After the Future

Quick Thoughts on the Impeachment

As I said in my post last week, this was political theater at a time when we're sick of it, but it was more compelling than I expected. Nevertheless, it's good that they got it over with in a week.  

Fifty-six percent of the country wanted him convicted, and 57% of the senators voted to convict. That's better than I expected. These days that's a landslide. And Mitch McConnell in his excoriating rebuke of Trump, no matter what his motivations, made it clear that he was guilty but got off on a technicality. That speech even played on Fox News. I think it's fair to say that at least 60% of the senate and the country see him as guilty. This is a crushing loss for Trump. Calling for witnesses would have been a mistake. 

The senate a broken institution and to expect anything more from it is ridiculous. The courts are not broken, and it's time for congress to step aside and let the courts do their far more credible job. They will provide a more effective and credible way to hold Trump accountable. At least I hope so.

And so the question now is what will happen in the real courts, and whether Trumpism will take some serious hits that will de-legitimate it with all but the craziest members of the Trump base. Will Trumpism become a liability for Trumpists who run in the midterms in '22.  

Trumpism will continue to play a strong role in state legislatures--and that's worrisome, but If we're lucky Trump becomes a George Wallace figure in the GOP, dividing them in a way that makes them increasingly irrelevant on the national stage. So there's reason to hope, but we remain on the razor's edge. 

 

Miscellaneous Thoughts on Impeachment, Culture, and the Surveillance State

It's important that the U.S. have a post-Trump reckoning about how much damage has been done, not just by him but by his enablers. Will the impeachment play some role in that? I doubt it, since the whole point of it is simply to focus on what is already known about what Trump did before and after the insurrection. The people who want to believe his role was negligible and is being exaggerated by Democrats will continue to believe that. Trump's impeachment lawyers can say any nonsense they want and not be held accountable as they would in a normal court of law. The impeachment, unless something surprising happens, will not change any minds. It will be more political theater in a year when we're sick of political theater. A "trial" like this can only work if you have good-faith, objective jurors who want to get to the bottom of things, and that's just not a description of the U.S. Senate.

I think that far more impactful will be real trials or legal proceedings in real courts, which are not broken institutions like the Senate. Already we're seeing how Fox and Newsmax are responding to real consequences for their having no compunction about broadcasting and magnifying Trump's lies. Goodbye Lou Dobbs.

When Trump is indicted or sued, no matter how compelling the evidence presented, there will be some who will not be convinced because they are the type of people who believe the moon landing was faked, Obama was a Muslim non-citizen, and HRC and and her gal pal in elite perversity, Huma Abedin, are Satan worshipping drinkers of children's blood. A good third of the country is unreachable, but there is a third of the country in the mushy middle that leans toward Trump and that is persuadable. I think putting Trump on trial in real courts with real evidence and with a real jury will make a difference in setting the record straight about who Trump is and what damage he has done to the country. Hopefully, all this will play out over the spring and summer as we're coming out of this pandemic nightmare. The two things working together might convince Americans that some kind of positive future is possible with relatively sane, relatively decent technocrats running the government.

On the subject of technocrats, I've just finished Bart Gellman's Dark Mirror, his account of the role he played in the Edward Snowdon NSA whistleblowing drama. Gelllman is no friend of government secrecy or the surveillance state, but he's a fair-minded reporter that brings into focus the complexity of the issues involved, and my reading this book, along with my actually living through the Trump era, has changed my mostly negative perception of the people who compose the so-called Deep State.

Like Gellman, I have always been concerned about potential abuses of the enormous surveillance powers of the state. What came into focus for me in reading his book and listening to the testimony of so-called deep state operatives during the impeachment trial last year was that there are very strong restraint norms in place that actually work most of the time. The resistance to Trump's abuses by the likes of Alexander Vindman, Bill Taylor, Maria Yovanovich, Fiona Hill, and others was all remarkable for representing a culture of integrity and loyalty to the constitution rather than to a single "dude", to use Ben Sasse's term of art.

If these are the people running the Deep State, more power to the Deep State if that's what's required to contain crackpot autocrats like Trump. If anything, I was surprised they were so impotent to prevent Trump from doing the damage he did, and that was because they lived within the restraint norms their culture prescribed. So this was clarifying for me. What matters most is culture, norms, traditions. That culture of restraint held up pretty well against Trump's assault on it. 

