast amount of law that doesn't simply follow from the text, but from saying "hey, this is what these cases are trying to do, and this is how we should apply it now".
A lot of the times Congress has made broad delegations to the executive and the courts are reaching to claw them back (Major Questions doctrine, Chevron vs. Auer, etc.)
Originalism isn't the "one weird trick" that means judges don't need to judge anymore, It's a judicial framework.
But way better than living constitutionalism that just lets the judge pick their preferred policy outcome.
As I was reading your post it occurred to me that to have earned an A+ on prescience, the Founders should have set rules in place to make it *gradually easier* to amend the Constitution over the long reach of time.
Eg…they could have specified that every 50 years the required votes to ratify an amendment gets reduced by some fraction of states or legislators. (So instead of 2/3 of states it gets reduced to 2/3 minus 1 state per 50 years after initial adoption, with some floor fraction specified - maybe 3/5.)
The idea being: at least they successfully anticipated that changes would be needed, but what they missed is that as time marches on, the need for change actually increases. So the ability to make changes should keep pace.
The document looks less useful / more out-of-touch with the world it has to provide guardrails for…and since the divergence increases, gaps get bigger, the amendment process should become more powerful. (Evidence for this is the increasing reliance on the court system to resolve big picture questions).
It’s an interesting thought experiment - and maybe something to keep in mind for Constitutional Convention 3.0…which is inevitable IMO - it’s just not sustainable as is. So many anti-democratic concepts built in that people are losing patience for. (Trump has accelerated the process without a doubt). Maybe it happens in 10 years, perhaps in 50 years. - just hoping enough people can realize it before total societal breakdown happens.
Something to keep in mind is that if amendments could pass easier we would very likely have a balanced budget amendment that almost passed in the 90s and a gay marriage ban that probably passes in the early 2000s. Probably many others as well.
But if they can easily be done they can easily be undone. See prohibition.
What would be the point of putting them into the constitution then? Why not just let such things be laws?
The federal government used to abide by the quaint idea that its legislative power is constrained by the Constitution.
This is a fascinating idea. Why not call for a generational refresh of the Constitution every 30 years or so? Clearly, conditions will have changed significantly in that time. Even in the comparatively "slower" historical era post-independence, you had only a 12-year interregnum between the "First Republic" (1777 Articles of Confederation) and the "Second" (1789 Constitution) in the new United States. And after that there was a rapid-fire series of Amendments that quite fundamentally shifted the Constitutional order.
Between 1776 and 1806 you had a very different situation in the new Republic, such that erstwhile forbidden things like having a standing army or navy or national bank seemed essential. And, of course, importing slaves was now illegal.
By 1836, Congress had already seriously considered the direct election of Senators several years prior (which wouldn't actually happen until 1913) as well as the Jacksonian Era or Second Party System in politics, which ended the previously elite-dominated system of republican governance with universal white male suffrage, more populist retail politics, and many re-written state constitutions including direct election to courts.
By 1866, we're in the bloody aftermath of the Civil War and Lincoln's Assassination, all sparked largely over constitutional questions. Might we have avoided the whole mess with a refresh of the constitutional design instead of engaging in our deadliest-ever war that didn't even really resolve those questions to everyone's satisfaction? In any case, we "re-wrote" a lot of the Constitution at this time via amendment, (passed without the real democratic participation of all Southern states!)
In 1896, things are radically more different, still, with the United States *gasp* on the verge of becoming itself a colonial power, with all the Constitutional dilemmas that would bring.
And so on...
I didn't have the faintest idea what 2024 would look like politically in 1994 and not just because I was in grade school. And I cannot claim to have the foggiest idea of what social and political conditions will be like in 2054, either. I do know that whatever they will be, we'll probably need at least an evolved constitutional understanding. And, maybe by that time, to your point, we'll have it, with a new Constitutional Convention. But if that happens, it'll be because we probably decided to side-step the ossified Constitutional order today out of necessity and desperation.
It's possible we don't amend the Constitution as much because on the whole we're satisfied with the government we have and are concerned about unintended consequences. The American people are a pretty conservative lot when it comes to how government is structured and the kind of far-reaching policies they would like to see implemented.
It's possible. Humans have an innate conservative loss-aversion bias, generally. And it's rare that we opt for change when the status quo is at least good-enough.
But remember that any implicit choices are mediated by what participants think is possible: I've never witnessed in my adult life actually amending the Constitution, despite pretty much everyone I know professing dissatisfaction with the resulting governance system, and certain aspects of it, in particular, such as the bewildering Electoral College. So my Overton Window for what is possible in American politics just assumes that the Constitution is immutable.
But, then I think back to various other things that I used to consider "impossible" and they include having Donald Trump elected to the White House *TWICE* and all the other stuff that's happened since that have together rendered the word "unprecedented" cliched and meaningless.
And lest I focus only on the bad, other things happened during this eventful period after 2008 that also seemed to me to be "impossible" prior to that but shocked me (in a good way). A Black president. Stimulus packages to actually help people weather a recession. Big infrastructure spending.
So, we've been through a generation of big swings now and they cut both ways. I do long for the simpler, easier world of the 1990s, but I also realize that we had to walk away from that. And whatever your partisan lean today, I'm sure we can all agree that Congress is very dysfunctional, that politics are too divisive, and that the average American feels too alienated from the system as it is. That cannot continue so we're going to have to do something about it, despite the risk. I think a lot of Trump voters kind of thought of their "risky" choice in that light.
Recently Ezra Klein was asked what he was most wrong about and he answered that he grossly underestimated the impact of regulations on our ability to do things. For me, it was grossly misestimating how much the American electorate (well, half) valued the things in America I find precious. How else could they put someone like Trump in office?
But the answer is that Trump doesn't matter much in their lives. His threat to the democratic order is theoretical. I mean, we had that bit of tomfoolery on Jan. 6 and yet things just went along fine, didn't they? And sure he's an obnoxious person you'd never want to be your boss, but he's not your boss and as long as times are good (or you've been convinced times are good), it's fine that he's President.
In general, Americans ignore politics (except for us benighted souls) and don't want it to do much, except in times of great crisis when they want it to do a lot. Thus the relief spending during COVID when the economy was in a coma. But otherwise, leave well enough alone, and ignore the frothing of political agitation that always goes on in Washington.
Americans are good at ignoring crises until they turn into real crises. Why do we have the Electoral College? Because it's never burned us. Once that happens, then the hue and cry about changing it will be deafening. How could we elect a Black President? Well, he seemed a decent guy with a lovely family and the economy was in free fall, and it's after two terms of a Republican, so not a big surprise. And maybe the barriers to electing a Black weren't as big as we feared; we'd never tried it before. And is Congress dysfunctional? Sure -- because it's so narrowly divided and there are big gains from tiny switches in support. But to say "that cannot continue" is true only in the sense that nothing continues forever, not that it's necessarily that bad for it to continue. A paralyzed Congress is not inconsistent with Americans' revealed preferences.
If the Americans were really truly unhappy with our system, I think we'd see some real efforts at change. At least, take down a Bastille or two.
So it should be noted that there is some guy named Thomas Jefferson who basically thought the same thing you just articulated. https://oll.libertyfund.org/quotes/thomas-jefferson-on-whether-the-american-constitution-is-binding-on-those-who-were-not-born-at-the-time-it-was-signed-and-agreed-to-1789
Given Jefferson is arguably the most important Founder (at the very least one of the most important), it should give us pause as to how difficult it should be to actually amend the US constitution. Or whether the Founders themselves actually saw the constitution as some sacrosanct text.
“Why not call for a generational refresh of the Constitution every 30 years or so?”
Jefferson thought we might need a rebellion every 20 years or so to remind the government to behave.
“…as time marches on, the need for change actually increases”
Could be. But there is no particularly good reason to believe that.
They almost got there with impeachment, the trip up was requiring a supermajority for the Senate after only a simple majority in the House.
Obviously it's been way too hard to pass amendments--only 17 after the Bill of Rights--but there have been plenty of indirect tweaks made by SCOTUS. It certainly has been a muddled mess with that, though.
If impeachment just required a majority then you'd potentially have the opposite issue where it's too easy to get rid of someone for partisan reasons.
Either way requires some people to be principled.
I really don't have an answer to how accountability for an executive could be truly "objective," given the now-obvious pull of partisanship. Anything governance related, including lifetime appointments to the courts, inevitably is touched by partisan bias.
That's a dynamic else that the Founders also discounted naively, in retrospect, given their preoccupation with the perils of "faction." But why didn't they foresee that political parties would exist, given that such parties already existed in the UK Parliament with the 18th Century rise of the Whigs and the Tories? Maybe in accepting the inevitability of partisan faction, they could have engineered ways to sublimate it better?
