I love this new idea and look forward to both reading these paired essays and working on my own thinking as a result. Today's thoughts are both so interesting and well-written. I do think they seem less like counterpoints to each other and more like a "Yes, and..." to each other. As we've learned throughout all the Trump years, both bad outcomes can happen...
Thank you! They aren't completely in opposition on everything but there really are strong points of disagreement. I will engage more of my disagreements in the comments and maybe future newsletters since this is such an important topic/debate.
I strongly support the idea of "The Counter" as a feature of this newsletter, want to thank Zeynep for including it, and hope to see more of it in the future. In this particular case, there is much Zeynep and Maciej agree on, but there IS strong disagreement on how important Trump's actions contesting the election are. Zeynep is very concerned, and Maciej thinks it is not worth bothering about. For me, this is an area where I am not sure what to think and don't have well-formed opinions. I find Zeynep's arguments (which are echoed in much of the media I consume, at least in a despairing, resigned way) compelling in the way that I find many arguments about important norms being transgressed compelling. I do believe that erosion of these norms is highly detrimental, especially over time. At the same time, I don't find it clear what to do about that. Publicly complaining about it to like-minded people does not seem like it accomplishes much, publicly complaining about it to non-like-minded people also seems unlikely to accomplish much, and doing nothing about it simply allows the erosion to continue. Those obviously aren't the only three options, but I don't have a sense of what would be a good alternative. Maciej, on the other hand, argues that we need to focus on the more pressing emergency of maintaining the ability to win elections under the existing biased structure, and finding ways to govern within a severely damaged system. He lays out a daunting view of the current situation (I love the metaphor of us locked out in our bathrobes, which does a wonderful job of capturing the sense of disorientation and sudden realization of the amount of effort needed to address the situation), but to me this view comes with a much clearer prescription for where to direct energy and attention. He may be wrong that Trump's shenanigans (and Republican's acquiescence to them) are not a big deal, but he may nevertheless be right that the most effective response to them is to move on and focus on other things.
I don't have an easy answer, but to me danger of ignoring it and hoping that it goes away is three-fold. One, the many millions of people who know think their votes were stolen deserve an answer, and it's wrong and dangerous to let that dangle. Two, Biden is being gravely de-legitimized—see point one—and that's under a setup where he will already have difficulty governing. Three, before he does all these things, we are told that he won't. Then he does. Then we are told it won't matter. But they do! And now we're down to our institutions will stand up to this. I wouldn't take such things granted!
I'm confused about your third point. A big chunk of the commentariat publicly worried that Trump would contest the election result, and then he did exactly what they predicted. It wasn't dismissed, but anticipated.
That said, institutions and people are allowed to notice, after four years, that Trump doesn't follow through and is incapable of sustained effort towards any goal. That's what I meant in my rebuttal about not treating his coup du jour attempt with the same seriousness in 2020 as we might have in 2016.
They thought the contesting would be performative—a few days of cries, a tantrum that would die out in a bout a week. That's clearly what the Republican leadership thought, too, and contra your arguments that this is going exactly as they planned (waiting it out), I think they did a real tactical error by not intervening quickly (after the first week) and will live to regret it as this will tear at the party for a long time.
Y'know, I think Zeynep is right that the transgressive structural changes left in Trump's wake do make our institutions more vulnerable to someone with a combination of, say, Trump's wacky tough-guy charisma and something like Mitch McConnell's vicious political competence. On the other hand, I also think you're right that even now there remains a resilience in the U.S. and its institutions that someone who grew up in a place like Turkey or the DDR might overlook.
All that said, I do think that disruptive conflict is more likely than not. If it does begin with a coup attempt, it'd better be a damned competent one, though, otherwise in a country the size of ours, divided the way it is, a long-running civil war -- now hot, now cold -- seems a far more likely outcome. Biden and Pelosi (and the Clintons, and the Obamas, etc., etc. -- the whole dismal Democratic Party Politburo) still think AOC is a Communist, and that any day now they're going to return triumphantly to 1992. And we call Trump delusional...!
Love this format! Both articles and arguments are well formed. It reminds me of a story I heard from a friend of mine, a Philosophy professor for many years.
"Two grand-daughters had a terrible disagreement. The first took her argument to her wise grandmother. Hearing the 1st grand daughter's well articulated argument the grandmother smiled and said "You know I think you are right."
Learning this from the triumphant 1st grand-daughter, the 2nd grand-daughter was incensed. She took her argument to her grandmother and made a passionate, well reasoned argument, for why she was right and her sister wrong.
The grandmother listened, smiled and said, "You know I think you are right!"
Now both grand-daughters were nearly losing their minds so filled with disbelief. Together they confronted the grand mother exclaiming, look the two sides of our argument are like night and day, they BOTH canNOT be right!
The grandmother smiled warmly at her lovely, intelligent and passionate grand-daughters and said, "You know, I think you are right!"
Love the format. Reminds me of a story friend of mine, a philosophy professor, told me.
Two sisters have a passionate argument. They are both certain they are right. Not being able to reconcile, the first sister visits her wise grandmother and lays out the disagreement, arguing passionately, persuasively for her point of view. The grandmother smiles at her grand-daughter and says, "you know I think you are right."
Hearing this the 2nd sister can't believe it. She too goes to the grandmother and makes a powerful case for why she in fact is correct, and her sister, unfortunately, terribly misguided. The grandmother listens, considers, nods her head at the the 2nd grand daughter, and says, "You know I think you are right."
Now both sisters are about to lose their minds. Together they confront their grandmother exclaiming our two arguments are like night and day, they both cannot be right! The grandmother gazed at her two lovely, intelligent and oh so passionate grand-daughters, looked at them earnestly and said, "You know, I think you are right!"
Thanks to you both for these pieces! I find points to agree with in both, to wit:
- It's clear that there are large parts of the Republican party that will do anything to stay in power, including if necessary a coup. They're definitely trying it.
- Local election officials, even if technically members of parties, are some of the most reliably mission-oriented people in the US. That & the fact that the military was immovable largely saved this election.
- My add: one of the biggest Republican plays of the last 40 years is connecting national political issues to local politics. Sarah Palin, for example, first came to power as a rabidly anti-choice mayor of a suburban town (not traditionally much of a mayoral issue). School boards are another one. My non-expert guess is that they will from here try to elect active partisans into election administration jobs where they can. That will be awful & should be fought along with all the other political battles we need.
- I'm not sure if a more competent authoritarian is the biggest risk, or a closer election, or simply the fact that the people who voted for Jesse The Body and Arnold Schwarzenegger are always happy to take a flier on a celebrity (I'm in California, so the memory of the recall of a next-in-line establishment democrat to get the Governator into power resonated all over the 2016 election for me), & there are a lot of them.
- I'm still scared of what this Lame Duck Information War in the courts and the disconnected media ecosystems is going to do to 2022 & 2024, but I take heart in the idea that we need to do the same long-term things to both win elections and prevent coups: pay attention to elections all up & down the ballot, and show people that government can actually help us.
Mayors and school boards are a place to look at but where you really see it is county commissioners, which wield a lot of control in surprising areas. And a lot of people who end up on county commissions start in places like school boards or small city councils.
*Seriously.* Where I live, the county commissioners have hamstrung the public health department during the pandemic by appointing a vocal anti-vaxxer and anti-masker to the county health board and yelping "constitutional freedom" every time the hospital and health department beg them to do *anything* to slow the spread.
Anyway. Yes. Counties have a lot of power in surprising areas that affect people's lives in very real ways, from water rights and land use to public health situations like our current one.
Yes. Yes it is. I had looked into getting a recall petition going ("incompetence" is a valid reason for prompting a recall election here), but I looked at the numbers after the election and it's pretty clear that a petition could probably get enough signatures to prompt a recall, but also clear that the current commissioners wouldn't have much trouble getting reelected.
Counties really do have a lot of power over people's lives!
I think trying to discern which of these two viewpoints is more correct should *not* be the place we get stuck on.
