Ignoring Democratic Norms

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Gerard Baker offers a few thoughts about the current state of the American body politic. Clearly, it is not very good. It is, as the old saying goes, divided against itself. While Donald Trump bears some responsibility, the notion that he and he alone is the cause of what ails America is obviously delusional. 

Baker begins with a sober assessment of the Biden presidency, a carnival of errors, led by an empty headed fool. It is so bad that by now everyone knows that the American left, through media manipulation, sold America a supposed cure that seems to have become worse than the disease.

Given the repressive attitude of the media and especially of the social media, the great American public is now reduced to expressing its political beliefs by screaming, “Fuck Joe Biden” in unison at sporting events. Of course, it is devilishly difficult to suppress the chants. Either you cover the games or you do not cover the games. If you cover them you will necessarily be promoting the chants. Even Facebook and Twitter are powerless to shut them down.

So, Baker offers an analysis of the opening months of the Biden presidency:

The Biden presidency is a metastasizing shambles, a real-world case study in the perils of progressive impossibilism: open borders; fiscal incontinence; naive strategic idealism; mask-wielding, mandate-waving, dissent-canceling, authoritarian collectivism. Mr. Biden is Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Walt Disney’s brilliant, nightmarish “Fantasia.” He’s seized the magician’s big hat and now everything he touches becomes a cascading waterfall of destruction.

Of course, as Baker explains, if Trump had won, the unhinged ranters who pretend to be defending democracy would never have accepted the election’s legitimacy. They did not accept it the last time, so there is no reason why they would have accepted it this time:

But the current predicament, and the poll’s judgment on it, got me thinking: How wide would Mr. Trump’s margin next time have to be for him to be accepted as president by the elites who have regarded it as their republican duty to thwart him? Ten percentage points? Twenty?

There is no margin of victory that Mr. Trump could secure that would legitimize his presidency in the eyes of the Democratic Party, the liberal media, most of the permanent government, and the rest of the establishment.

Attributing America’s constitutional crisis to Trump is dishonest and ignorant. It is designed primarily to cover up the bad behavior manifested by the American left. When unhinged radicals harassed Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in a restroom, the current president pooh-poohed it as part of American politics.

You know and I know that if any QAnon supporter had done the same to Hillary Clinton, the media would have been filled with gales of outrage-- and the right wing would instantly have been denounced and jailed as Nazi scum.

This is the larger, existential constitutional crisis the U.S. faces. It is not, as the Never Trump Robert Kagan argues in a much-discussed recent essay, all the product of a personality cult, the work of a narcissistic caudillo who emerged out of nowhere to lead an army of putschists against a benevolent state. It is deeply rooted and bipartisan; the malignancy owes at least as much to sustained antidemocratic behavior on the left and across much of the ruling classes as it does to the actions of a bombastic former president.

As for my comments on the Kagan piece, they are linked here.

As it happens, and to the dismay of his supporters, Trump is not entirely blameless. You may believe that he has been more sinned against than sinning, and you may believe that he was harassed and abused at an unconscionable level, but still, he does bear some responsibility for his behavior.

Mr. Trump carries a large part of the blame, to be sure. Whatever genuine doubts were sown last year by an election administered in the most permissive—and Democrat-friendly—way possible, he didn’t make a case to throw out even one precinct’s worth of votes. His continuing refusal to accept the results exerts a destabilizing force on the creaky institutions of republican government.

The more salient issue involves the behavior of the anti-Trump left. For all their clamoring about democratic norms, they themselves have been violating them systematically for years now:

But if they were honest, the people who want to stop Donald Trump would admit that they themselves have been traducing political norms at least since he first came down that escalator in 2015. The more we learn from John Durham’s investigation about the Russia fabrications, the better we understand the scale and duration of the campaign to defeat Mr. Trump, and then, failing that, to destabilize his administration and, yes, depose him.

Were the people who conducted this campaign—inside and outside government—faithful guardians of the Constitution?

So, Russian collusion was one volley. When it failed, the left sought other ways to destroy the Trump presidency-- because after all it was the only thing they knew how to do.

When the Russia effort sputtered, empty and exhausted, to a futile halt, these constitutional purists sought alternative ways to destroy the presidency. They seized on the killing of a black man by a police officer to unleash turmoil in the country, folding it into a narrative of racial persecution for which Mr. Trump was somehow held responsible.

“When the campaign of leaks and innuendo failed to dislodge Trump from power, the horizontally integrated pieces of the newly assembled anti-Trump messaging complex needed to pivot,” as the writer Wesley Yang puts it. “They sought a new basis for maintaining the ongoing state of emergency, and they found an out-of-the-box solution in the form of ‘anti-racist’ doctrines.”

And yet, right wing Trump supporters were not rioting, pillaging, looting and destroying major American cities last spring and summer. But, rather than apply moral judgment where it was deserved, the left decided to cover it all up, to refuse to hold their own constituents accountable, and to get up into the highest dudgeon over the protesters of January 6.

This narrative of continuing constitutional crisis for which only Republicans are to blame is a convenient political cover for Democrats. You will be told, even as Mickey Mouse’s reign of error continues, that you have no choice but to re-elect the people choreographing it—otherwise you will be guilty of conspiring in an overthrow of constitutional government. 

But until those on the other side acknowledge their own role in the undermining of democratic legitimacy, the crisis will only deepen.

Until it happens-- don’t hold your breath. Being moral degenerates of the first order they have learned one rule from today’s politics-- never take responsibility for your own failings. Shift the blame and shift the blame. If that does not work, shift the blame some more.

As the Biden presidency is exposed as incompetent, its handling of the Covid pandemic has one and only one purpose-- how can they blame it on Trump or on Republicans?

If the American public allows them to get away with it, as it has up to now, they will continue doing so.