Tuesday, October 5, 2021

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.

6 comments:

Ares Olympus said...

Ignoring the name-calling in this post, I agree all around, failing democratic norms, or civil norms seems to be the sign of the times. And Joe Biden isn't going to unify us, even if his administration did lead as the moderate unifier he pretended to be in the campaign that got him to a record 81 million votes.

What we most clearly see is how immaturity works. You want to act badly, your conscious gets in the way? Don't despair! Don't reflect! Just keep the fingers pointing on what your rivals are doing that is worse and you're off the hook. You can do anything! Grievance rage, identity-politics are really that powerful on any sides. And populists will always rise up to meet them.

I don't know if the sports-event "F Joe Biden" chants are a response to people feeling silenced. I imagine it does feel liberating to be a part of a united mob, and if it continues maybe people who disagree with the sentiment will simply stop attending sports events, and we'll have one more place we'll be a divided society. Sports stadiums can be the safe space for the disgruntled on the right, just extensions of Trump's rambunctious rallies.

And really what "F Biden" chants seems to me is a call for Trump to return. His voice needs to be restored to Twitter and Facebook. So these are HIS PEOPLE, as he likes to call them, and now THEY are fighting for him.

I don't feel sorry for Trump and I think he got what he deserved. I do feel sorry for the Republicans in office now, those who want to express ideas that are not just about tribal grievances, those who don't want to cheer when sports stadiums are filled with profanity. But if they dare speak up, there's a good chance they'll be primaried, and a good chance they'll lose with all this rage. Trump can sink any Republican's career even without twitter.

Trump was just dissing Florida's Governor Desantis? Why? Because every poll shows Desantis as the most-named candidate for President 2024. Ronald Reagan's 11th commandment was never Trump's. Trump has no loyalty to anything except his own aggrandizement. And Republicans are beholden to aggrieved voters who see no reason to compromise for anything but the best, no matter what cost this is to their future success or our country.

Anonymous said...

"Donald Trump bears some responsibility" In exactly the same way a good samaritan trying to save a drowning person is responsible for the victim being in the water. All Trump did was confront those who use division to gain power.

Sam L. said...

"Ignoring Democratic Norms": There's a difference between "Democrat norms" and "democratic norms". I see "democrat norms" as "bombs on the fly".

"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." There wasn't any in 2016, either. My ONLY faith in Democrats is that they will lie, cheat, and steal.

"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." I have been hearing about QAnon for some time, but I have yet to find out WHAT it is, other that a bugbear to the Left.

Anonymous said...

Qanon was a blog where an unknown blogger posted predictions often claiming to have inside information. The blog would have never become famous but for two things: 1. It was anti left/fascist which of course upset the MSM and hollywood. 2. Worse even though the posts were far right conspiracy theories more often then not they turned out to be accurate, which of course upset the left/fascists in government who were exposed.

Sam L. said...

Democrats? Have NORMS?? SURELY...you JEST!

Thanks, Anon, for that one ray of sunshine.

markedup2 said...

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

Any suggestions for disallowing it that don't involve people dying?

What we most clearly see is how immaturity works. You want to act badly, your conscious gets in the way? Don't despair! Don't reflect! Just keep the fingers pointing on what your rivals are doing that is worse and you're off the hook.

Because maturity has been working out so well. Republicans have spent the last 50 years "maturely" getting ostracized. How did the party that eliminated slavery become the racists? By acting mature and not beating the shit (rhetorically or literally) out of the Left who has been acting immaturely longer than I've been alive.