When there are two valid interpretations or proposed actions involving an outcome whose consequences are extremely important, but ultimately impossible to predict with accuracy, the question should be:
Start by assuming we can't know this with certainty.
What is the cost/harm of being wrong if we went with A, compared to the cost of being wrong if we went with B?
In decades of technical assistance to non-profit organizations, public health campaigns, and assisting in medical decision-making, I have often found this approach to be something of an Occam's Razor. It starts with accepting that perfect prediction is impossible. It maps closely to the risk vs benefit of medical decision making. Conversely, once someone frames the problem we should address as "which of this is right?", almost limitless effort tends to get stuck there.
BTW, Zeynep, your idea of publicly and respectfully addressing counter-arguments is just wonderful. This is applying the scientific method. This kind of inquiry is what moves knowledge forward instead of creating further attachment to one's prior interpretations.
I don't know enough about any of this to pick out the significant areas of disagreement, but it seems to me that Maciej's points end up building the case for why it's possible for your essay to be correct. (I realize that thinking is very tangled; I guess like other commenters I find that the essays "yes, and" each other more than they disagree.) As many have written elsewhere, the seeds of fascism have always been strong in the U.S., but it's also the structures that permit and entrench minority rule that can -- and seem to be -- give the minority the means and the will to stage a coup (or whatever word we want to use) when they feel that democracy no longer serves them.
The fact that Dems lost so badly down the ballot seems to me to be the result of this cycle feeding on itself. I live in Montana and, while it's usually characterized as a red state, it's been purple most of my life (I was born here in 1976) and I have never until this year seen it swing so firmly to the right. There are a lot of factors that have led to that, but I think a disconnect from physical reality is a big one. Covid, for example, didn't start killing and hospitalizing large numbers of people until after the election, so R's failures to deal with it on a national level seemed less important to many than what they perceived as overreach by our D governor being reflective of D overreach in general.
What I'm curious about is how climate change will shift a lot of demographics. When people start moving out of hurricane- and fire-prone areas to places they deem more "safe," and where they can work remotely, will "big squares of nothing" like Wyoming start representing a larger proportion of the population than they (or we, since one could characterize Montana similarly) currently do? And will the realities of climate change finally hit science-deniers over the head? Or will it enable further entrenchment of conspiracy theories and eagerness for hardline evangelical Christianity (for example) with its simple answers?
Great thoughts and questions! Just listened to a wonderful Bill Gates' podcast on climate change (Rashida Jones is the moderator, they had Elizabeth Kolbert as a guest). At the end, Rashida asked Bill what the #1 thing individuals can do to help mitigate/reverse the changes we are seeing today - Bill, did not hesitate he said it was use your and be involved in politics. I am hopeful that the younger generations are smart enough to see and know this.
I think they are. This is more philosophical, but I was listening to something by Stephen Jenkinson (I don't know how to categorize him -- philosopher?) where he talked about how people of his age have lost the right to ask young people to explain themselves. Instead, he said, you have to turn your chair and look where they're looking (metaphorically). You will be stunned by the courage it takes to see what they see and still keep going.
Also (this is my soapbox and I'll probably never get down) community involvement whether it's politics or volunteering. I know I'm not the first person to say the pandemic has been a stress test for how communities will fare when climate change begins to hit hard. Getting involved with your local community, neighborhood, whatever, has massive add-on benefits that are often intangible.
What's the podcast? I don't know that one but it sounds good!
Well said, love that metaphor! https://www.gatesnotes.com/podcast. I really like listening to Bill, he's so smart, but clear, precise, broad, and human (like Zeynep!).
Maciej Cegłowski is certainly astute about the role inertia has always played in U.S. politics, but I also think that he's almost literally whistling past the graveyard of America's unresolved historical conflicts. What the 3/5 rule of the Constitution and the Missouri Compromise attempted to finesse, and the Civil War failed to resolve, is as much a festering engine of resentment today as any of the other newly virulent animosities in the rest of the world, including those between Sunni and Shi'a in the Middle East, or Greek and Turk in the Eastern Mediterranean.
With all due respect to both of your arguments, I can't see anything on the political horizon at present that offers any legitimate hope of reconciliation between our two estranged halves. We may not be facing a second civil war, as Zeynep seems to fear, but neither will the inertia that appears to offer some comfort to Maciej keep us from each other's throats forever. There's just too much external pressure on the entire political/social/economic edifice for us to rely on something that mindless for our salvation.
FWIW, here's my own take on the significance to this conflict of Trump as demagogue in chief, written before the election. I think it holds up pretty well, at least about Trump personally.
"Regardless of the outcome of the elections in November, the political class is unlikely to return unchallenged to the kind of neoliberal centrism touted by the DNC or Atlantic magazine. It seems far more likely that an ever-capricious Donald Trump will offer urban cops, white supremacist biker gangs, rural sheriff’s departments, Oath Keeper and Proud Boy militias, Christian Dominionists, and the rest of his proud deplorables whatever cover they need to attack people living happily in circumstances that their peculiar subcultures find unendurable.
Why would he not? There’s surely nothing more perfectly suited to Trump’s ego-driven triumphalism than starting a civil war, especially one that his very stable genius can’t imagine losing. The only thing stopping him, the only thing keeping his malignant meddling from turning a disorganized rabble of volunteer culture warriors into a full-blown fascist movement, is his own lack of character.
Whatever actually motivates him, Trump is clearly a narcissist, not an ideologue, a Perón rather than a Hitler. His followers are good at resenting anything they can’t understand, and threatening people who can’t defend themselves, but they’re not much good at anything else apart from bootlicking and delusional aphorisms. This might not matter if they had a halfway committed leader, but Trump himself is far too lazy and far too incompetent to take personal charge of forging their resentments into a set of principles robust enough to govern a country of 330 million people.
For those of us sane enough to want out of this whole demeaning Todestanz, the absence of anyone in Trumps’s entourage actually competent enough to seize state power might offer us exactly what we need, namely a little more time to get our affairs in order before the real apocalypse — climate change, famines, mass migrations, collapsing global economic interdependencies and real wars, with real armies — is upon us in earnest. We can only hope."
I agree that Trump is indeed a narcissist, though I do think he is an ideologue—it may appear incoherent but I don't think it's totally unrecognizable as a coherent ideology. It is mostly nativist, herrenvolkish with a dash of cult of personality and strongman politics. He is, though, apparently not fond of working hard and presidency is hard work. And that seems to be what a lot of people are counting on! I just don't find that comforting. And yes, this leaves all those long-term problem just getting worse.
I'm in the UK (Scotland, even, where momentous change may be afoot) but as we barrel toward a pointless and disastrous Brexit, which is probably only desired by 30-40% of the population, we have similar issues.
The common thread to both your arguments - the differences which seem more a matter of which horrors to emphasise - and to our problems here, is surely the nature of 'right-wing' politics, essentially competitive, against that of 'left-wing' or 'progressive' politics, which is essentially co-operative. With a competitive world-view essentially anything goes if it brings a 'win', and if you can't better yourself making things worse for others works too. Reaching out to those with this approach to life, as Maciej and many on the British left argue for, is ultimately necessary for a co-operative polity, but faces extraordinary barriers that only seem to be becoming higher.
We have to argue for some common basic principles, and live them too. This will be a long game and short-run electoral success may be elusive, but otherwise a slide to misery and cruelty seems inevitable.
Part of the similarity between the two cases is that neither has proportional representation. This article does the math and finds that, under a proportional representation system like either the Dutch or the German, "The Conservatives would not have won an outright majority". Of course, arguably, as the article itself concedes, voters might behave differently under either system but still it's worth noting that minority or disproportional power to slim majorities generates a lot of challenges, which makes norms/customs (and their breaking, like we've been seeing) a lot more important. https://theconversation.com/what-would-the-british-parliament-look-like-under-proportional-representation-128808
In the US probably the best you can do toward that end is work for state and municipal level ballot initiatives to implement ranked-choice voting. They've had mixed results, but overall seem to be advancing.
