A letter to my former student:
This is going to be a long post, and I realize almost no one will actually bother to read it. But I need to say it. So let’s begin.
Recently, I had a Twitter exchange with a former student. He’s a really good guy; I like him a lot, and always have. Our interactions are positive and respectful. He’s a veteran of the Persian Gulf War who has gone on to be a teacher, an administrator, and a coach at at a high school. He has been a servant to the nation and the community and deserves nothing but respect for that.
In the course of our exchange, he volunteered the following comment:
“and, please understand that it is possible to be a conservative without being a supporter of our president - in fact, I’ve been waiting for a while to cast a vote for someone I actually favored as opposed to against someone I do not!”
What follows is my response:
Of course it it possible to be a conservative without being a supporter of our president – in theory. In theory, there might be a credible conservative alternative to Donald Trump who might advance a conservative political agenda that you might agree with.
But we don’t live in the world of “in theory.” We live in this world, at this time. And the conservative politics you wish to support no longer exists. Rather, conservatism in its American sense – belief in limited government, support for independent businesses, a confidence in the rights and capacity of the individual to make choices for themselves and to live with the consequences of those choices (at least in matters not related to abortion rights, which American conservatives do not seem to trust women to exercise) – has been dying for at least 30 years. Modern conservatism is a mere shadow of its former self, and there is no evidence that there is a credible conservative core inside the Republican Party around which a contemporary conservative movement that looks like the older one might form.
My concern with your impulse to vote against candidates you don’t like (Democrats, I presume) is with the unchallengeable fact that Donald Trump and his enablers now constitute an existential threat to the survival of American democracy itself. Voting for Trump OR his Republican enablers makes one complicit in advancing that threat. Indeed, so long as no serious challenger to Trump and his enablers emerges from within the Republican Party, there is no moral or ethical way to support the party’s candidates – at least for federal office. (Federalism still allows the possibility of credible Republican choices at the state and local level, at least in some regions.)
I can’t possibly describe all the ways Trump and his enablers have made the Republican Party an existential threat to American democracy. I will focus on five: 1) Trump’s demonization of the media; 2) Trump’s demonization of the weak and defenseless in society; 3) Trump’s demand for the prosecution of his political opponents; 4) Trump’s delegitimation of elections; and 5) Trump’s delegitimation of the rule of law.
Please note that none of these topics has anything to do with daily disputes about regular political issues. I am not addressing the wrong-headedness of Trump’s actions that have undermined NATO. I am not focusing on the stupidity of his unconcern about global climate change, or about his failures in healthcare reform, or his appointment of federal judges. I might critique all of those things, but those are the stuff of ordinary politics. Rather, I am focusing on forces that pull democracies apart. Supporting Trump – and his Republican allies today – constitutes a threat to the American republic.
–1. The demonization of the media. OK: all presidents dislike the press. Some, like Nixon, hated the press. But they all seemed to understand that the press was part of the system. They (mostly) all seemed to understand that the often antagonistic relationship between the press and the politicians was a key component of a functioning democracy. They seemed to understand that, as Justice Black put it in his concurrence in NY Times v United States (the Pentagon Papers case), “In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.”
Donald Trump does not believe this. In fact, he has openly stated as much, telling 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, “You know why I do it? [Attack the press?] I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.” In other words, Donald Trump is engaged in an open, unrestrained effort to undermine the press in order to serve his own power and advance his own agenda.
In undermining the possibility of a free, critical press Trump is damaging the prospects that any future American people will believe that the press can do the job it needs to do. Once all media is framed as partisan, the notion of information, of facts, dies. And no future president will face constraint by a free press either: what is good for the goose is good for the gander. Trump will not be the last president to rely on the “lyin’ media” frame if Trump manages to convince the American people that no one should believe the press, however imperfect it may be.
Notably, no significant part of the Republican party or its leaders are challenging Trump’s attacks on the media in any meaningful way. They are, if anything, promoting it. As a consequence, supporting either Trump or his Republican enablers threatens a linchpin of American democracy. It cannot be justified.
–2. The demonization of the weak and the vulnerable: The savageness with which Donald Trump treats his targets is remarkable. It has been a long time coming, of course: recall the infamous scenes in which Tea Party activists mocked a homeless veteran for seeking help during the 2010 midterms. But Trump seems to delight, indeed to positively revel, in punching downwards. Like most bullies, Trump focuses on people who can’t really fight back as he spews bile, hate, and mockery at them. His targets don’t just include minorities and immigrants, of course, but disabled persons, people – usually women – Trump decides aren’t attractive, victims of natural disasters, and, of course, even war heroes/prisoners/soldiers killed in combat serving the United States.
Please note that the research here is clear: when presidents demonize one group or other, many in the president’s audience end up hating the targeted groups more than they were already predisposed to. In other words, when presidents attack, public opinion measurably shifts in ways that reflect and amplify the president’s rhetoric.
Trump’s disgusting, hate-filled rhetoric harms the vulnerable and marginalized in society in ways that you and I, who are after all middle class white guys, simply cannot understand – even as we can empathize with them. And so long as no serious Republican challenger emerges to resist Trump’s vile perversion of our politics, so long as Republican doctrine – not just Trump’s – is to serve the powerful and afflict the afflicted, then supporting Republicans, at least at the federal level, is immoral. It also erodes the promise of the American civic experiment to discover if people of different races and creeds and ideas and histories can live together in some semblance of freedom.