Making the impeachment a matter of simple majority would help. I think that the US Constitution makes too many things a matter of supermajority, which really decreases policy agility and renders many important policy mechanisms moot (e.g. impeachment or constitutional amendment). The threat of overstepping or derailing governance with simple-majority legislative oversight isn't dire enough when compared with the threat of system ossification and a lack of accountability to power when you make everything stuck until you have supermajorities. Especially if you can't just dissolve the legislature and call for new elections to actually reflect an emerging popular supermajority.
Arguably, Trump could have been held to account with mere simple majorities of both houses of Congress. Those ten Republican House Members who voted to impeach Trump and seven Republican Senators who voted to convict him might have voted otherwise, though, if they had thought that it would actually go through. Or maybe they would have been joined by more Republican colleagues who felt that "If you come for the king, you'd better not miss!" It's hard to read, given all the contingency of the situation and how "flexible" the Republicans have been in embracing Trump even after his disgrace.
I'd like to not have to rely on the cynical selfishness of Members of Congress who only turn against their party's leader when it seems political expedient to do so. But what's the alternative? Even Bipartisan Commissions on various important things have been poisoned in the eyes of a partisan public. The courts certainly aren't seen as neutral arbiters, the Supreme Court least of all. Any independent commission or court would be viewed skeptically in our low-trust climate as some "Deep State." So what, then?
>I know its fashionable to consider our Founding Fathers as flawless demigods whose Constitutional legacy is unquestionable to us today. But they were REALLY wrong in failing to put into place an actually-effective impeachment mechanism.<
They got tons of things wrong. Our madisonian constitution is the worst of any developed democracy, and it's not particularly close.
Someone who agrees with you; quite possibly his most famous post (that or his seriously ill timed Bangledesh post). https://www.vox.com/2015/3/2/8120063/american-democracy-doomed
Ha. I don't know that I'd say the democratic nature of our polity is doomed. For one thing authoritarian spells don't last forever. Going by the experience of Germany, Italy, Spain, Chile, Greece and so on, I'd guesstimate these periods last several decades on average.
And I'm hopeful the dam will break soon (MAGA will start to get decisively and regularly punished by the electorate, thereby forcing the GOP to purge or go out of business and be replaced) before we get to that point.
And meanwhile we possess the most lethal weapons system ever devised by humans, so I doubt imposition of autocracy will come from without.
I just think our Madisonian constitution—first and foremost because of the absurd difficulty of amending it (which makes frequent tinkering and experimentation—something I regard as healthy for any polity—a non-starter) is manifestly inferior to the Westminster model.
I probably prefer a parliamentary system, but if you look over the last 25 years with both Bush Jr and Trump as president, I would still say we have had a better run country than any other large democracy...
I actually agree given the circumstances the Founders look pretty good (with the extremely important exception of anything involving slavery).
The real thing to me is it actually shows that the most important act in this country's founding was George Washington deciding to NOT to try to be President for life or dictator for life. It seems pretty clear he could have chosen that path and all we had to do was look across the Atlantic for an example of a revolution that led to a military hero becoming a dictator.
Agree on Washington. Another big moment was Adams stepping down when his party/side lost.
Agreed. And I recall reading about how the founders explicitly sought a relatively strong executive following the state-level failures of weak executives created during the Revolutionary War era. It's my understanding that numerous states created weak executives, with a focus on committees and congresses, due to their heightened concerns of tyrannical despots as they rebelled against monarchy. Yet those governments were pathologically ineffective, which created their own problems. Striking a balance between effectiveness and accountability is quite hard.
Yes, absolutely. Let me not come off here as some edgy revisionist claiming that the US Constitution was bad, actually. I think the Framers did an extraordinary job under constraints that are hard for us to even fathom today. Not the least of which an almost total lack of precedent for actually-functioning republican democracies.
And the strong executive dilemma is real! The US Constitution isn't even the first version that the newly United States operated under originally, the Articles of Confederation. Those Articles made for such a weak executive that a bunch of angry drunks marching on the capital in the Whiskey Rebellion threatened to bring it down!
Tragicomedic as that seems in retrospect, we also have to remember that the newly-independent colonies were indebted, isolated, and extremely vulnerable to predations even from former allies (like Napoleonic France). It was really touch and go for decades and the average American could easily fear that the European powers would claw back their independence. You could see how the appeal of a strong leader would prevail in uncertain times.
As, indeed, it has ever since.
And that's the real reason that we have such an undesirably-strong Executive. We are meek and easily manipulated when we are fearful. The presidency as designed in the US Constitution theoretically isn't anywhere near as strong as it is in practice today. But every crisis we've ever had has been an opportunity for the then-president to claim more emergency powers for himself and more executive authority that too-often became permanent. We saw that in my lifetime especially under George W. Bush in the GWOT, but you've seen a real expansion of executive power under every president since, with all sorts of then-justifiable reasons. But it's easy to lose sight of the aggregate effects of handing the power to a Caesar "temporarily," only to have that "emergency" continue indefinitely. We tend to look at these expansions through a partisan lens, but every power claimed by one party is then available to use by the other.
Did the Founders set up the Constitution believing it would gird a strong executive? Probably not; they tended to believe that the Congress would be dominant (reflected in their putting the powers of Congress first, via Article I). And indeed, for major parts of our history, the President was very weak and Congress was very strong. It goes back and forth.
The best, closest, and nearly only practical model they had was Parliament, and though the King still "ruled" there was a lot of jealous guarding of powers by Parliament from the King. It looked logical that Congress would be as staunch in maintaining its own power, they just never considered what would happen if the King was also a party/faction member with a Parliamentarian party.
All that said, they're failure to anticipate the effect of political parties was their biggest short sightedness.
It appears to be much easier to be reelected if you do nothing to annoy any constituency. Therefore, cede vast areas of legislative responsibility to the executive and whine when the incumbent does something annoying. Obviously, this single factor isn’t the whole story, but it resonates.
The "McConnell says Trump morally responsible for Jan. 6 attack, but votes to acquit" headline Matt linked to is a rich text.
>It said they were fine with the possibility of Trump being reelected.<
I gave your comment the "like" it deserves. But I do have one quibble: It's a near certainty many Republican Senators actually were not "fine" with the possibility of Trump's being reelected. Many of them had serious misgivings about allowing Trump to remain eligible for the presidency. Many of them were surely aware of the grave danger he represents, and how detrimental a Trump restoration would be for the republic. They simply prioritized self-interest more than the national interest. Their cognizance of the risks the country was running by allowing Trump to remain in politics makes their cowardice and self-dealing all the more outrageous.
There's no substitute for virtue in our elites.
There were a lot of "well, Trump is finished, he's never going to run for re-election anyway" takes and they were likely sincerely believed given how bad the mood was about Trump in the immediate aftermath. They didn't want to just rip off the band-aid when it was the easiest it ever would have been, cowardly assuming it would just fall off on its own.
I would add this naked self-interest has a very important variable, which is the low-turnout primary. I think that variable is critical to why a majority of the House GOP during January both voted against confirming the electors and anonymously voted to keep Liz Cheney in her leadership role at the time.
And it's important to why Biden's inner circle kept the party in the dark about the basic capacity of the president. Not a single critic of Democrats for doing this craven behavior has a realistic counterfactual of a 2024 Democratic primary that is any less crazy than the 2020 primary quotes Harris was repeatedly tied to in this general election. So if you don't move aggressively to prioritize party activist interests, you can be punished in a primary. And if you do permit a competitive national party primary, your party's activist interests damage your electability for the general election. There's a common variable here.
In different ways, Republicans and Democrats have played with fire to avoid a brutal competitive primary in the 2024 presidential cycle. It's the one common thread from the GOP moving on from Jan 6th to Trump's pivot leftward on abortion vs DeSantis and Haley while not showing up to the debates ... to Biden's unfitness for office being covered up for months or years. It's the low-turnout primary. That's what keeps making usual party men behave in unusually craven ways.
This is totally correct but I also think another slow boring villain is at fault here. Death by overly pedantic Proceduralism. I am absolutely positive that if democrats simply finished the electoral count obligations and then that night, ~1am on 1/7, voted to impeach trump, while the building was still smoldering he would have been convicted. Literally every single person there witnessed what happened. An impeachment isn’t a legal process, it’s a political one with a legal facade. They didn’t need the whole rigamarole of lawyers and arguments etc. we knew exactly what happened. But overtly lawyer brained Dems wanted the full impeachment and by the time it got to the senate, too many senators could plausibly hide behind questions of constitutionality of convicting a non incumbent. This doesn’t justify the gop senators who didn’t vote to convict, but this too could have been avoided and had their feet held closer to the fire. Also I think recent events in South Korea show, maybe impeachments ought to be a blind vote. May help overcome human fallibility.
You are WAY too certain of the outcome of this scenario. Even if the Senate vote took place on 1/7/21 there's a pretty good chance that at least 34 Senate Republicans could've found a way to let Trump off the hook. It's what they're best at!
Maybe, but allowing it to occur weeks later AFTER Trump was out of office is complete bullshit and allowed them the excuse.
Not to mention the articles of impeachment not just being focused on Jan 6th, but also including stuff that occurred before the election thus potentially implicating other republicans
Very much agreed.