In Scotland all of our elections are PR - which may be one of the best reasons to become independent of England, given that there is little prospect of UK-wide adoption.
As an attorney, I see this issue in part in legal terms. Trump and his cohorts are violating the Treason, Sedition and Subversive Activities Act- They need to be arrested and tried. Without doing so, we have conveniently turned a blind eye to what is clearly an attempted coup.
USC .S. Code § 2383.Rebellion or insurrection applies to:
"Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto..."
18 U.S. Code § 2384.Seditious conspiracy applies to:
"If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof..."
18 U.S. Code § 2385.Advocating overthrow of Government applies to:
"Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or
Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so...
'Whoever organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof...
"As used in this section, the terms “organizes” and “organize”, with respect to any society, group, or assembly of persons, include the recruiting of new members, the forming of new units, and the regrouping or expansion of existing clubs, classes, and other units of such society, group, or assembly of persons."
My broad comment on legal arguments is that laws may be written down, but they are also what people say they are and willing to enforce—that's part of the reason why I think playbooks are important. Human institutions are not like gravity; they do not exert a force on their own.
Well said, Zeynep. There are countless violations of the Hatch Act, 'acting' people in positions in which they are in violation of who can hold these positions, etc - and no enforcement. It would seem the Executive Branch can almost do what they want and suffer no recourse.
Sarah Kendzior keeps making this point. Allowing crimes to slide is what got us here, and if we continue to let them slide it's what will enable further acceptance of authoritarian figures. That's her point anyway (she also uses Berlusconi as an example for what happens when you don't prosecute corruption at high levels).
In addition, there is lots of evidence of Trump's pre White House corruption- and it was allowed to go basically ignored. US doesn't treat white collar crime as seriously as petty shoplifting. This is part of how we get to having a President Trump to begin with.
Ought still implies can, though. "Punishing accordingly" is a nice thought, but the extent to which an Administration can actually make that happen without arguably even worse consequences (anywhere from even further compromise of the independence of the Justice Department to actual civil war) may be limited.
Israel is an interesting example of both possibilities and limitations, IIUC. They've successfully done some corruption prosecutions of former Prime Ministers, but the attempt to prosecute Netanyahu appears from what I can tell to have done more to break the judicial system than to actually rein in his corruption. And Trump sadly, even after his departure from office, will be more of a Netanyahu-like cult figure than the other more "normal" prosecuted PMs.
Biden should not be involved in decisions about prosecution. The Attorney General office is designed to be one that acts independently of the president. It seems like w the corruption of the Trump administration we have forgotten that.
Hasn't Netanyahu been prime minister the entire time of the charges against him? I have understood that he can't be prosecuted while in office and that is one of the reasons he is desperate to hold on to power. Am I wrong about that?
It isn't clear what a prosecution of Trump will look like to people who have been supporters. I think it is concerning that it will only enhance his cult- as it appears that you believe. However, perhaps it won't. To fail to prosecute him is to prove that when he stated he could shoot someone on 5th ave without being arrested- he was right.
I think it will enhance his cult, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't happen. It just means that part of rebuilding after this includes trying to address the attraction to authoritarianism and cults that got us here (along with the lack of prosecution of white collar crime, which as you point out below is also what got us here). It is going to take a long, long time and a lot of dedicated people.
What do we do then? It seems like we end up in territory where we play around with philosophical arguments for allowing a certain level of unprosecuted corruption in order to maintain civil order. Could you chip away at it over time, though? Pass and enforce laws that start to make white collar crime and corruption something that people start to think twice about, without going after a main cult figure? I mean, this isn't my preferred route. I want to see people prosecuted for crimes but you make a good point about the practical implications for civil society.
Setting up better independent enforcement mechanisms for existing anti-corruption laws seems like a clear next step. Like, it should not be up to the President to decide whether to punish someone who violated the Hatch Act by illegally campaigning for the President, right? And there are probably a bunch of other procedural things of that nature that need strengthening.
Beyond that I think the best you can do is conspicuously refuse to pardon Trump and give the state authorities like Vance in NY a free hand to go after him for tax fraud etc. And *maybe* the Justice Department can examine whether there are charges on which they have him "dead to rights" i.e. a prosecution should have relatively low risk of acquittal. But even then you have to ask practical questions like:
-- when you arrest him, how do you coordinate the National Guard to come out and protect the place where he's detained against armed mobs, and are you sure they'll take the side of the law against the mob?
-- how are you going to find an impartial jury? Where are the people who don't already have strong biased opinions for or against Trump?
These may be surmountable obstacles, they may even be worth surmounting, and maybe previous cult leader prosecutions can provide some useful lessons. But we can't behave as if treating this like a "normal" criminal prosecution is an option.
Just out of curiosity, would these apply to the people who had plotted to kidnap the governor of Michigan? It seems that part of their plan also involved overthrowing the state government as a whole.
I also think it is worth noting that, post-Reagan, republicans are playing from a wining position. If no legislation ever passes ever again, they are fine with that. They wouldn't complain about more tax cuts or deregulation, but there is nothing essential. Presidential democracies are very gridlock-prone, and there is a party that 'wins' by causing gridlocks.
I think this one by Yglesias is most relevant here: https://www.vox.com/21448334/republicans-supreme-court-ginsburg-democracy. I'll say more in a bit but I think the biggest disagreement I have with Maciej is on the feedback cycle of entrenchment of minority power—through multiple mechanisms that are now reinforcing each other though some of them were supposed to oppose each other. (Like thinking of the Senate as a way to keep the country together and make it hard for a slim majority to impose its will on a substantial minority: instead, it's become a tool of tiny minority imposing its will on everyone else).
As the writer suggests, the silence of the Republican establishment is a sign of parallel, non-intersecting information environments. Were they not to remain silent, the backlash from their base would be swift and strong. The possibility to manipulate language surrounding our "norms and institutions" is a large part of our dilemma. Slow work and patience are our main avenues now.
"And in their confusion, Republicans seem not to have noticed the new dynamic which is emerging. The combination of the “Stop-the-Steal” ragers and the fear of the silent Republican establishment types are mothers milk to Trump.
Angry and afraid people fighting—over him—is the very top of his hierarchy of needs. It’s his version of self-actualization. And while he may be forced to give up the office of the presidency, he will not give up being at the center of this storm. Republicans don’t seem capable of understanding where this eventually leads. So let me spell it out for them:
I’m afraid a lot of that is wishful thinking. The Republican party has been written off before, and come roaring back stronger than ever. Donald Trump will prove no more than a speed bump in the overall scheme of things, the Republican party is the entrenched party of government where it matters, in the boring state and local offices that govern matters that affect people’s daily lives and determine how Congress and the President are elected. The brilliant thing about the Republican party is that they don’t need policies that help people, because their ideology is all about government being the enemy and that people shouldn’t expect anything from it except maybe controlling crime (but even if they don’t, it’s the Democrats’ fault). They connect this to the American mythology of individualism and self-reliance in a way that allows them to take credit for when things go well and blame “overregulation” when things go poorly. It’s all heads-I-win, tails-you-lose, and it’s been working for decades (since Reagan).
Slow work and patience has always been our main avenues though. Even if we don't see the slow work and patience because they don't make for engaging enough stories until after the fact.
How can the core values we associate with the left be inculcated in those on the right? Take belief in science versus science denial. The cost of Trump's and Trumpers' denial of the seriousness of COVID-19 is now being felt nationwide, in rural as well as urban America. Healthcare workers are busy dealing with victims of the disease at present, but when the pandemic has passed, these workers will share a deep understanding of the importance of science -- and they will be present everywhere in the country, rural and urban. Surely they will be committed to promoting the value of science in their own communities long-term. Also, healthcare workers span the economic spectrum, from high-paid doctors and administrators to nurses to maintenance workers, so their support for science will transcend class differences.
