Fear itself

My friend Michael the Atlanta lawyer has some guardedly optimistic thoughts that in my view seem well-grounded, despite everything:

I started “Fear Itself” this week, Ira Katznelson’s book about the Long New Deal. He covers it through both the Truman Administration and dovetails the domestic analysis with the foreign policy choices made by FDR and Truman. The opening quarter of the book is about how the US was gripped by massive, justified fear throughout this time period (he rejects the notion that FDR had made the country optimistic by 1937) and that FDR came to power within a context of parliamentary democracies throughout the world seemingly in retreat. Fascism and Communism seemed to have better answers to the Depression, which had delegitimized the notion of a republic. When he came to power, there was an assumption on the part of many people (Waler Lippmann, for example) that he would get temporary powers akin to a wartime leader such that he could rule by decree. Instead, while he did take more power than his predecessors, the New Deal was mostly passed through Congress. That’s the jumping off point for Katznelson to talk about how the Southern Democrats who had power in Congress were both populist allies of the New Deal and also racists who hemmed in its ability to challenge White supremacy.

This section triggered the first optimistic thought I’ve had in a while: in meaningful ways, Trump has not been able to govern as a true authoritarian. He can’t get the SAVE Act through Congress. He hasn’t brow-beaten the Senate GOP into getting rid of the Parliamentarian or the filibuster because the Senators know what that will mean the next time the Democrats have a trifecta. He knows that he cannot implement the SAVE Act through executive order. His side is taking a fat L on the TSA shutdown and is having to approve a resolution where TSA gets funded but ICE does not (although they are mostly funded for the whole year anyway). He deployed ICE to airports and they were purely scenery, which is an indication of what would happen if he tried to sending them to polling places in November and that’s before you get to the fact that there are few airports and lots of polling places. His signature policy got whacked by the Supreme Court.

I am not pushing back on the notion that Trump hasn’t caused massive damage in a million different ways. He has. He started a war that has caused economic shocks and for which there are no easy answers. He declared war on Minnesota. He has terrorized immigrant communities. He has caused lasting damage to public health. His Administration makes the corruption of those of Harding or Grant look like nothing. My point is simply that our system still constrains a wannabe caudillo in meaningful ways and we should not ignore that in the otherwise steady tide of terrible news.

This might be dismissed as Guardrails Lite, but I think the better response is, politics and culture and their interaction are very complicated, and its important to acknowledge, as he does, both the immense damage that Trump has done, is doing, and will do, to American life and its institutions, and the very real limitations on his ability to destroy everything worth preserving that still exist.

For me, the most critical question of the next two and a half years will be this: What will Trump’s refusal to abide by the results of the electoral process any time he loses produce? The SAVE Act is an example of Trump being high on his own supply, in which the in the constantly in flux combination of Savvy Trump, Bullshit Trump, and Stupid Trump combine in some way that has led him to conclude “sincerely,” to the extremely limited extent such a concept ever makes sense when applied to his mental states, that Republicans lose elections only because of cheating. But the thing about this belief, besides the fact that, like so much of his “thinking,” it’s some combination of convenient conscious lying/bullshitting and stupid paranoid delusional ideation, is that it doesn’t even make any sense as a pragmatic matter. It’s far from clear that the provisions of the SAVE Act would even help Republicans on net, because it’s just paranoid flailing in response to the imaginary problem of “voter fraud”. (the real fraud, as always, is that there are too many non-white people in America now, which is the esoteric as opposed to the exoteric meaning of “voter fraud,” h/t Th Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss Experience, feat. WF Buckley and Stephen Miller).

This applies both to the results of the midterms, and especially to the 2028 election, which I expect will feature Trump’s fourth presidential campaign, despite the flagrant illegality of this that even the laziest Federalist Society hack will be unable to defend.

So yes, the institutions are sort of giving way but sort of holding as well, and the ultimate test for them is going to be what it was in 2020, which is that Trump isn’t going to accept electoral losses. In regard to that as well as everything else that might happen, the future is unwritten.

. . . Andrew Gelman offers a significant caveat:

You write, “It’s far from clear that the provisions of the SAVE Act would even help Republicans on net,” and, indeed, it’s far from clear . . . but I think that part of the plan of the Save act would be to cause chaos.  Millions of legitimate voters would suddenly be disenfranchised, and then the Supreme Court could step in and say that the Constitution requires that they count all the votes from rural whites who are obviously citizens but not count votes from urban areas where there is a legitimate concern about fraud.  Etc.

The point is that there’s no way the provisions of the act could really be implemented as written because of how many millions of people would be outraged that their votes don’t count, and the courts have a track record in ruling asymmetrically in such settings.  State legislatures could also get involved, which gives the Supreme Court another set of “researcher degrees of freedom” (as we say in the replication crisis) to get the results they want, by deferring to the states where desired and ruling against the states where not.

I’m not saying this would definitely work–I guess that some members of the court would be bothered by this sort of thing–but it seems like it could be the plan.

You know that principle:  make everything illegal and then the cops and the government have complete discretion as to who to throw in jail?  This is similar:  invalidate millions of votes and then they get to decide which votes count.