That being said the fact that dems didn't work with republicans to craft the articles of impeachment was wrong.
Also the slow walking of them. They should have been done in a day or two. And not given republicans the excuse of Trump being out of office
This shows the lack of trust between GOP Senators.
It's basically a prisoner's dilemma where if they all move against Trump none of them take the heat and its in their collective interest. But if they all move against Trump, it would be the self-interest of any GOP Senator to defect to Trump and grandstand against it. And if there isn't going to be an impeachment, then it's really in their interest not be caught voting against Trump. So almost no one goes for impeachment and they end up worse off than if they all went for it.
And for this lack of trust we can point to the cynical opportunistic nature of GOP politics and right-wing media environment. They'll go for self-interested political expediency over high-minded conservative governance. And things will have to get very bad indeed for GOP Senators to be scared for their self-interests, not just have their principles trampled over.
Another remedy that could have been taken (that wasn't) would have been invoking the 25th amendment immediately (the afternoon/evening of January 6th). Not sure if that would have disqualified Trump from running in 2024, but it would have given political cover to allow Republicans to vote yes on impeachment.
No matter what I’ve still got a daughter to raise and bills to pay. I can only worry so much about what the extremely rich and powerful do. I’m just older now than I was in 2016, I’ve seen people I love become total online political brain rot weirdos and I do not want to succumb to dark urges and doom scrolling. I’ve seen what it does and it’s nothing good.
I hope it all works out.
> I've seen people I love become total online political brain rot weirdos
Until recently I lived in Vietnam and had an acquaintance there who was South African and he was ALL INTO American politics. Nearly every time we would meet for beers he would talk about something from US politics. And I would always be like...mate, we're in Vietnam and you're not an American citizen I can't imagine any possible way any of that affects us in the slightest, how many hours a day are you spending on this?
Online political brain rot is wild.
Side note: living in a communist dictatorship obviously has downsides but I can't help but wonder if the curtailment of all this "politics as spectator sport" isn't actually a net positive for a society.
For the same reason, I think people everywhere should pay FAR more attention to Chinese politics, but it's harder because they are much more opaque. It's like Cold War-era "Kremlinology" now following internal developments in the CCP under Xi.
But what China does matters as much if not more than what the US does. Again, we can two elephants whose movements shake the savannah!
American politics matters a lot for everyone--in particular for Vietnam, which stands to benefit from "reshoring" away from China and stands to win or lose a lot from the US-China geopolitical rivalry in the Pacific (and in the South China Sea, in particular).
I'm American but haven't lived in the US for a decade and a half, but everywhere I have lived people are glued to the "America Show" for the very rational reason that when the elephant stomps, the savannah shakes! And, hey, despite my being a dual-citizen of the EU now, it's not like I'm at all unaffected by political developments at home.
There is a vast difference between tuning in to American industrial policy talk that affects Vietnamese restoring (rare to the point of nonexistence in my experience) and paying attention to American culture war issues (which is all I ever hear any foreigner talk about).
They talk about bathroom policies in North Carolina and gender reassignment surgery in California prisons.
There is zero way any of that affects someone living in Vietnam. But that's what they spend hours a day on. Not reading up on why Lego decided to build a billion dollar factory in Bình Dương. Most of them didn't even know that happened if I didn't tell them.
Most of them couldn't even name a single thing about Vietnamese politics or policy so they aren't even political junkies, obviously. They are American politics spectators.
Excellent point—and you’re certainly right. Following the Culture War stuff is just our version of tuning into soap operas weekly. And that’s as true outside of the United States. And I have seen exactly what you’re referring to during my years living in various Sub-Saharan African countries: local people who bizarrely knew some third-degree rumor about gay rights in the United States, but didn’t understand anything about more material developments that directly affected their life. They’d, of course, eagerly ask me all about it, not even really digesting my answers as much as looking for confirmation of salacious rumors. And I’d tell them, “Don’t you think it’s more important to understand the Chinese investment in your infrastructure, or how your own government’s domestic political considerations might spark a civil war?” In places with a more “vibrant” media like Nigeria, coverage of local politics was similar to the American style, with cartoonish headlines about who’s up and who’s down and how has a mistress and who is invoking witchcraft, etc. I saw Trump’s precursor there in the form of the then-Nigerian President “Goodluck” Jonathon, who issued executive orders via Facebook (which I had to watch obsessively, since these shifting and arbitrary policies affected my work there!).
So, even when I’m following the idiot circus, I’m still looking for angles and advantage. And I can often forget that my style of news-consumption is a minority behavior today. And that most people don’t even follow hard news at all, even as they are doom-scrolling through tabloid-style “news.” Even political “news” is increasingly devoid of actual content, not the least because politicians—especially on the American Right—don’t even bother to talk about actual policy anymore. Instead, they stoke resentments over the outrage of the day in order to drive negative partisanship against foes.
It's only true that American politics matters massively to people living in Vietnam if there is some major difference in approach toward relations between the two major parties. I guess we'll have to see what the tariffs end up being but the broad trend of courting Vietnam seems likely to continue whichever party is in office as far as I can see.
That's true *for now,* but was a very new consensus after Trump. It absolutely wasn't the shared policy of the Democrats and Republicans prior to 2016. And I wouldn't be so sure that the bipartisan consensus holds even through the second Trump Administration, given the capriciousness of the cult of personality around Trump and the fickle nature of what he sees as "America First" when it comes to foreign policy.
Trump has consistently been rhetorically tough on China, but he also has another mental model that he often defaults to that strong powers should have spheres of influence in their own regions. Why shouldn't he decide that Xi should have the run of the First Island Chain and the South China Sea, to the detriment of Vietnam and others? Even if he doesn't start treating Xi like he does Putin, he might say one thing and undermine his rhetoric with actual policy, as he did during his first term. Saying that you need to decouple from China is one thing, but what if he doesn't have the faith of his convictions to actually follow through? It would be, after all, more expensive and less profitable to do so.
You may or may not be right in your prediction, but the point you're responding to was that it isn't worthwhile for a South African living in Vietnam to pickle his brain with American politics, and really nothing you've written there is going to be solved by fretting from afar, particularly given it's all speculative and so the only really meaningful question for this person ('would it be better to leave?') does not have a clear answer.
You bring up a valid point about agency: can I actually act on any information I glean from all the doom-scrolling? And maybe not.
I'd still prefer to know if a tsunami is coming, though, even if my chances of escaping drowning are low. Wouldn't you want to know as a Polish person in 1938 that the Nazis would invade? I'd definitely want to be the Jewish German who was "being paranoid" about the Nazis in 1933 and worked to GTFO over the following years.
Now, maybe that's a little too catastrophic-seeming. What about if you want to see opportunities in the changing political winds? If I'm a South African in Vietnam, I might decide that the future is in re-shoring to "friendly" countries (like Vietnam) and I might want to start a import-export business or a manufacturing concern that's taking Chinese parts and assembling them in Vietnam for re-export.
Or I might decide that actually that's a bunch of hype or rhetoric and it's absolutely not something I should invest my nest egg in. And that, actually, aligning myself with the China story economically is my best path forward.
Maybe it's because Americans politics is just a lot more fun to follow. I mean, the German elections will have serious implications not only for Germany but elsewhere, like the future of NATO and Ukraine, but is anyone excited about the race?
Maybe people didn't reject Biden because he's too old (cough *Trump* cough) but because he's too boring.
German politics are very closely followed here in Europe, to be sure. Where Germany goes the EU follows, both politically and economically—and it’s NOT GOOD right now.
Americans don’t follow politics anywhere else much, as a rule. Which, on the one hand is understandable, given the US is the powerful one. But the fact that most even educated Americans couldn’t rattle off all the names of the leaders of Japan, Germany, the UK, France, and India is certainly a shortcoming of the information ecosystem there. Because those places do matter quite a lot for American interests.
That Americans (and most everyone else) doesn’t really understand the Chinese political system is understandable, given how complex and opaque it is. I have to at least hope that most people understand that China is run by the CCP with Xi at its head—but beyond that? More effort to understand the maybe biggest economy on earth and rising adversary/superpower should probably be made by an American population who is certainly affected by China’s rapidly shifting policy environment and increasing competition and antagonism. Maybe it’s pretty boring, though, compared with the 24/7 reality show that is American politics.
You can find the information on foreign affairs and international politics in the American press if you pay for it and dedicate the time (as I do). The NYT, WaPo, WSJ, et al give ample coverage of political developments in Europe and elsewhere. But it’s not the headlines that much interest readers or viewers, so it tends to get buried. And the average news consumer now isn’t paying for anything and gets the majority of their information from TV and social media—where you get exactly what you pay for: cheap to produce slop, zero reporting, and opinion and propaganda posing as “news.”
This is one of my favorite "to be clear"s ever
Hopefully you stay in the Slow Boring comment section!
I’m okay with limited political brain decay : )
The book "Politics is For Power" is intended, I believe, to convince people to log off and organize in their neighborhood and such. For me it was much more successful in the first than the second.