Once respect for science in general is more widespread across the country, other scientific consensuses, such as human-caused global warming, will have more credibility. Slowly a shared understanding of the world can be rebuilt, arising from the horrors that we are currently experiencing across the country.
It remains to be seen, but I have some hope that the vaccine will actually have reasonable uptake—especially if the efficacy numbers from the initial readouts hold up and if we can try to dodge the polarization. (Yeah, easier said than done). Immediate, practical observations may help change this conversation.
Dodging the polarization will be facilitated by the diversity of backgrounds in Biden's COVID-19 response team. Given past unethical studies using African-Americans, we need a variety of Black influencers to get vaccinated and publicize their decisions. If Trump keeps bragging about "his" vaccine, his followers may follow his lead, provided they have not already been infected at his super-spreader events. Rep. Delaney's idea of paying $1,500 to each person vaccinated would help uptake and stimulate the economy at the same time.
I'm actually not that hopeful on this front though it does seem to be the only real opportunity. Bigger and hotter, for example, would seem to be an obvious demonstration of climate change's effects, but it's very easy for deniers to say that they're bigger and worse because of a failure to enable bigger timber cuts (even though some huge wildfires have happened in drought-stricken grasslands, not just forests).
Maybe. Covid 19 has been called a Goldilocks virus, meaning not to hot not to cold, just right. The lukewarm aspect of it for many, allows it to both spread widely and allows for other wildly untrue “truths” to persist. This is unfortunately true of all vaccines, they solve for the negative, the “what happens if we don’t do something” unprove-able. So much of what we see as anti-science is the inability for concrete thinkers to see, touch, or hear the dragon. Some get incinerated, but many more escape. The survivors tell us it’s not that big of a deal...
The vast range of effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection is indeed a problem in convincing many people of its seriousness. Unfortunately for survivors of serious COVID-19, the effects can be long-lasting, such as decreased lung function, and cardiovascular disease including stroke can occur even in young victims.
The Counter - a wonderful idea! As one would hope, I believe the composition of your argument, Zeynep, with Ceglowski's Counter is more illuminating than the sum of the parts.
First: the idea that what we're seeing is "ordinary"... that's absurd, and dangerous. It might be barely possible to understand such complacency if the issue were Trump attempting (and presumably failing) to break a norm. But calling him a norm-breaker is just a kind of shorthand. More enlightening is to see his very existence as a demonstration of the extent to which norms have already been removed from the arena. This will not change even in the (unlikely) event that he fades away. The degree to which he's receiving overt and tacit permission to make this flagrant attempt, to make millions on it, to inflame his followers with it, to use it to consolidate his grip on the Republican Party, to launch his 2024 campaign with it... What this reveals is more about us than him, and it should alarm everyone, regardless of whether we think he has any chance of remaining in the White House next year.
So thus far I think Ceglowski is flat wrong. But second: I also think it's very, very important, existentially important, to hear what he's saying about our ongoing political defeat being the more immediate and more urgent issue. The left is very gifted at being correct while failing, and it's easy to conceive of a response that correctly attacks Trump's latest outrages while causing unacceptable collateral damage politically.
The response to this will be, "We can't let that concern us in the face of these abuses." But that's incorrect. It must concern us - in fact, it is quite literally the most important thing in the world. We need a response that correctly attacks Trump's latest outrages while also *advancing* our cause politically.
There's no a priori reason to think that's impossible. I submit that there's a model for it in the way we're taught to deal with internet trolls: you're speaking to the troll, but your audience is everyone else. In this case, your real audience is the electorate. Not the overt racists or the MAGA diehards - they are lost causes - but the millions who think of themselves as Trump supporters but voted for Obama, anti-gerrymandering, minimum wage laws, Florida's Amendment 4, ranked-choice voting.
While political pros of all stripes practice pure power politics, voters have shown time and again that they value fair play. The attempted coup must be denounced, and everything about how this is done must be addressed to a jury that is the electorate. It would be great to reach them all, but 5% would be more than enough.
As it happens, we've just elected a President who understands this in the marrow of his bones. His elevation of restoring social norms to a headline position in his platform has largely earned ridicule from political, media, and cultural leaders across the map. This is unacceptable. We must demand that thought leaders on the left recognize this as a gating issue for everything else we're trying to do, because polarization and power politics inherently favor our opponents.
There are many, especially among the professionals on all sides, who will be unmoved by any defense of norms. But there are also many who will. They can be hard to see and hear, but they are the only ones who matter.
Congratulations on Insight and The Counter, Zeynep. You are off to a great start!
Thanks so much for this comment, I find it exceedingly insightful. In light of your thoughts and taking some of Zeynep's comments about the importance of addressing the beliefs of millions of voters who think the election may not have been trustworthy, I wonder if there could be a national commission on voting that could attempt to establish the degree of fraud and of voter suppression (concerns of both the right and the left) with enough independent authority to influence the views of enough people to make a difference. Such a commission could recommend election law reforms. I think the knee-jerk reaction of many would be that no one on the right will listen to such a commission, so it is a pointless exercise, and doubtless many would disregard anything which did not confirm their pre-existing views, but I think a key insight of your comment is that not that many people would need to be really swayed in order to make a real difference. If even 5-10% of the population felt like their concerns were being taken seriously instead of dismissed, that feels like a real step away from alienation. Dismissing everyone on the right by considering them to be in the same bucket as the worst of the worst is both a moral and a strategic error.
An inquiry broad enough to make stakeholders of everyone. Above my pay grade whether that's exactly the right thing, but it seems like the right kind of thinking. Agree that the absence of ability to make binding prescriptions would not be a fatal flaw, if a flaw at all.
I'm only getting to this now, but there is a value of some time passed since these ideas. I think the notion that this has been an ordinary election seems off given the litany of lawsuits that have occurred since then and the planned protest by many House and Senate Republicans next week. They won't change the outcome but these are also not the behaviors of a normal election process. From my own experience, I voted in Harris County via drive-through "booth." It was in response to the pandemic and it was planned and reviewed by various state officials and the Texas Secretary of State, mostly Republicans. And then as a whiff of Texas possibly going blue or at least flipping the Texas House blue, lawsuits started pouring in to throw out the 100,000's of votes done via drive through and Republican officials who previously gave the ok become silent. For the first time in my 20+ years of voting, I didn't know if my vote would be counted (a far cry from the more egregious voter suppression going on, but a first for me). So to call an ordinary election seems off the mark from my own experience.
Ultimately, I think both of these dynamics are happening in parallel. The outright winning of elections, particularly by gerrymandering and a non-democratic Senate, is represented by Mitch McConnell and the authoritarian takeover by Trump. The former has used the latter as a tool hoping to contain it but we're seeing that relationship going in a new direction. Republicans continuing to win elections won't preclude a newer, savvier Trump from emerging. You can see the divisions forming now. I suppose what Trump and his allies do in the next 2 and 4 years will be what we need to keep our eyes on.
I love this new idea and look forward to both reading these paired essays and working on my own thinking as a result. Today's thoughts are both so interesting and well-written. I do think they seem less like counterpoints to each other and more like a "Yes, and..." to each other. As we've learned throughout all the Trump years, both bad outcomes can happen...
Thank you! They aren't completely in opposition on everything but there really are strong points of disagreement. I will engage more of my disagreements in the comments and maybe future newsletters since this is such an important topic/debate.
Those were my thoughts, too. In the end, they (the two arguments) don't really counter each other.
Regardless, thanks for writing this. I look forward to the series and the comments.
I agree with you Katie, good insight on the "Yes and " flavor to this.