Because this is what it comes down to: Whom do you trust? The other day I wrote about why I thought that elites of both political parties were responsible for the fragilizing of our democracy. I argued that it wasn't so much about the individuals but about the culture that shapes the elite ethos in the media, politics, and business. The Neoliberal ethos of much of corporate America, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, and its media in its competition with with the Cowboy white-entitlement ethos of the Republican Party and its media created a political/economic system over the last thirty years that was utterly unresponsive to the needs of most ordinary Americans. Neither party was trustworthy because both were captured by a destructive elite cultural ethos that shaped their policy agendas. It's no wonder that so many Americans have developed a pox-on-both-their-houses attitude to the two-party system. And it's no wonder that the more ontologically dizzy among them would embrace insane conspiracy theories. 

Nevertheless, the Democrats produce people like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Stacy Abrams, and AOC. My argument for Bernie over Clinton in '16 was that more than anything the Democrats needed a change in culture and that's just not something Clinton was capable of effecting. (I wasn't sure Bernie could do it either, but he had a better shot at it.) But one of the things that has become clearer during the Trump years is that the Sanders/Warren wing of the party seems to have won the argument with the Neoliberal establishment wing represented by the Bidens and the Clintons--and really Obama, because he pretty much caved to it.

The ethos of the Democrats is clearly moving away from its Neoliberal assumptions shaped in the '80s and '90s toward a new ethos defined by a retrieval of a New Deal social democratic values, which is clearly what is called for in this historical moment. This is a return to its roots, roots that Democrats influenced by the Neoliberal Aspen-Institute elite mindset started to reject in the 1970s. So what we're seeing in the Democratic Party under Biden now is a much needed change in culture. 

That's a culture I can trust in the hands of someone like Biden because he is a decent enough and unoriginal enough guy that I can be assured that he will go with the flow--kinda like Obama did with the Neoliberals. In many ways he's the perfect figurehead for this change of party culture--reassuring to the mushy middle while being smart enough to know which way the wind is blowing. The question is whether he will be able to effect the way the mushy American middle perceives the Democrats' that will be significant enough to prevent Republicans from returning to power in '22--or ever, at least until they return to some level of sanity.

So far so good with Biden. A lot depends on whether events will work to support the marginalization of Trumpism in the next year or so. Those events will be primarily the success of Biden's legislative initiatives and further revelations about the extent of Trump's corruption, and perhaps even revelations about his treason. I realize that people like me might be vulnerable to our own kind of conspiracy theory, but it wouldn't surprise me if it turns out that Trump was a Russian asset, whether witting or unwitting.  I'm willing to concede, however, that this might be the kind of disinformation that fits my presuppositions. We'll see. The mystery of Trump's prodigious ass kissing of Putin has yet to be explained. 

So back to Gellman's Dark Mirror. The surveillance technology is there, whether or not they are going to be used. They are going to be used, so the real question is whether they will be abused. And the only real constraint is a culture of restraint within the  institutions that have access to these technologies. I was very impressed by the way the culture and its individual technocrats in the national security community pushed back against Trump and his appointees at the time of Zelensky call and in other matters. The culture held, but it would not have held had Trump won another four years in the White House. He could have effected a change of culture by purge and forced retirements. I'm persuaded that at least for now the culture of the surveillance state is basically trustworthy. 

Laws are needed to restrict abuses, but what's more important is a culture of restraint, because if the culture is permissive about abuses, the laws won't matter. The Democrats represent a culture of restraint (Obama's respect for process is exemplary if irritating in this respect) in a way that the Republicans have proved time and time again that they don't. The line from Nixon's Watergate to Reagan's Iran Contra to Cheney's Abu Ghraib to McConnell's cynical obstructionism to Trump's besotted minions storming the Capitol is all understandable because of the fundamentally delusional thinking that is at the foundation Republican Party culture. Even the saner, principled conservative, small-government Republicans are fundamentally clueless about how the world works and what is called for by central governments at this historical moment. 

Nothing is more important in the next decade than that this political culture of delusion be de-legitimated. The surveillance state and the problems of technocracy are going to continue to present serious challenges to a viable democracy, but there is no living without them--especially if we are going into an era of hard-right domestic violent terrorism. The most important thing is that we elect elites who will be stewards of the traditions, norms, and cultures of the institutions that wield these awesome powers. Clearly the Republicans are not trustworthy stewards, and while we must hope that the forces of sanity prevail in keeping them out of power in the near future, we must always be vigilant that the Democrats don't slip into the kind of delusions that shaped their policies while captured for over thirty years by the Neoliberal Washington Consensus. 

The Failure of Democracy is the Failure of Elites

For all our talk of democracy, it's pretty obvious that the country is run by elites in business, media, and politics. The rest of us get to ratify the general leftish or rightish direction they seem to be going, but the actual power of the people is pretty crude and is in effect plebiscitary. Elite thinking is the only thinking that really matters, and all talk about the will of the people is really pretty fanciful.