The vast majority of online politics is a waste of time or counterproductive. It's also not great for most people's social relationships or happiness.
I agree social media is often bad for mental health and can be counterproductive politically, which is why I don’t have social media anymore. But I read Politics Is for Power and I wasn’t convinced his alternatives would work in the 21st century. He seems really enamored with early-to-mid 20th century machine politics, but there’s reasons machines don’t exist anymore and I don’t think they’re coming back. And I’m not convinced door knocking or small bore protesting or other forms of “organizing” make any difference.
The truth is posting probably does have more potential to lead to influence than traditional organizing. The issue is how to do so without rotting your brain or losing sight of what is effective and what really matters.
Agree. But also, because so much of public policy has been federalized — typically with Democrats leading the charge in pushing for more federal centralization — there’s a limited range of issues to meaningfully address at the local or state level. Local land use and school boards, and what kind of drinking straws are allowed at local restaurants, but not much else. The critical path on so many issues runs through DC that local involvement can seem as futile, and more tedious and hard, than just ranting about stuff online.
I'm not sure. There are lots of things that affect my everyday life that local politics could deal with, but people seem not to care. A few years ago, I became exceedingly frustrated at a forum of City Council candidates because they kept talking about federal issues over which the city has absolutely no control. I don't really care about my council members' stance on immigration or the federal debt. I care about their approaches to things like road repair, ordinances that affect business start-ups, pedestrian safety, and so forth, but I think voters are more swayed by stances on federal issues now because I see more and more of it creeping into local and state office holders' and candidates' rhetoric. This is likely an outcome of online politics as sport/hobby.
I think this is downstream of the drying up of local news. Even if you're interested in local issues, it's genuinely hard to find anything comprehensive explaining what's going on in city hall or the state capitol.
Agreed but local officials need to realize and acknowledge their limited authority and responsibility for their political district as the public will try make them responsible for nation issues based on the public’s present condition of brain rot. Local officials do a disservice spending limited local resources on national issues plus missing an educational opportunity to inform the public that their concerns should be directed elsewhere. Over 4 years locally more than 40 hours of public 2020 election integrity hearings were held at the county level to address the concerns of the federal election. It’s really hard to explain this short of brain rot within the local county commissioners and their constituents. Truth to power at the local level would be a start.
I mean, people are worried because of what the extrmeley rich and powerful are enabling specifically because of how bad that can make things for people like you and your daughter.
Worry does nothing. I voted, I participate in my community, and I give money or volunteer where/when I can. I'm just not into the excessive online doom culture anymore.
First priorities Democrats should make here are making Trump as unpopular as possible as quickly as possible, and making the Senate confirmation of his trifecta of national security goons as painful as possible.
In the House, sounds like Johnson has received marching orders to prioritize tax cuts. Easy opening to message to the public. Democrats should know how to do this.
In the Senate, we need to be absolutely merciless on Patel, Hegseth, and Gabbard. The trick is to make them out to be buffoons, obvious even to the public, not in ways that The Groups merely find offensive. This means NOT pulling a Kavanaugh. Bonus points if we can put them in a position to insult their god-emperor. I think there's enough neo-con energy left in the Senate GOP if we can chum the water with enough of their revealed anti-Americanism we can seed some doubt.
In either way, we need to go full McConnell. Sand in the gears. Zero assistance on anything without humiliating concessions. Constant probing for weakness.
Unlike when they're in the majority, I actually have full confidence congressional Democrats will do the right thing when they're in the minority.
What does "not pulling a Kavanaugh" mean? I think "rape is bad" is a fairly mainstream view.
In the Kavanaugh case, Democrats hoped that telling everyone about a rape accusation would be enough to convince them that Kavanaugh was really a rapist, but the GOP did a pretty good job running interference and more or less convincing the voters that mattered that the whole thing was a big political firestorm without substance. The issue is not that the public doesn't believe rape is bad, it's that they don't believe Kavanaugh is a rapist.
Sexual assault in general is (unfortunately) a bad issue for this by its very nature, since it's nearly impossible to prove dispositively without eye witnesses or contemporary evidence.
Yeah I think the whole thing very quickly congealed into whether or not you bought into the "believe women" progressive shibboleth, whereby you just take a woman at her word when she accuses a man of sexual assault regardless of other circumstances or factors. That's very bad territory for Democrats.
That's not to say that Ford was lying, just that the events in question were over three decades prior and most of the parties involved were intoxicated, so it's pretty much impossible to establish what actually happened with any real confidence.
It was also almost certainly not helped by the other less plausible accusations against Kavanaugh from other women, which dragged down the weight of Ford's testimony.
Illustrates the long-term harm of crying wolf in politics at any time. In the moment it’s not just about the opportunity to do maximum harm to your opponent. It’s also an opportunity for the public to calibrate on your credibility.
How effective politically has bringing up sexual harassment been? Kavanaugh sits on the supreme Court and Trump will sit in the oval office in less than two weeks.
If it's brought up you need to humiliate them in their own language. The focus is proving guilt, it's proving either a lack of fealty or weakness. Those are the languages spoken by MAGA.
I think you're excessively focused on outcomes here. The reality is if Republicans lined up behind Kavanaugh they had the numbers to confirm him, which they did. That doesn't mean it was the wrong play to bring up the allegations against him, it just means it wasn't powerful enough to turn a losing hand into a winning one.
I do have to admit that credible accusations of rape, while not exactly a plus, do not seem to be a dealbreaker for most American voters.
A huge amount of weight is riding on the word "credible" in that judgment.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Less than credible accusations, like Tara Reade's, probably don't move the needle, but they probably shouldn't and there's nothing remarkable about that. I think it is interesting that Bill Clinton's popularity has held up as well as it has, to say nothing of Trump.
"I'm not sure what you mean by that."
I mean that a substantial part of those "most American voters" likely didn't find the accusations to be credible. And, if you don't find an accusation wrongdoing credible, why would it be a "dealbreaker"?
Having more contemporaneous evidence would be nice. Taking her word for it when her first mention of it to anyone else was apparently 28 years after the fact is problematic.
The other substantially less credible accusations against Kavanaugh also almost certainly didn't help the impact of Ford's testimony, but those have been entirely memoryholed from mainstream discourse at this point.
I'm not sure that part about 28 years is true, but my point is Ken didn't say "unproven", he said "outlandish", because that's what the Republican party settled on as a rationale.
It is outlandish to accept accusations of a three decade old crime solely on the demonstrated faulty memory of the accuser.
I’m going by Wikipedia which is dangerous. It says she mentioned the assault by an unnamed person to her marriage therapist in 2012. That’s the oldest mention I see.
Yeah, that sounds about right. The alleged events were older than I remembered.
The Kavanaugh hearings were not about rape. They were about outlandish accusations of sexual assault.
This is actually a pretty good illustration of what Matt's talking about. After Ford testified, many Republicans said she was credible. After voting for Kavanaugh anyway, they didn't say, "on balance, I consider X more important," they said Ford was obviously lying. What changed? Fuck you, that's what.
This is what I'm getting at - it's not enough to highlight what's a deal breaker for you, you need to find what's a deal breaker for THEM. The GOP did this masterfully when the astroturfed a Me Too about Al Franken and got Dems to sacrifice one of their best communicators.
Shelby used the word "credible" but also praised the prosecutor in the same breath. Other GOP senators were more muted in their evaluations. I imagine a lot of them didn't want to outright attack Ford, who was clearly going through something, whether real or imagined.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/408789-gop-senator-calls-ford-credible/
They very quickly changed their minds about not attacking Ford.
I don't think this is accurate as a historical matter. Republicans portrayed Ford as either a sympathetic but confused person taken advantage of by Democrats (best case) or a deliberate liar (worst case) basically from the beginning. There was no real pressure on Kavanaugh, or real sympathy for Ford, from Republicans at the hearings.
“What changed?”
The weight of evidence continued to grow.
One of the great ironies of the SB comments is that people think they are intellectuals for knowing what "ex post facto" means, but basically all of their "Dems are idiots" takes just work backwards from results they don't like.
I agree with all of this. Talking about the things that normies care about that they don't like about Trump and the Republicans is the way to go. And they need to be ruthless about it.
We are where we are largely because of Mitch McConnell largely in my view. If he had put country over party for only the two weeks after 1/6, our government would be much more secure. But, irony is that in any bill or nomination the Democrats need to think, what would Mitch McConnell do?
Democrats need some sort of equivalent Powell doctrine on legal/social attacks.
Clarence Thomas. Kavanagh. Trump.
If you come at the king, you’d better not miss. Either go balls to the wall or dont start. This Merrick Garland starting too late stuff can’t happen.
Of course Biden and Obama don’t even have Powell doctrine when it comes to military matters, as the dribbling supplies to Ukraine recently demonstrated.