I strongly support the idea of "The Counter" as a feature of this newsletter, want to thank Zeynep for including it, and hope to see more of it in the future. In this particular case, there is much Zeynep and Maciej agree on, but there IS strong disagreement on how important Trump's actions contesting the election are. Zeynep is very concerned, and Maciej thinks it is not worth bothering about. For me, this is an area where I am not sure what to think and don't have well-formed opinions. I find Zeynep's arguments (which are echoed in much of the media I consume, at least in a despairing, resigned way) compelling in the way that I find many arguments about important norms being transgressed compelling. I do believe that erosion of these norms is highly detrimental, especially over time. At the same time, I don't find it clear what to do about that. Publicly complaining about it to like-minded people does not seem like it accomplishes much, publicly complaining about it to non-like-minded people also seems unlikely to accomplish much, and doing nothing about it simply allows the erosion to continue. Those obviously aren't the only three options, but I don't have a sense of what would be a good alternative. Maciej, on the other hand, argues that we need to focus on the more pressing emergency of maintaining the ability to win elections under the existing biased structure, and finding ways to govern within a severely damaged system. He lays out a daunting view of the current situation (I love the metaphor of us locked out in our bathrobes, which does a wonderful job of capturing the sense of disorientation and sudden realization of the amount of effort needed to address the situation), but to me this view comes with a much clearer prescription for where to direct energy and attention. He may be wrong that Trump's shenanigans (and Republican's acquiescence to them) are not a big deal, but he may nevertheless be right that the most effective response to them is to move on and focus on other things.
I don't have an easy answer, but to me danger of ignoring it and hoping that it goes away is three-fold. One, the many millions of people who know think their votes were stolen deserve an answer, and it's wrong and dangerous to let that dangle. Two, Biden is being gravely de-legitimized—see point one—and that's under a setup where he will already have difficulty governing. Three, before he does all these things, we are told that he won't. Then he does. Then we are told it won't matter. But they do! And now we're down to our institutions will stand up to this. I wouldn't take such things granted!
I'm confused about your third point. A big chunk of the commentariat publicly worried that Trump would contest the election result, and then he did exactly what they predicted. It wasn't dismissed, but anticipated.
That said, institutions and people are allowed to notice, after four years, that Trump doesn't follow through and is incapable of sustained effort towards any goal. That's what I meant in my rebuttal about not treating his coup du jour attempt with the same seriousness in 2020 as we might have in 2016.
They thought the contesting would be performative—a few days of cries, a tantrum that would die out in a bout a week. That's clearly what the Republican leadership thought, too, and contra your arguments that this is going exactly as they planned (waiting it out), I think they did a real tactical error by not intervening quickly (after the first week) and will live to regret it as this will tear at the party for a long time.
Y'know, I think Zeynep is right that the transgressive structural changes left in Trump's wake do make our institutions more vulnerable to someone with a combination of, say, Trump's wacky tough-guy charisma and something like Mitch McConnell's vicious political competence. On the other hand, I also think you're right that even now there remains a resilience in the U.S. and its institutions that someone who grew up in a place like Turkey or the DDR might overlook.
All that said, I do think that disruptive conflict is more likely than not. If it does begin with a coup attempt, it'd better be a damned competent one, though, otherwise in a country the size of ours, divided the way it is, a long-running civil war -- now hot, now cold -- seems a far more likely outcome. Biden and Pelosi (and the Clintons, and the Obamas, etc., etc. -- the whole dismal Democratic Party Politburo) still think AOC is a Communist, and that any day now they're going to return triumphantly to 1992. And we call Trump delusional...!
Love this format! Both articles and arguments are well formed. It reminds me of a story I heard from a friend of mine, a Philosophy professor for many years.
"Two grand-daughters had a terrible disagreement. The first took her argument to her wise grandmother. Hearing the 1st grand daughter's well articulated argument the grandmother smiled and said "You know I think you are right."
Learning this from the triumphant 1st grand-daughter, the 2nd grand-daughter was incensed. She took her argument to her grandmother and made a passionate, well reasoned argument, for why she was right and her sister wrong.
The grandmother listened, smiled and said, "You know I think you are right!"
Now both grand-daughters were nearly losing their minds so filled with disbelief. Together they confronted the grand mother exclaiming, look the two sides of our argument are like night and day, they BOTH canNOT be right!
The grandmother smiled warmly at her lovely, intelligent and passionate grand-daughters and said, "You know, I think you are right!"
Love the format. Reminds me of a story friend of mine, a philosophy professor, told me.
Two sisters have a passionate argument. They are both certain they are right. Not being able to reconcile, the first sister visits her wise grandmother and lays out the disagreement, arguing passionately, persuasively for her point of view. The grandmother smiles at her grand-daughter and says, "you know I think you are right."
Hearing this the 2nd sister can't believe it. She too goes to the grandmother and makes a powerful case for why she in fact is correct, and her sister, unfortunately, terribly misguided. The grandmother listens, considers, nods her head at the the 2nd grand daughter, and says, "You know I think you are right."
Now both sisters are about to lose their minds. Together they confront their grandmother exclaiming our two arguments are like night and day, they both cannot be right! The grandmother gazed at her two lovely, intelligent and oh so passionate grand-daughters, looked at them earnestly and said, "You know, I think you are right!"
Thanks to you both for these pieces! I find points to agree with in both, to wit:
- It's clear that there are large parts of the Republican party that will do anything to stay in power, including if necessary a coup. They're definitely trying it.
- Local election officials, even if technically members of parties, are some of the most reliably mission-oriented people in the US. That & the fact that the military was immovable largely saved this election.
- My add: one of the biggest Republican plays of the last 40 years is connecting national political issues to local politics. Sarah Palin, for example, first came to power as a rabidly anti-choice mayor of a suburban town (not traditionally much of a mayoral issue). School boards are another one. My non-expert guess is that they will from here try to elect active partisans into election administration jobs where they can. That will be awful & should be fought along with all the other political battles we need.
- I'm not sure if a more competent authoritarian is the biggest risk, or a closer election, or simply the fact that the people who voted for Jesse The Body and Arnold Schwarzenegger are always happy to take a flier on a celebrity (I'm in California, so the memory of the recall of a next-in-line establishment democrat to get the Governator into power resonated all over the 2016 election for me), & there are a lot of them.
- I'm still scared of what this Lame Duck Information War in the courts and the disconnected media ecosystems is going to do to 2022 & 2024, but I take heart in the idea that we need to do the same long-term things to both win elections and prevent coups: pay attention to elections all up & down the ballot, and show people that government can actually help us.
Mayors and school boards are a place to look at but where you really see it is county commissioners, which wield a lot of control in surprising areas. And a lot of people who end up on county commissions start in places like school boards or small city councils.
counties are an underrated level in US government - huge responsibilities, mostly low public profile.
*Seriously.* Where I live, the county commissioners have hamstrung the public health department during the pandemic by appointing a vocal anti-vaxxer and anti-masker to the county health board and yelping "constitutional freedom" every time the hospital and health department beg them to do *anything* to slow the spread.
Anyway. Yes. Counties have a lot of power in surprising areas that affect people's lives in very real ways, from water rights and land use to public health situations like our current one.
That's terrible, ouch.
Yes. Yes it is. I had looked into getting a recall petition going ("incompetence" is a valid reason for prompting a recall election here), but I looked at the numbers after the election and it's pretty clear that a petition could probably get enough signatures to prompt a recall, but also clear that the current commissioners wouldn't have much trouble getting reelected.
Counties really do have a lot of power over people's lives!
I think trying to discern which of these two viewpoints is more correct should *not* be the place we get stuck on.
When there are two valid interpretations or proposed actions involving an outcome whose consequences are extremely important, but ultimately impossible to predict with accuracy, the question should be:
Start by assuming we can't know this with certainty.
What is the cost/harm of being wrong if we went with A, compared to the cost of being wrong if we went with B?
In decades of technical assistance to non-profit organizations, public health campaigns, and assisting in medical decision-making, I have often found this approach to be something of an Occam's Razor. It starts with accepting that perfect prediction is impossible. It maps closely to the risk vs benefit of medical decision making. Conversely, once someone frames the problem we should address as "which of this is right?", almost limitless effort tends to get stuck there.