–3. The demand for the prosecution of political opponents: Politics is a blood sport, and at least in elections it is zero-sum. My win is your loss. Yet most democracies manage to survive because a norm develops that win or lose, we have to respect others’ rights to participate, advocate their policies, and promote their points of view. Opponents are not enemies. They are competitors.
There has been an undeniable trend over the last 30 years to shift the language of political competition from “opponents” to “enemies.” Not all this shift has been concocted by Republicans, or by Trump, by any means. But Trump is the first president in modern US history to respond to political opponents by insisting that they need to be imprisoned for crimes against the nation. He is the first to systematically incite his supporters to openly chant for the jailing of a political opponent. He is the first since Richard Nixon to demand that the law enforcement agencies of the United States serve his partisan political agenda by investigating his opponents for crimes that they have already been cleared of.
This is the stuff that happens in crackpot countries. Newly-installed dictators purge their opponents, using the levers of power to confirm their authority. But in so doing, they make the stakes of any moment of political transition extraordinarily high: the game literally becomes all or nothing, since the consequences of losing can mean imprisonment. And since the stakes are so high, so is the conflict: no one can afford to lose, so they fight it out to the last breath.
“Lock her up” isn’t funny. It isn’t cute. Weaponizing law enforcement for political ends has profound consequences for the stability of democracy.
Trump’s claims that Hillary Clinton and other opponents ought to be imprisoned undermines confidence in the possibility of peaceful transitions of power in the United States. Until I see evidence that anyone on the Republican side is fighting back against Trump’s gross abuse of federal power, supporting him or the party that enables his abuses undermines the possibility of democratic governance as such.
–4. The deligitimation of elections: No one likes to lose. And gerrymandering, and manipulated vote counts, and other forms of voter suppression have been an unfortunate part of our political life since the Republic was formed.
But Trump has exceeded any other president in his all out assault on the norms of electoral politics. He claims he won the popular vote in 2016 … once you discount the 3,000,000+ votes cast by illegal aliens. Against all evidence he continues to assert that in-person voter fraud is vast – but only in those elections that he and his party members lose. In 2018 he described legally-prescribed recounts as efforts to “steal” the elections from his team.
All this, meanwhile, is happening when it is clear that the majority of vote shenanigans in the US are perpetrated by Republicans: North Carolina’s Voter ID law was overturned for its explicit racial bias, while both North Carolina’s and Pennsylvania’s Congressional districts were declared unconstitutionally gerrymandered. (Pennsylvania’s redrawn districts produced a balanced outcome; North Carolina’s were not redrawn due to time concerns, and Republicans in North Carolina perpetuated their 10-3 majority in Congressional seats despite the fact that Democrats in North Carolina got 100,000 more votes statewide than Republicans did.) And this doesn’t even begin to touch on the closing of vote stations in minority dominant districts, the purging of voter rolls, and the like – all of which have been shown to be disproportionately burdensome on people of color.
Given that NO Republican leaders AT ALL have in any way challenged any of this, the entire Republican party is culpable in undermining American democracy as manifested in the need for free and fair elections. There is simply no way to vote for Republicans and also vote for the protection of properly run, properly managed elections. Voting for Republicans today is to support the undermining of free and fair elections in the United States.
–5. The delegitimation of the rule of law: Criticism is one thing. It is unpleasant, but it is fundamentally healthy. But demonization is another thing altogether. Asserting that law enforcement agencies are corrupt – without evidence – is corrosive to political legitimacy.
Trump, of course, is engaged in the systematic delegitmation of the rule of law. His understanding of the law is that it should serve his interests and his political purposes. His understanding of any investigation he doesn’t like is that it is a witch hunt.
This, too, is the enterprise of dictators. If the law only works for the powerful, who at the same time insist that they are victims of the law, then democracy cannot function.
And again, the actual Republican party, the one that actually exists right now, has wholly abetted this abuse. They have cravenly cowed to Trump’s rhetoric for fear of facing his tweets, the talking parrots at FOX News, and the hordes of Trumpizoidal maniacs who are likely to show up in primary elections. Lindsay Graham prosecuted the Clinton impeachment for charges ultimately derived from the fact that Bill Clinton lied about getting a blowjob from a woman who was not his wife. Today, he insists that campaign finance payoffs running to hundreds of thousands of dollars illegally spent as part of a scheme to protect a presidential candidate’s election chances are no big deal – merely lies told to protect the candidate’s family. The hypocrisy would stagger … at any other time than this one.
Voting for Republicans today inevitably means supporting the subversion of the rule of law. It means supporting the erosion of American democracy.
At this point, Trump apologists usually offer some version of the comment, “both sides do it.” Well, no they don’t. Not to anything close to this scale. Not organized at the very top of the political system, where now the Trump reelection team is being completely integrated with the RNC’s fundraising operation – for the first time in US history. (The grift is about to get vastly bigger than anyone can even fantasize.)
America is in trouble. It is time to recalibrate “voting against people you don’t like.” It is time to kill the modern Republican Party. It’s the only way to bring it back to life.
snowghoul
turnnoffyourmind
jbbartram-illu
germansingergirl