I agree with this but I want to add some extras:
1. Stop writing paranoid fantasies about the 22nd Amendment and admit that Trump is a lame duck.
2. Recognize that the most likely 2028 outcome is JD Vance winning the GOP nomination as Trump’s heir apparent.
3. Spend the next four years making JD as unpopular as possible.
In general I agree. But some stuff the Dems should cave hard on so it's not an issue later.
In particular immigration. They should give Republicans basically whatever they want so it can't be used against them later.
Interesting commentary here, though it leans heavily into revenge politics and Trump Derangement Syndrome narratives. Perhaps the Democrats could consider presenting a compelling alternative platform beyond just 'we aren't Trump,' apocalyptic rhetoric, or critiques of his administration's policies.
The reality is that we need two strong parties for a healthy democracy. Today, however, we’re left with two weak ones. Among them, only one appears to be tapping into the sentiments of the broader electorate—and here's a point that might sting: it’s not the Democrats.
But what about if they try to pass something immigration-related? That will just read as Dems being their old, unlikable selves if they refuse to play ball it seems.
"That’s how pluralistic politics works: You agree with people when you agree with them, but you don’t shy away from disagreeing when you disagree"
But that's not how business works! And all the people you mentioned are in business so this is BAU for them.
Okay, sure, everyone has met a handful of enlightened bosses who handle feedback marvelously. But there's a reason HBR has hundreds of articles on "managing upwards".
You might spill the dirt over beer with mates but nowhere remotely close to where a blogger like MY might hear whispers of it.
Yeah, American corporations are very hierarchical to an almost militaristic degree and really call into question the self-concept that Americans have about our society as a kind of democratic (with a small "d") culture with casual, horizontal, meritocratic relationships.
That's why Musk, et al are such a good match for Trump. They both come from a corporate world where "bossism" reigns. Trump's never headed a public corporation, so he's not even used to the same scrutiny that Fortune 500 CEOs face from boards and shareholders. For him, at the head of a private, family company funded by the very shadiest sources of capital, it's what he says goes.
So why wouldn't they assume this is how the country should be run? Trump was never very successful in business (despite his very skilled cosplay as a entrepreneurial genius), but Musk, Thiel, Andressen and friends can feel justifiably smug in their own ability to build impressive companies.
I hear you, but FWIW my military friends feel they have way less power as civilian bosses.
In the military, if you want to get promoted, you need good "officer evaluation reports." But your commanding officer can only give a limited number of top ratings ("top block"). So the best officers compete like crazy to impress their COs. That means proactively trying to figure out what the CO wants and doing it.
In civilian life, the chain of command is way less rigid, and often getting a promotion means leaving for another company rather than getting good marks from your boss. So there's not the same hustle or respect for authority.
Though maybe it's different for tech bosses like Elon (as opposed to midlevel "bosses").
i think this is just a difference of scale. there are lots of pathways for promotion and success in the military at any given time in the country. so many its a common trope to move every year or so in military families. in the business world promotions are just not always possible at any given time. or they require large moves to other departments which people have really soured on in the business world of today. so your best bet is to quit to join a new team at a different company. which i think is quite similar to the military if you think about it.
Someone, polytropos I think, proposed that I write down what scares me in a Trump administration and think of what would have to happen to make this a problem.
And the thing that that exercise really drove home is I’m not as afraid of the government as I am of the wackadoos on my street with the militia flag and the fuck you sign and unpredictable random people being encouraged to be confrontational with liberals and having people like me described as dangerous threats to them. That authority figures will respond with no real urgency.
This is why normalizing has always struck me as a bad idea. It’s bringing bullying, personal violence back into public life when they’d been pushed out.
I came to the same conclusion just by tweaking my media diet to include less blow-by-blow politics. For the most part, unless I read about the abuses of power, corruption and incompetence, MAGA governance probably won't impact my daily life. But all the "47" signs and very-only bumper stickers that I don't understand are a constant reminder that the political movement is very much a part of my daily life. I don't have to think too hard to imagine ways the asshole-honor culture of MAGA can spill over my job or neighborhood or my kids' schools.
Here here... Especially after reading that recent Pro Publica article. There seem to be way too many of these militia group larpers that salivate at the thought of being a brownshirt and committing acts of violence against their fellow citizens.
Not bringing Trump to justice for trying to overthrow the election is mainly on the Biden administration and partly on Fani Willis. Four years is plenty of time if you don’t dither.
The first best thing would have been for the Republicans not to be the craven fools they are during the second impeachment. But I agree that the second best thing would be to run an efficient, minimally competent prosecution. Fani Willis is a terrible person and Merrick Garland is a sad joke.
Yeah, this is where I lost Matt here. By the summer of 2024, normal politics was all Democrats had against Trump, but he should've been in prison (or at least house arrest) at that point, if they had made better decisions earlier.
Waiting as long as they did to start the case on election interference was inexcusable on Garland's part.
I still think it'd be a bad idea to put Trump in jail and to use the DOJ to do it.
Impeachment was the right political remedy and it was on the GOP for not pursuing it.
He committed serious crimes for selfish purposes and he should've been held to account for that. Impeachment is a broken system, that has proven inadequate for the task of reigning in Presidential abuse of power. There is no justification for letting him off the hook, other than a misguided notion that the President is above the law, which is, for all intents and purposes the rule of the land now, but it didn't have to be this way.
The failure to prosecute him in a timely and effective manner came down to can-kicking and shifting responsibility. Why should voters take the jerimiads about Trump's threat to democracy, when the elites telling them this treat him like a normal politician
Unilateral disarmament rarely works out.
Bad: Biden using the DOJ to imprison Trump on 1/21/21 and charge him with treason.
Worse: Trump returning to office on 1/20/25, pardoning every offender, and setting a precedent for every future political leader in this country that they can get away with it.
The scary thing to me is less about Trump himself and more about where this road leads us.
You could have said the same about Nixon until the political winds changed direction and the public supported reforms to prevent Nixon from becoming a positive example for future presidents.
Let’s say that Trump pardons the January Six rioters. And let’s say that they were radicalized during their stint in an isolated wing of the prison. So some of them assume Trump has their backs and then go commit some horrific crimes in his name. Then some copycats get the same idea. Unless and until we become a totalitarian nation like Russia, voters will react negatively to such things, having experienced the foreseeable consequences of their prior electoral decisions.
If the electorate feels negative consequences, whomever they assign blame to is going to experience consequences. The ensuing political grandstanding will result in laws specifically crafted to prevent those negative consequences in the future.
That's an optimistic take (and maybe even likely). The thing is, in this case, the optimistic take depends on more political violence taking place, and voters reacting negatively to that and putting safeguards in place - but that kind of anarchic violence is what we should have been preventing in the first place. We HAD safeguards in place, and now they've been gutted for the foreseeable future; at this point, the optimistic take is that they get put back in place sooner than later.
FWIW, I also think the pardon of Nixon is what led us down this road to begin with: it set a clear standard that the President was above the law that Presidents of both parties ran with and Trump (who revers Nixon) eventually exploited.
I feel like politics used to be more constrained by "but will happen when the shoe is on the other foot". Like, right now MAGA is running around talking about how they're going to put everyone they disagree with in jail, constantly throwing around accusations of treason and law-breaking. But as Trump himself showed us, it's actually hard to put people in jail for "political crime", especially public figures.
At the end of the day Trump was not impeached because Republican senators were scared to lose reelection; Trump is going to be sworn in as President again because he won an election; and the Democratic Party is in the political wilderness because they can't get enough people to vote for them. The electorate can and should decide the consequences of the actions and words of politicians. It's actually a good thing that we didn't have to find out what happens when we imprison a former/future president(ial nominee).
Idk, lots of healthy democracies around the world imprison former heads of state all the time, for the crimes they commit. Trump committed some pretty serious crimes, but the justice system dragged their feet until it was impossible to go after him and partisan. Politics muddied the waters.
I think by dragging their feet, and mostly dropping this stuff until the election, political elites signaled to voters that they didn't prioritize stopping Trump, that they didn't see him as an existential threat to democracy. It was an indirect legitimazation, even if unintended, and the reality is that they thought Trump was done and they could move onto other priorities. However, I do think that peoplefollow cues from elites in some ways, and I think that straightforwardly prosecuting Trump for the crimes he committed around the trying to overturn the election would've crystalized, for at least a decisive number of Americans that he was an aberrantion and beyond the pale of normal partisan disagreements. Failure to adequately punish sedition, like Trump's, isn't unique to the US, but it usually leads to that seditionist pushing farther when they get the chance again.
My uninformed understanding is that successful prosecutions of heads of states in democracies are for "real" crimes committed by politicians. Like Sarkozy bribing a judge for political dirt; bribery is a "real" crime, not a "political crime." It is trivial to demonstrate that bribery is illegal and bribing a judge for any reason violates that law.
Trump lied about the election, tried to strong-arm a governor or two and fomented a riot on Jan 6. None of those are clear-cut "real" crimes and prosecuting it was non-trivial.