BTW, Zeynep, your idea of publicly and respectfully addressing counter-arguments is just wonderful. This is applying the scientific method. This kind of inquiry is what moves knowledge forward instead of creating further attachment to one's prior interpretations.
Thank you!
I don't know enough about any of this to pick out the significant areas of disagreement, but it seems to me that Maciej's points end up building the case for why it's possible for your essay to be correct. (I realize that thinking is very tangled; I guess like other commenters I find that the essays "yes, and" each other more than they disagree.) As many have written elsewhere, the seeds of fascism have always been strong in the U.S., but it's also the structures that permit and entrench minority rule that can -- and seem to be -- give the minority the means and the will to stage a coup (or whatever word we want to use) when they feel that democracy no longer serves them.
The fact that Dems lost so badly down the ballot seems to me to be the result of this cycle feeding on itself. I live in Montana and, while it's usually characterized as a red state, it's been purple most of my life (I was born here in 1976) and I have never until this year seen it swing so firmly to the right. There are a lot of factors that have led to that, but I think a disconnect from physical reality is a big one. Covid, for example, didn't start killing and hospitalizing large numbers of people until after the election, so R's failures to deal with it on a national level seemed less important to many than what they perceived as overreach by our D governor being reflective of D overreach in general.
What I'm curious about is how climate change will shift a lot of demographics. When people start moving out of hurricane- and fire-prone areas to places they deem more "safe," and where they can work remotely, will "big squares of nothing" like Wyoming start representing a larger proportion of the population than they (or we, since one could characterize Montana similarly) currently do? And will the realities of climate change finally hit science-deniers over the head? Or will it enable further entrenchment of conspiracy theories and eagerness for hardline evangelical Christianity (for example) with its simple answers?
These are very good questions!
I'm a big fan of Octavia Butler, and her book "The Parable of the Sower" does not leave me very optimistic about these last questions :/
Great thoughts and questions! Just listened to a wonderful Bill Gates' podcast on climate change (Rashida Jones is the moderator, they had Elizabeth Kolbert as a guest). At the end, Rashida asked Bill what the #1 thing individuals can do to help mitigate/reverse the changes we are seeing today - Bill, did not hesitate he said it was use your and be involved in politics. I am hopeful that the younger generations are smart enough to see and know this.
I think they are. This is more philosophical, but I was listening to something by Stephen Jenkinson (I don't know how to categorize him -- philosopher?) where he talked about how people of his age have lost the right to ask young people to explain themselves. Instead, he said, you have to turn your chair and look where they're looking (metaphorically). You will be stunned by the courage it takes to see what they see and still keep going.
Also (this is my soapbox and I'll probably never get down) community involvement whether it's politics or volunteering. I know I'm not the first person to say the pandemic has been a stress test for how communities will fare when climate change begins to hit hard. Getting involved with your local community, neighborhood, whatever, has massive add-on benefits that are often intangible.
What's the podcast? I don't know that one but it sounds good!
Well said, love that metaphor! https://www.gatesnotes.com/podcast. I really like listening to Bill, he's so smart, but clear, precise, broad, and human (like Zeynep!).
Thank you! Will listen :)
The one on "Why People Believe Lies" is also fascinating, Bill talks with the author of "Sapiens". Enjoy :-)
Ooh, I love that book.
'use your' --> 'use your vote'
Maciej Cegłowski is certainly astute about the role inertia has always played in U.S. politics, but I also think that he's almost literally whistling past the graveyard of America's unresolved historical conflicts. What the 3/5 rule of the Constitution and the Missouri Compromise attempted to finesse, and the Civil War failed to resolve, is as much a festering engine of resentment today as any of the other newly virulent animosities in the rest of the world, including those between Sunni and Shi'a in the Middle East, or Greek and Turk in the Eastern Mediterranean.
With all due respect to both of your arguments, I can't see anything on the political horizon at present that offers any legitimate hope of reconciliation between our two estranged halves. We may not be facing a second civil war, as Zeynep seems to fear, but neither will the inertia that appears to offer some comfort to Maciej keep us from each other's throats forever. There's just too much external pressure on the entire political/social/economic edifice for us to rely on something that mindless for our salvation.
FWIW, here's my own take on the significance to this conflict of Trump as demagogue in chief, written before the election. I think it holds up pretty well, at least about Trump personally.
"Regardless of the outcome of the elections in November, the political class is unlikely to return unchallenged to the kind of neoliberal centrism touted by the DNC or Atlantic magazine. It seems far more likely that an ever-capricious Donald Trump will offer urban cops, white supremacist biker gangs, rural sheriff’s departments, Oath Keeper and Proud Boy militias, Christian Dominionists, and the rest of his proud deplorables whatever cover they need to attack people living happily in circumstances that their peculiar subcultures find unendurable.
Why would he not? There’s surely nothing more perfectly suited to Trump’s ego-driven triumphalism than starting a civil war, especially one that his very stable genius can’t imagine losing. The only thing stopping him, the only thing keeping his malignant meddling from turning a disorganized rabble of volunteer culture warriors into a full-blown fascist movement, is his own lack of character.
Whatever actually motivates him, Trump is clearly a narcissist, not an ideologue, a Perón rather than a Hitler. His followers are good at resenting anything they can’t understand, and threatening people who can’t defend themselves, but they’re not much good at anything else apart from bootlicking and delusional aphorisms. This might not matter if they had a halfway committed leader, but Trump himself is far too lazy and far too incompetent to take personal charge of forging their resentments into a set of principles robust enough to govern a country of 330 million people.
For those of us sane enough to want out of this whole demeaning Todestanz, the absence of anyone in Trumps’s entourage actually competent enough to seize state power might offer us exactly what we need, namely a little more time to get our affairs in order before the real apocalypse — climate change, famines, mass migrations, collapsing global economic interdependencies and real wars, with real armies — is upon us in earnest. We can only hope."
I agree that Trump is indeed a narcissist, though I do think he is an ideologue—it may appear incoherent but I don't think it's totally unrecognizable as a coherent ideology. It is mostly nativist, herrenvolkish with a dash of cult of personality and strongman politics. He is, though, apparently not fond of working hard and presidency is hard work. And that seems to be what a lot of people are counting on! I just don't find that comforting. And yes, this leaves all those long-term problem just getting worse.
I'm in the UK (Scotland, even, where momentous change may be afoot) but as we barrel toward a pointless and disastrous Brexit, which is probably only desired by 30-40% of the population, we have similar issues.
The common thread to both your arguments - the differences which seem more a matter of which horrors to emphasise - and to our problems here, is surely the nature of 'right-wing' politics, essentially competitive, against that of 'left-wing' or 'progressive' politics, which is essentially co-operative. With a competitive world-view essentially anything goes if it brings a 'win', and if you can't better yourself making things worse for others works too. Reaching out to those with this approach to life, as Maciej and many on the British left argue for, is ultimately necessary for a co-operative polity, but faces extraordinary barriers that only seem to be becoming higher.
We have to argue for some common basic principles, and live them too. This will be a long game and short-run electoral success may be elusive, but otherwise a slide to misery and cruelty seems inevitable.
https://www.futureeconomics.org/2017/09/equality-of-voice-an-introduction/
Part of the similarity between the two cases is that neither has proportional representation. This article does the math and finds that, under a proportional representation system like either the Dutch or the German, "The Conservatives would not have won an outright majority". Of course, arguably, as the article itself concedes, voters might behave differently under either system but still it's worth noting that minority or disproportional power to slim majorities generates a lot of challenges, which makes norms/customs (and their breaking, like we've been seeing) a lot more important. https://theconversation.com/what-would-the-british-parliament-look-like-under-proportional-representation-128808
Precisely - and legislatures (and other democratic outcomes) that accurately reflect votes cast are one of the basic principles to be argued for.
https://www.futureeconomics.org/2015/09/irrelevant-alternatives-and-pr/
In the US probably the best you can do toward that end is work for state and municipal level ballot initiatives to implement ranked-choice voting. They've had mixed results, but overall seem to be advancing.