And so people across the political spectrum are for their different reasons have become extremely frustrated that the political system seems so utterly unresponsive to their will that it's completely understandable that cynicism about politics should be so pervasive. This cynicism has turned toxic in the more populist precincts of American society, and Democratic elites bear much of the responsibility for the loss of the white working class to that was solidly Democratic before Reagan to the current fever dreams of the Right.  

So we can talk all we want about how delusional Trump supporters are, but it wouldn't have come to this if it weren't for a fundamental nihilism or fecklessness among the country's elites--including its Liberal elites. I hold the Bill Clintons, Dick Morrises, Rahm Emmanuels, Larry Summers, and the whole Neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party as significantly responsible for the rise of the Tea Party, Trumpism, and  Q anon--if not quite as responsible as spineless Republican elites like Kevin McCarthy and Marco Rubio or the calculating cynicism of Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz and so many other game players like them. Not to mention Rupert Murdoch.

My point here is that the Democratic elites were criminally negligent in their Neoliberal Washington Consensus cluelessness, and that combined with their run-of-the mill Beltway swampiness and their capture by a kind politically correct silliness they gave Fox and Limbaugh enough to work with so that even sane people began believing the worst about them. So I think it's fair to say that If Democracy fails in the United States in the next decade, it won't be caused by White Supremacist militias and Q anon conspiracists, but because of the accumulated failures of elites that created the conditions for their emergence. 

In a very blunt sense, Q anon, insane as its specific assertions are, isn't wrong. Elite culture may not be dominated by Satan-worshipping pedophiles with space lasers made by Jews, but there is a kind of nihilism in which ego, greed, and will to power are simply accepted as normative as the main motivating driving forces in politics, business, and media. Mythologizing that nihilism by way of demonizing it in conspiracy theories takes what is kinda true and twists it into something that just isn't, but that doesn't mean that the kinda true part of it can be dismissed because of the crazy way it's being distorted. 

This is not an indictment of many individuals in business, media, and politics because clearly there are many fine people in each of these areas, but there is a pervasive cynicism about the corruption of our institutions that pervades popular culture for good reason. It's understandable why so many people are inclined to think the worst of someone like Joe Biden even if he doesn't deserve it. But why anyone can think the best of a sleazy crackpot like Donald Trump--that he is a better man, a truer American than Joe Biden or Barrack Obama--is one of the most astonishing feats of political jiujitsu in my lifetime. The irony of Trump being adopted as if he were Michael the Archangel leading an army to slay the Satanic armies is so absurdly whackadoodle, it leaves one speechless. 

During most of my adult life, media--especially prestige fiction, film, and TV--present a picture of American institutions that are run by psychopaths whose ego, greed, and will to power are the ugly truth that determines policy no matter what the decent people who work in these institutions would prefer. There is a feeling that the evil power that they and their institutions represent has a kind of stolid inevitability, that Don Quixotes can break their lances tilting at it and might win a victory here or there, but that the power and inevitability of this evil power is implacable. At best the decent folk are the John Kellys or Jim Mattises who try to provide some check on the worst instincts of the really terrible people who rise to the pinnacles of power in these spheres. But in the end, the good people either are either coopted or purged.

Trump isn't an aberration; he's just someone who daylights, magnifies, and exaggerates what's already there almost everywhere. He's somebody who believes that everybody is as bad as he, as cynical and self-interested in his or her motivations as he, and he's more right than wrong about that when it comes to so many of the people who rise to positions of power and influence in this country. 

Does that sound extreme or overly cynical on my part? Maybe, but it seems pretty clear to me that those motivations are by and large accepted as normative within these elite spheres. People working in these institutions as individuals may be more or less decent, but the institutional ethos is deeply corrupted by the exigencies of capitalism, and it makes sense that those who are most successful in such a corrupt values environment are those who have the least compunction about behaving corruptly. Is there any wonder that decent, but poorly informed people in great swaths of America are inclined see the ruling elites the way they do?

But perhaps that's why I feel a scintilla of hope. Yes, it might prove naive, but it's precisely because Trump has daylighted and magnified for all to see what we have in fact become that maybe, just maybe, especially as more comes out about him in coming months, that we will come to some broad collective resolution to reject elite nihilism for something better. The catch, of course, is whether something better will present itself. Biden might buy us some time, but he's not it. Will it come from within elite precincts of American society or from somewhere else? Don't know. But it's more likely to come from African American people of faith than from a soul-eviserated white elite, imo. Not the Kamala Harrises, but the Stacey Abrams. Not the Corey Bookers, but the Raphael Warnocks. We'll see.