The Georgia case was based on racketeering in which a bunch of people obviously broke the law, but pinning it on Trump was non-trivial and it seems like the charge against him would have been for racketeering, not breaking a "real" law.
Trump clearly cheated on his wife with a porn star and then paid her to keep quiet. None of that is actually illegal. I mean, falsifying business records, something, something now it's a felony because election something... that is what you get when you charge a "political crime". Not only does he not see jail time, it energizes his supporters who understandably view it as a trumped-up political prosecution.
Trump hoarded classified documents and then broke a bunch of laws trying to hide that fact from the FBI. Of all the crimes he committed, that one was the closets to just flagrantly breaking "real" laws. Had that one been prosecuted in a timely manner and had he been found guilty, my guess is that one would have been above water in public opinion. But he is the luckiest person alive and drew the under qualified judge he appointed who just tossed the case based on like something Clarence Thomas muttered. And the case didn't get far enough for the public to pay close enough attention for it to matter.
I don't really agree with that at all. Trump knowingly pressured election officials to rescind the correct results. He pushed the fake electors scheme, and was complicit in organizing the January 6th protest as a coherent attempt to overturn the results.
Now how against the law is that? I'm not a lawyer, but throwing the book at him seems reasonable, even if it is an "Al Capone cheating on his taxes" situation, the case for justice is important
The actual substance of the "business records" crime is that he didn't bribe her with his own money, but with campaign funds. He can't be done for stealing or fraud because he is the authoriser of those campaign funds, but it wasn't money he was free to do with as he chose.
Anyone who is a freelancer or a small business will have their business accounts and their personal accounts separate, and, if those business accounts are organised as, say, an LLC, then it's actually illegal to spend LLC money on things that you could completed legally spend your own money on. Trump's crime is equivalent to that.
Yeah. And at that point Biden should have just led a coup like what Matt’s talking about.
The January 6 prosecution was like a modern aircraft carrier. It’s capabilities are impressive if it ever makes it to sea, but they take so long to build the war will probably be over before any new ones launch.
In this case they scuttled it in the dry dock.
The scuttling at Scapa Flow redeemed the honor of the Kaiserliche Marine. Scuttling a capital ship in dry dock would shame even Admiral Byng.
The entire justice system has been kowtowed by "trying not to look political" when it comes to conservatives for way longer than Biden. They run absolute defense for the GOP and it doesn't save them at all from Trump just making shit up about how they have it out for him. I really hope that this is a lesson that gets learned if and when we overcome Trump's authoritarian shit.
agreed, either bring the charges early or not at all. Same applies to the raid on Mar a Lago
People near me in suburban Pennsylvania wore shirts emblazoned "I'm voting for the felon." Trump would have run from jail, and he might still have won.
"...between gerrymandering, the GOP’s financial edge, the power of conservative media, and the natural advantages of a higher-turnout coalition, Democrats were doomed to be permanently marginalized."
While true that the permanence was overstated, it was only recently that states like Wisconsin and Michigan have begun to overturn their gerrymanders to become fully-functioning democracies again, with the federal impacts downstream from that. An impact of 18-20 years is, in politics, something akin to permanent.
The conservative media advantage turned out to be even more critical than forecasted because it paved the way for the current social media "news" ecosystem landscape and is now an efficient engine by which stories create themselves and get cycled through the "some people say" machine.
The financial edge (as proven by Harris) was eventually a red herring if not a disadvantage.
We will see how mid-term turnout goes!
Yeah, I agree. The false dawn of the Obama and Biden Administrations (especially in the electoral years of 2008 and 2020) shouldn't distract us from the reality that Republicans have totally stacked the electoral deck against Democrats (a deck that already structurally advantages them in rural areas due to how the Constitution designed the Senate and Electoral College). We're now in an era where Democrats don't win was much as Republicans sometimes lose. And, due to this structural advantage, Republicans only manage not to fail upward when things go REALLY wrong (Iraq War, Great Recession, COVID, et al)!
The 2010 Census redraw, in particular, was a crippling blow with generational political impact. We've only seen a modest correction in gerrymandering since, and only with the (temporary) intervention of courts. We can now forget such legal interventions to restore even a modicum of electoral balance (more on that below).
Compare this with the (in retrospect unbelievable fact) that the Congress (or at least the House) was on lock for the Democratic Party even through the Reagan years, that high-water mark of Conservatism! That's why Newt's 1994 Republican House majority was such a huge, paradigm-shattering deal! Today, the Democrats are lucky to even eek out a slim majority on the coattails of a presidential victory. In my wildest dreams I wouldn't consider a 56-62% Democratic House majority to be possible again under a Republican president, as you saw under the 97th, 98th, 99th, 100th, 101st, and 102nd Congresses under Reagan and Bush. , Especially not with so many of those seats in the American South!
The razor-slim 51% Democratic House majorities in the 117th and 118th Congressional under Biden is more like the *best-case* today. After two decades of Republicans controlling the post-Census redistricting process at the state level, the House districts as drawn today give Republicans a partisan lean of up to 16 seats!
Redistricting isn't as relevant for the Senate, where the Republican's structure advantage is more down to the rural-urban partisan divide that gives Wyoming the same number of Senators as California. And Democrats haven't been smart about overcoming that electoral math in their continued focus on the educated, metropolitan voter. So, the best Democrats can hope for is 51 or 52 Senators out of 100 now, and they've spending most of the last decade down at only 45-46. The Senate map in 2024 was especially bad for Democrats, but it's not much better in 2026 and 2028 because structurally the Senate is a really hard prize for Democrats.
And let's not forget the Supreme Court, which has been Conservative since the 1970s. Even under Clinton, it skewed Conservative. And today we could only wish for such a "moderate" (but definitely Conservative-skewed) Court. It will be a far-right Supreme Court for the rest of my working life, at this rate. And they're the ultimate arbiter of what's legal, so that merely compounds the opportunities for Republican shenanigans up to and including legal coups.
We are not obligated to take on policy stances that hurt us with rural voters. It is a choice! The Democratic party used to be very strong in rural states.
Also, if the voting results from 2024 continue, the electoral college skew largely goes away if more Latinos vote Republican.
I have been saying this for a while. Democrats need to meet voters where they are. If land has greater representation than population, then you should give more deference to those opinions and values.
It's funny that in writing that sentence you've ended ascribing 'opinions and values' to land, which is in itself the issue.
Land has been pretty quiet for the most part but if, per the desires of the SB community, we ever put in place a Land Value Tax, I expect to see Land rise up in revolt that will put the Tea Party to shame.
When you view states as arbitrary collections of land, and citizens as the rightful constituents of federal politics, it certainly seems that way.
Well, personally, I think the structural advantage given to rural voters in the United States is really egregious and undemocratic on its own merits.
And the US Constitution certainly wouldn't (and politically couldn't) have been designed the way it was with the benefit of hindsight, given that rural states in the original 13 colonies had equivalent populations to more urban states: https://brilliantmaps.com/population-density-1775/. The Northeastern "Acela Corridor" was as relatively populated as it is today, but you just didn't have scarcely populated former territories like Wyoming, Idaho, et al whose electoral advantage in the Senate was so egregiously out of proportion to their population. Maybe Maine was the single exception. Places like Georgia and the Carolinas were then major urban as well as rural centers with populations to match (complicated by the fact that much of that population weren't actual voting citizens). Already the political dilemmas involved in this Constitutional design almost tore the country apart during the decades leading up to the Civil War, with each territory accepted into the Union as a full, voting state.
But, them's the rules, and ain't no goin back. So democrats should, could, and have been far better at appealing to rural voters. They stopped doing this because they lost the feedback loop with local parties. But that's reversible. A bigger challenge to contesting the rural voter is the informational sphere in rural areas that are no longer served by legacy media: in their place has rushed in a whole bunch of right-wing propaganda and dumb-dumb social media slop.
The Agrarian Parties of Europe are a good model to emulate here, as they provide for a unique centrist politics that isn't just a sop to big-city monied interests (as much of the American Conservative movement has been, historically) but also has some working-man populism. They also provide nuance around the needs of regular people in rural districts (with a more nuanced policy around Climate Change and environmental protection, for example).
Even here in Sweden, there's a huge disconnect between the urban Stockholmer's understanding of the Green Transition and the reality facing a rural voter in sparsely-populated Värmland where my wife is from, where people work on farms, in forestry, in industry, and in the trades and therefore must by more reliant on fossil fuels for work and regular life. So, the (Agrarian) Center Party here strikes that balance well and often governs in coalition with the center-left Social Democrats or the center-right Moderates, both of whom bring a more urban bias to their politics. The Democrats could have an internal coalition that does the same!
"And the US Constitution certainly wouldn't (and politically couldn't) have been designed the way it was with the benefit of hindsight, given that rural states in the original 13 colonies had equivalent populations to more urban states"
I actually think that if the population disparities between states had been foreseen by the drafters of the Constitution, that would have strengthened their conviction that each state needed equal representation in the Senate for protection of states with smaller populations.