In Scotland all of our elections are PR - which may be one of the best reasons to become independent of England, given that there is little prospect of UK-wide adoption.
As an attorney, I see this issue in part in legal terms. Trump and his cohorts are violating the Treason, Sedition and Subversive Activities Act- They need to be arrested and tried. Without doing so, we have conveniently turned a blind eye to what is clearly an attempted coup.
USC .S. Code § 2383.Rebellion or insurrection applies to:
"Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto..."
18 U.S. Code § 2384.Seditious conspiracy applies to:
"If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof..."
18 U.S. Code § 2385.Advocating overthrow of Government applies to:
"Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or
Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so...
'Whoever organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof...
"As used in this section, the terms “organizes” and “organize”, with respect to any society, group, or assembly of persons, include the recruiting of new members, the forming of new units, and the regrouping or expansion of existing clubs, classes, and other units of such society, group, or assembly of persons."
My broad comment on legal arguments is that laws may be written down, but they are also what people say they are and willing to enforce—that's part of the reason why I think playbooks are important. Human institutions are not like gravity; they do not exert a force on their own.
Well said, Zeynep. There are countless violations of the Hatch Act, 'acting' people in positions in which they are in violation of who can hold these positions, etc - and no enforcement. It would seem the Executive Branch can almost do what they want and suffer no recourse.
Agree. But, if we don't call Trump's actions out for what they really are and punish accordingly, there is less disincentive for next time.
Sarah Kendzior keeps making this point. Allowing crimes to slide is what got us here, and if we continue to let them slide it's what will enable further acceptance of authoritarian figures. That's her point anyway (she also uses Berlusconi as an example for what happens when you don't prosecute corruption at high levels).
In addition, there is lots of evidence of Trump's pre White House corruption- and it was allowed to go basically ignored. US doesn't treat white collar crime as seriously as petty shoplifting. This is part of how we get to having a President Trump to begin with.
Yes, ignoring and waiting out corruption and "tantrums" merely normalizes them.
Absolutely.
Ought still implies can, though. "Punishing accordingly" is a nice thought, but the extent to which an Administration can actually make that happen without arguably even worse consequences (anywhere from even further compromise of the independence of the Justice Department to actual civil war) may be limited.
Israel is an interesting example of both possibilities and limitations, IIUC. They've successfully done some corruption prosecutions of former Prime Ministers, but the attempt to prosecute Netanyahu appears from what I can tell to have done more to break the judicial system than to actually rein in his corruption. And Trump sadly, even after his departure from office, will be more of a Netanyahu-like cult figure than the other more "normal" prosecuted PMs.
Biden should not be involved in decisions about prosecution. The Attorney General office is designed to be one that acts independently of the president. It seems like w the corruption of the Trump administration we have forgotten that.
Hasn't Netanyahu been prime minister the entire time of the charges against him? I have understood that he can't be prosecuted while in office and that is one of the reasons he is desperate to hold on to power. Am I wrong about that?
It isn't clear what a prosecution of Trump will look like to people who have been supporters. I think it is concerning that it will only enhance his cult- as it appears that you believe. However, perhaps it won't. To fail to prosecute him is to prove that when he stated he could shoot someone on 5th ave without being arrested- he was right.
I think it will enhance his cult, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't happen. It just means that part of rebuilding after this includes trying to address the attraction to authoritarianism and cults that got us here (along with the lack of prosecution of white collar crime, which as you point out below is also what got us here). It is going to take a long, long time and a lot of dedicated people.
What do we do then? It seems like we end up in territory where we play around with philosophical arguments for allowing a certain level of unprosecuted corruption in order to maintain civil order. Could you chip away at it over time, though? Pass and enforce laws that start to make white collar crime and corruption something that people start to think twice about, without going after a main cult figure? I mean, this isn't my preferred route. I want to see people prosecuted for crimes but you make a good point about the practical implications for civil society.
Setting up better independent enforcement mechanisms for existing anti-corruption laws seems like a clear next step. Like, it should not be up to the President to decide whether to punish someone who violated the Hatch Act by illegally campaigning for the President, right? And there are probably a bunch of other procedural things of that nature that need strengthening.
Beyond that I think the best you can do is conspicuously refuse to pardon Trump and give the state authorities like Vance in NY a free hand to go after him for tax fraud etc. And *maybe* the Justice Department can examine whether there are charges on which they have him "dead to rights" i.e. a prosecution should have relatively low risk of acquittal. But even then you have to ask practical questions like:
-- when you arrest him, how do you coordinate the National Guard to come out and protect the place where he's detained against armed mobs, and are you sure they'll take the side of the law against the mob?
-- how are you going to find an impartial jury? Where are the people who don't already have strong biased opinions for or against Trump?
These may be surmountable obstacles, they may even be worth surmounting, and maybe previous cult leader prosecutions can provide some useful lessons. But we can't behave as if treating this like a "normal" criminal prosecution is an option.
Just out of curiosity, would these apply to the people who had plotted to kidnap the governor of Michigan? It seems that part of their plan also involved overthrowing the state government as a whole.
I can't imagine that they haven't violated law(s). I think the part of the US Code that I cited only is about the federal government though.
Gotcha. It just occurred to me I have no idea if trying to overthrow a state government is considered treason, or just federal.
It think treason involves a foreign power and sedition involves overthrowing the government without necessarily having foreign power involvement.
I didn't know that! Thanks :)
Yglesias' 2015 post about the problems with presidential democracies is relevant here: https://www.vox.com/2015/3/2/8120063/american-democracy-doomed
I also think it is worth noting that, post-Reagan, republicans are playing from a wining position. If no legislation ever passes ever again, they are fine with that. They wouldn't complain about more tax cuts or deregulation, but there is nothing essential. Presidential democracies are very gridlock-prone, and there is a party that 'wins' by causing gridlocks.
I think this one by Yglesias is most relevant here: https://www.vox.com/21448334/republicans-supreme-court-ginsburg-democracy. I'll say more in a bit but I think the biggest disagreement I have with Maciej is on the feedback cycle of entrenchment of minority power—through multiple mechanisms that are now reinforcing each other though some of them were supposed to oppose each other. (Like thinking of the Senate as a way to keep the country together and make it hard for a slim majority to impose its will on a substantial minority: instead, it's become a tool of tiny minority imposing its will on everyone else).
As the writer suggests, the silence of the Republican establishment is a sign of parallel, non-intersecting information environments. Were they not to remain silent, the backlash from their base would be swift and strong. The possibility to manipulate language surrounding our "norms and institutions" is a large part of our dilemma. Slow work and patience are our main avenues now.
This is an interesting read about the state of the Republican party by a conservative anti-Trumper. https://thebulwark.com/what-if-trump-is-trying-to-break-the-gop/
"And in their confusion, Republicans seem not to have noticed the new dynamic which is emerging. The combination of the “Stop-the-Steal” ragers and the fear of the silent Republican establishment types are mothers milk to Trump.
Angry and afraid people fighting—over him—is the very top of his hierarchy of needs. It’s his version of self-actualization. And while he may be forced to give up the office of the presidency, he will not give up being at the center of this storm. Republicans don’t seem capable of understanding where this eventually leads. So let me spell it out for them:
Donald Trump is going to destroy their party."
I’m afraid a lot of that is wishful thinking. The Republican party has been written off before, and come roaring back stronger than ever. Donald Trump will prove no more than a speed bump in the overall scheme of things, the Republican party is the entrenched party of government where it matters, in the boring state and local offices that govern matters that affect people’s daily lives and determine how Congress and the President are elected. The brilliant thing about the Republican party is that they don’t need policies that help people, because their ideology is all about government being the enemy and that people shouldn’t expect anything from it except maybe controlling crime (but even if they don’t, it’s the Democrats’ fault). They connect this to the American mythology of individualism and self-reliance in a way that allows them to take credit for when things go well and blame “overregulation” when things go poorly. It’s all heads-I-win, tails-you-lose, and it’s been working for decades (since Reagan).