This is fairly anecdotal so YMMV, but i think for many ppl they just view states as junior varsity government and think it’s inherently dumb to give them such equal representation and deference. A quirk in the system. Law school really reinforced to me the underlying sovereignty of states. Those silly lines on a map tracking a river or whatever extremely matter. The state on One side of that river can decide to kill you for the same crime that it couldn’t on the other! The monopoly of violence is the ultimate measure of sovereignty. Our union is just far closer to something like the EU than people fully realize, to say nothing of the latent demographic and geographic diversity. Once you bake that in, the choices for the electoral college and the senate make more sense to me. This isn’t the only way to run a democracy but it is our way.
Yes, I agree with this. I've said for years that the structure of the US federal system makes a lot more sense when you understand that the country is effectively a much more integrated version of the European Union (doubtlessly much facilitated by substantially greater commonality of language and culture).
“A bigger challenge to contesting the rural voter is the informational sphere in rural areas that are no longer served by legacy media: in their place has rushed in a whole bunch of right-wing propaganda and dumb-dumb social media slop. “
This is certainly true in Montana with the right wing urban covid population surge; this once purple state of Citizens United Law campaign finance law, progressive 1972 environmentally and private rights State constitution, in addition to the history of fighting the extractive cooper kings has been forgotten. The advent of UPS, 63 million $ from AR funding for fiber cable and related internet connectivity has enabled an economic boom which is both a blessing and a land use nightmare without zoning. You are correct about a need for a replacement of legacy media (Montana Free Press is a start). Hopefully the Democrats can expand their reduced foot hold before all these new folks turn this “Last Best Place” into the “Yellowstone” movie set they think they moved to.
Maine was part of Massachusetts then
“…undemocratic…”
Rural states select elected officials by popular ballot. What’s undemocratic about that?
What's undemocratic is that my vote for president in Florida is worth half of your vote in Vermont due to the way the Electoral College works (helpful explainer map here: https://www.maps.com/how-much-voting-power-does-each-us-state-have/). That's very far from the principle of one person; one vote. The Vermonter essentially has 2 votes for president relative to a somebody who just happens to live in Ohio.
Ditto with the ratio of voter to senator in Rhode Island (1.1 million) vs. Texas (pop 30.5 million). So, my aunt in Rhode Island literally has *30x* the relative Senate representation as my boss in Texas. That's pretty undemocratic!
Most Republicans would agree that giving two senators to the District of Columbia would be "unfair," but why is that any less fair than giving two senators to Rhode Island, which only a slightly larger population? Or to Wyoming or South Dakota, which are fewer?
This is indeed a mathematical quirk of the system. The best argument in its favor, is unlike in many other less federalized systems, Floridians and Vermonters each have far greater autonomy to alter the laws within their own equally sovereign states. There are small p political reasons why so many states end up similar to one another. Reducing transaction costs, inertia, simplicity etc. But the states themselves are constitutionally allowed to be quite different form one another! Nothing prevents Vermont from establishing a parliamentary government with a prime minister, rewriting all of their laws etc. Hell Louisiana mostly uses French Law. So in a narrow sense of pro rata vote for senator you are correct that More Populous states have less representation. But they do not have any less internal sovereignty and their voice in the National Government is proportional in the House and to an extent the Electoral College. But you have largely the same representation in the House and mostly in the EC (which if 2024 trends holds is now at parity if not slightly skewed against republicans) as any other American.
Both Florida and Vermont adhere to the one person, one vote idea. So do Rhode Island and Texas.
That you do not like the way the United States chooses the president and senators does not make it undemocratic.
The urban cosmopolitan vs. rural traditionalist split shows up almost everywhere in the world. This seems like something deeply embedded in human nature vs. something political operatives could just decide to ignore.
We don’t say that for republicans. They can keep their policies and be ok losing more often than not but when they do win they project 25 everything.
Gerrymandering is a red herring. With one tiny exception, the party that wins the national House votes wins a majority of the seats. If the Democrats want to win the House consistently, they have to consistently win over the electorate.
It's a red herring in federal elections. In state elections it has been more significant. Due to sorting it'd be hard for Democrats to win the state house in an even election under any map, but under the 2010 maps Republicans could win a supermajority in the same environment.
This appears to be true. I was referring to the House, which is mostly what people talk about. But state legislatures — yeah.
It's not a red herring because having sufficient representation in the Congress (which, again, is the primary wing of government) is a good in itself. Having a House Member for your district isn't just useful because the president has a simple majority to pass legislation. We only think that if we buy into the media narrative of all politics becoming nationalized and basically something akin to sports. But below the headlines, there's A LOT of arcane policy, amendments, and budget earmarking that gets done in Congress for hyper-local concerns.
"But if I were to say, “It’s fine to vote for Trump while still strongly disagreeing with what he did around 1/6, I’d just like to hear you say that in public,” the response would be that everyone knows it’s best to avoid Trump’s bad side"
While it's true that people want to avoid Trump's bad side, I think the real reason you don't see people argue that "Trump trying to overthrow a free and fair election result is bad, but not as bad as raising taxes on wealthy people" (or whatever justification people have for supporting Trump) is that it's completely non-sensible and untethered from reality. It's really hard to argue that 1/6 is kind of bad. If it was bad, then it was really bad. Billionaires especially know this, even with the wealth they could but probably wouldn't lose under a Harris admin, so instead they go with "1/6 wasn't bad." It’s just more simple and there's no slippery slope they have to worry about.
I think it's possible to ride the line, just very difficult. I see three apologist arguments:
One is that it was patriotic to storm the Capitol because the election was stolen. That would be true if it wasn't a lie, but business people are too smart for that.
Another is that Trump didn't incite the violence (he said "peacefully") and that the mob incited itself. This is the argument you would pick if you were a smart business person who wanted to support Trump but also denounce Jan 6. But the fact that Trump keeps insisting the election was not not stolen makes people in this camp look stupid and naive.
And the final argument is that it's okay to lie to get what you want (talk is cheap, etc). I think this is what pro-Trump billionaires believe. And if that's what you believe, why would you stick your neck out to say the truth in public?
“And to me it seems that Gödel must have been thinking of the pardon power. This has frequently been abused, mostly in banal ways, by lame-duck presidents to pull selfish stunts with no grounding in the public interest. Nothing particularly terrible has ever occurred due to presidential pardons. “
This is where I lose Matt - acting like the Hunter pardon is no big deal and doesnt set a horrible precedent — “nothing to see here” — is disingenuous — If Trump had pardoned one his sons for an 11 year time period, the entire liberal media, including the Slow Boring and it’s readers, would be outraged. Not sure why that is so hard for the left to admit this point. It doesnt refute the broader point of the article, which I generally agree with, but just some very lazy writing.
Oh there are so so many precedents of bad pardons in our nation's history. I mean, Andrew Johnson pardoned Jefferson Davis.
The Hunter Biden pardon was justified on its own merits, because no reasonable person could look at his situation and conclude that he wasn’t being singled out for differential harsh treatment because of who his father is. That’s not justice.
So this is only convincing if you think that Hunter Biden should have been left twisting in the wind as a sacrificial lamb for the greater good, despite the injustice to him personally.
He was singled out for writing a memoir about his drug addled crimes, then carelessly and publicly allowing more direct, photographic, proof of his crimes to be placed directly in front of Justice Department officials who... Should have looked the other way?
That's your argument?
I am a federal criminal defense lawyer, have defended many people from Hunter's specific charges, and have never seen a case brought like the gun case. The ratio of people who indisputably commit those crimes beyond a reasonable doubt to people who get charged with them is astronomical. Those are generally trivially easy to prove offenses so the nature of the evidence in Hunter's case is not unusual (beyond that it's in book versus Snapchat form).
Usually, people who get those charges are gang members who can't be prosecuted for their real offenses for various reasons (through a DOJ initiative called "Project Safe Neighborhoods"). Never ever white-collar recovering addicts.
Without disputing any of that, his laptop was scrutinized by the DOJ, and the evidence, and the fact that the evidence had been in the hands of the FBI, were extremely public. I imagine that it would look pretty bad for such high profile public wrongdoing to be overlooked, especially when the administration is concerned with things like gun control. How could anyone explain not bringing charges?
If I'm understanding you right, you argue that as a matter of PR, the charges were inevitable because he's famous. That proves my point, not yours.
No, the charges were inevitable because his crimes were so brazen, and it was so clear that the authorities knew about them, that nobody could afford to be seen as ignoring them, because that would look exactly like not prosecuting someone only because of who his family is.
Maybe we agree?
Yep, that’s his argument!!
> no reasonable person could look at his situation and conclude that he [Hunter Biden] wasn’t being singled
Unfortunately, I don’t think we can assume voters are sufficiently reasonable in this dimension, or at least that they’re receiving a fair and balanced perspective on the allegations against Hunter Biden. Moreover, while I agree that he’s being singled out, I also believe there’s credible evidence that he’s a criminal who engaged in shady behavior, possibly extending to trading on his family name and connections.