Slow work and patience has always been our main avenues though. Even if we don't see the slow work and patience because they don't make for engaging enough stories until after the fact.
How can the core values we associate with the left be inculcated in those on the right? Take belief in science versus science denial. The cost of Trump's and Trumpers' denial of the seriousness of COVID-19 is now being felt nationwide, in rural as well as urban America. Healthcare workers are busy dealing with victims of the disease at present, but when the pandemic has passed, these workers will share a deep understanding of the importance of science -- and they will be present everywhere in the country, rural and urban. Surely they will be committed to promoting the value of science in their own communities long-term. Also, healthcare workers span the economic spectrum, from high-paid doctors and administrators to nurses to maintenance workers, so their support for science will transcend class differences.
Once respect for science in general is more widespread across the country, other scientific consensuses, such as human-caused global warming, will have more credibility. Slowly a shared understanding of the world can be rebuilt, arising from the horrors that we are currently experiencing across the country.
It remains to be seen, but I have some hope that the vaccine will actually have reasonable uptake—especially if the efficacy numbers from the initial readouts hold up and if we can try to dodge the polarization. (Yeah, easier said than done). Immediate, practical observations may help change this conversation.
Dodging the polarization will be facilitated by the diversity of backgrounds in Biden's COVID-19 response team. Given past unethical studies using African-Americans, we need a variety of Black influencers to get vaccinated and publicize their decisions. If Trump keeps bragging about "his" vaccine, his followers may follow his lead, provided they have not already been infected at his super-spreader events. Rep. Delaney's idea of paying $1,500 to each person vaccinated would help uptake and stimulate the economy at the same time.
I'm actually not that hopeful on this front though it does seem to be the only real opportunity. Bigger and hotter, for example, would seem to be an obvious demonstration of climate change's effects, but it's very easy for deniers to say that they're bigger and worse because of a failure to enable bigger timber cuts (even though some huge wildfires have happened in drought-stricken grasslands, not just forests).
*Bigger and hotter wildfires, sorry
Maybe. Covid 19 has been called a Goldilocks virus, meaning not to hot not to cold, just right. The lukewarm aspect of it for many, allows it to both spread widely and allows for other wildly untrue “truths” to persist. This is unfortunately true of all vaccines, they solve for the negative, the “what happens if we don’t do something” unprove-able. So much of what we see as anti-science is the inability for concrete thinkers to see, touch, or hear the dragon. Some get incinerated, but many more escape. The survivors tell us it’s not that big of a deal...
The vast range of effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection is indeed a problem in convincing many people of its seriousness. Unfortunately for survivors of serious COVID-19, the effects can be long-lasting, such as decreased lung function, and cardiovascular disease including stroke can occur even in young victims.
The Counter - a wonderful idea! As one would hope, I believe the composition of your argument, Zeynep, with Ceglowski's Counter is more illuminating than the sum of the parts.
First: the idea that what we're seeing is "ordinary"... that's absurd, and dangerous. It might be barely possible to understand such complacency if the issue were Trump attempting (and presumably failing) to break a norm. But calling him a norm-breaker is just a kind of shorthand. More enlightening is to see his very existence as a demonstration of the extent to which norms have already been removed from the arena. This will not change even in the (unlikely) event that he fades away. The degree to which he's receiving overt and tacit permission to make this flagrant attempt, to make millions on it, to inflame his followers with it, to use it to consolidate his grip on the Republican Party, to launch his 2024 campaign with it... What this reveals is more about us than him, and it should alarm everyone, regardless of whether we think he has any chance of remaining in the White House next year.
So thus far I think Ceglowski is flat wrong. But second: I also think it's very, very important, existentially important, to hear what he's saying about our ongoing political defeat being the more immediate and more urgent issue. The left is very gifted at being correct while failing, and it's easy to conceive of a response that correctly attacks Trump's latest outrages while causing unacceptable collateral damage politically.
The response to this will be, "We can't let that concern us in the face of these abuses." But that's incorrect. It must concern us - in fact, it is quite literally the most important thing in the world. We need a response that correctly attacks Trump's latest outrages while also *advancing* our cause politically.
There's no a priori reason to think that's impossible. I submit that there's a model for it in the way we're taught to deal with internet trolls: you're speaking to the troll, but your audience is everyone else. In this case, your real audience is the electorate. Not the overt racists or the MAGA diehards - they are lost causes - but the millions who think of themselves as Trump supporters but voted for Obama, anti-gerrymandering, minimum wage laws, Florida's Amendment 4, ranked-choice voting.
While political pros of all stripes practice pure power politics, voters have shown time and again that they value fair play. The attempted coup must be denounced, and everything about how this is done must be addressed to a jury that is the electorate. It would be great to reach them all, but 5% would be more than enough.
As it happens, we've just elected a President who understands this in the marrow of his bones. His elevation of restoring social norms to a headline position in his platform has largely earned ridicule from political, media, and cultural leaders across the map. This is unacceptable. We must demand that thought leaders on the left recognize this as a gating issue for everything else we're trying to do, because polarization and power politics inherently favor our opponents.
There are many, especially among the professionals on all sides, who will be unmoved by any defense of norms. But there are also many who will. They can be hard to see and hear, but they are the only ones who matter.
Congratulations on Insight and The Counter, Zeynep. You are off to a great start!
Thanks so much for this comment, I find it exceedingly insightful. In light of your thoughts and taking some of Zeynep's comments about the importance of addressing the beliefs of millions of voters who think the election may not have been trustworthy, I wonder if there could be a national commission on voting that could attempt to establish the degree of fraud and of voter suppression (concerns of both the right and the left) with enough independent authority to influence the views of enough people to make a difference. Such a commission could recommend election law reforms. I think the knee-jerk reaction of many would be that no one on the right will listen to such a commission, so it is a pointless exercise, and doubtless many would disregard anything which did not confirm their pre-existing views, but I think a key insight of your comment is that not that many people would need to be really swayed in order to make a real difference. If even 5-10% of the population felt like their concerns were being taken seriously instead of dismissed, that feels like a real step away from alienation. Dismissing everyone on the right by considering them to be in the same bucket as the worst of the worst is both a moral and a strategic error.
An inquiry broad enough to make stakeholders of everyone. Above my pay grade whether that's exactly the right thing, but it seems like the right kind of thinking. Agree that the absence of ability to make binding prescriptions would not be a fatal flaw, if a flaw at all.
This is cool. I've worked on software teams where we instituted a rule for "Big Architectural/Tech Type Arguments" between members:
You have to be able to explain the opposing point of view in the strongest, least straw man form possible.
I'm only getting to this now, but there is a value of some time passed since these ideas. I think the notion that this has been an ordinary election seems off given the litany of lawsuits that have occurred since then and the planned protest by many House and Senate Republicans next week. They won't change the outcome but these are also not the behaviors of a normal election process. From my own experience, I voted in Harris County via drive-through "booth." It was in response to the pandemic and it was planned and reviewed by various state officials and the Texas Secretary of State, mostly Republicans. And then as a whiff of Texas possibly going blue or at least flipping the Texas House blue, lawsuits started pouring in to throw out the 100,000's of votes done via drive through and Republican officials who previously gave the ok become silent. For the first time in my 20+ years of voting, I didn't know if my vote would be counted (a far cry from the more egregious voter suppression going on, but a first for me). So to call an ordinary election seems off the mark from my own experience.
Ultimately, I think both of these dynamics are happening in parallel. The outright winning of elections, particularly by gerrymandering and a non-democratic Senate, is represented by Mitch McConnell and the authoritarian takeover by Trump. The former has used the latter as a tool hoping to contain it but we're seeing that relationship going in a new direction. Republicans continuing to win elections won't preclude a newer, savvier Trump from emerging. You can see the divisions forming now. I suppose what Trump and his allies do in the next 2 and 4 years will be what we need to keep our eyes on.