Hence, I’m totally fine with throwing Hunter Biden under the bus to minimize the bad optics of a pardon—doubly so after President Biden already promised not to pardon his son. Reasonable people can certainly disagree on the tradeoffs being weighed here.
Moreover, it almost certainly won’t matter. I doubt that few, if any, voters will condone Trump’s future, more corrupt pardons but would have condemned those actions had it not been for the Hunter Biden pardon. At most, it just gives another excuse to those already converted to the Trump cult.
Presidential pardons have been used to free pedophiles, drug traffickers, traitors, and a governor who blatantly sold a Senate seat. The optics of pardoning bad people in a President's lame duck period are broken.
I think this speaks to a broader truth that "good government" has been subsumed by partisan and short-term material considerations by voters. We can't rely on voter outrage, legacy media, and politicians' shame to reign them in any more. We need game theory, which would make throwing Hunter under the bus look a bit better, but I feel like the pardon norm is irrevocably broken, of it ever existed.
“…no reasonable person could look at his situation and conclude that he wasn’t being singled out for differential harsh treatment because of who his father is”
That’s funny, because I think I am a reasonable person and I have concluded that Hunter Biden was singled out for unjustifiably favorable treatment because of who his father is. E.g.,
“…throughout the Hunter Biden investigation, decisions were made that benefited the president's son.
“The two whistleblowers accuse Delaware Assistant US Attorney Lesley Wolf, an assistant to Mr Weiss, of repeatedly blocking further investigation into Hunter Biden.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66252781
Then why didn't Biden pardon him instead of allowing him to be investigated? Why did he pardon him for *all crimes* during that time period instead of just the ones you think he is being singled out for.
We all understand why Biden did this for his son, that doesn't make it good.
You’d have to ask Biden to know for sure, but a perfectly rational reason for the breadth of the pardon is that Biden feared that otherwise the pardon would not accomplish its goal of protecting Hunter from a continued vendetta of investigation and prosecution under the second Trump administration.
Why did Joe Biden allow his own son to be investigated and charged by *his administration* while in office for no reason?
Again, you’d have to ask him, but a perfectly rational explanation is he wanted to avoid political blowback before the 2024 election.
You said "continued vendetta" implying that Biden allowed a vendetta to happen against his son while in office. The more likely explanation is that Hunter broke the law, published it in a book, and then was charged. If Biden thought the law was unjust, did he pardon/commute anyone else charged/convicted of this crime?
Not to mention the other egregious pardon abuses.
If there's one thing recent history proves, on both sides, it is that the presidential selection is so important to the two parties that their partisans will routinely tell any lie necessary to get their candidate elected.
Both sides activists will happily lie in small town municipal elections so it doesn't say much.
I don't think there is much correlation between stakes and willingness to lie.
I think there is. A lot of people don't think the local mayor is important enough to invest themselves in lies if, say, he's caught paying a sex worker with a check.
But the presidency is so important to people that people will say things like "January 6 was a peaceful protest" or "Joe Biden will do just fine in office all the way to age 86".
I keep coming back to the fact that the expected guardrail of "the public sees an attempted coup, is properly alarmed & punishes the party that allowed it" isn't working because traditional journalism -- what we used to call the "mainstream media" -- has totally lost credibility with a huge section of the public. And I can't really blame people for being cynical; from the Covington Catholic mess, through bullshit cancellations, "mostly peaceful" protests, gender affirming medicine etc etc. they've just lied to our faces so many times, how could a rational person trust them at this point?
Even if we agree on basic facts -- an angry mob stormed the capitol -- there's context and framing: How dangerous was 1/6, really? How personally culpable was Trump? There's room for interpretation here, especially if you don't follow the news closely & don't have a lot of context on how democratic republics are supposed to function. We're supposed to have credible opinion leaders to help people make sense of these things, and we just don't anymore. And I don't know how we fix that -- once trust is shattered it's very hard to rebuild.
This view doesn't explain the fact that many conservatives, including die-hard Trump supports in his own cabinet, immediately and very loudly concluded that J6 was dangerous and that Trump was responsible. You don't need to trust the New York Times if you have Erick Erickson saying that Trump should be impeached, convicted, and barred from office immediately.
Well sure, there's a lot it doesn't explain. I'm saying it's a big part of the problem, not the sole determinant.
You don't think trust in media has declined, or that that loss of trust doesn't benefit Trump?
I just think the level of trust in media is irrelevant to this specific issue, where nearly every non-media person across the political spectrum agreed that Trump had behaved abhorrently and then simply ret-conned that view when it was no longer politically useful. It's like saying Biden pardoned his son because the media has lost credibility -- a complete non-sequitur.
But it was no longer politically useful to hold that view because Trump's popularity endured. I agree that "public officials speak & act with integrity" should always be plan A, but at the end of the day politicians (and by extension political appointees, lobbyists, etc) are beholden to voters. It's very frustrating that they resolved the cognitive dissonance by pretending nothing bad happened, but that's human nature.
In a universe in which the MSM behaves with perfect integrity, it might still be the case that many of Trump's supporters would stand by him & refuse to believe the truth, but surely some marginal segment would reject him. And we'd hope that would be enough to shift the calculus. That's all I'm saying. I can understand if it seems like whataboutism when the focus should be on the contemptible hypocritical behavior of conservative leading lights, but I'm on this hobby horse because it's the root of so many different problems.
That 1/6 took place merely six months after "the events of summer 2020" does seem like very important context if you're scratching your head about why normal people aren't as fired up about it.
People *were* fired up about it when it happened. That that view flipped 180 degrees later had everything to do with partisanship and party discipline and nothing to do with trust in the media, George Floyd or what have you.
Training to downplay how fired up people were about January 6th is a very desperate attempt of a retcon
So I read the linked Morgenstern memorandum and it turns out that it wasn’t Einstein who interrupted Gödel at the naturalization hearing, when he tried to explain the constitutional loophole, it was actually the examinor.
I can only recommend to read the entire document, I found it very entertaining.
Excellent, troubling take. Glad it’s not paywalled, hope it’s widely shared and read.
I believe you’ve written about this but I do think it’s relevant that almost no one (besides maybe Liz Cheney & Adam Kitzinger) actually behaved as though 1/6 was a Big Deal beyond its political impact in a red/blue sense.
The Biden admin took every opportunity to (a) tie himself to anti-1/6 policies (worst attack since the Civil War) and (b) to link the GOP generally to the attacks (ultra-MAGA).
I guess people can debate the extent to which Biden himself was responding to the already-in-progress conservative retconning of 1/6, but there really was zero attempt to run any kind of bipartisan unity admin against fascism. The committees work was pretty consistently undermined by the admins desire to score political points off the attack.
It seems pretty clear the Biden theory of the case here was that turning town the temperature and returning to “normal” policies would break the Republicans’ fever and lead Trump to irrelevancy. We now know that failed, and we need to reckon with that.
He also governed as though he had a mandate which he didn't actually have, which was a problem.
Definitely. It almost seems like they didn't update their thinking after the election turned out to be much closer than the polls suggested. It's hard to remember now, but it looked like Biden was on his way to winning by 8%-10% points instead of the 4% he actually won by (and less in the tipping point states). If he had actually won a victory that large, maybe a return to normalcy and "rising above" Trumpism could have worked.
Doris Kearns-Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, and Jon Meacham convinced Joe Biden he could be the next FDR with the smallest congressional majorities in American history.
He wouldn't have even had a senate majority if Trump hadn't poisoned the well in Georgia. It would have been a 50/50 senate.
It's pretty clear we're going through a party realignment and trump just allows people (somehow) to plaster their beliefs into him. If he kicks the bucket during his run here it'll be a strange set of bedfellows running the show indeed
Well, specifically, it’ll be JD Vance running the show. But point taken. It’s anybody’s guess what direction he’d take things.
Will he fire RFK and Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk?
Yes, good question….
Maybe, but who knows. I think we'll learn a lot about where the difference coalitions shift in the next 2 years
I agree with what you write, but I think you ignore an important part of what's going on, contrary to your customs and inclinations. Many of those voting for Trump did so despite disliking and/or fearing the man, because they feared Harris and/or the Democrats more. From my perspective as an elderly conservative Democrat, their concerns are substantial. Not quite enough to lead me to vote for the man, but close. Many of the unpopular Democratic positions grouped as "cultural" seem to me deeply illiberal threats to the country just as dangerous as those posed by Trump.
Hello, fellow elderly conservative Democrat. I was just thinking the other day about the campus protests about the Israel/Hamas war, and how "Maybe let's not nuke the entirety of Gaza" quickly morphed into "Sinwar is a noble leader and Hamas is great," and the echoes of mid-20th century leftists who praised Stalin and actively covered up the atrocities in the Soviet Union.
I could not and did not vote for Trump, but I sulk a lot about current leftist positions too.
Good to be reassured that others share my viewpoint, thanks.
These people are constantly looking for a Trumplike figure to elevate as to excuse their worst behaviors.