Friday, April 26, 2024
The Constitution Will Not Save Us From Trump and the Far Right
On Thursday, the Supreme Court gathered to consider whether Donald Trump, as president, enjoyed immunity from prosecution for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. Even if the justices eventually rule against him, liberals should not celebrate the Constitution as our best bulwark against Mr. Trump. In fact, the document — for reasons that go beyond Mr. Trump, that long preceded him and could well extend past him — has made our democracy almost unworkable.
For years, whenever Mr. Trump threatened democratic principles, liberals turned to the Constitution for help, searching the text for tools that would either end his political career or at least contain his corruption. He was sued under the Constitution’s emoluments clauses. He was impeached twice. There was a congressional vote urging Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to proclaim Mr. Trump unfit for office. More recently, lawyers argued that the states could use the 14th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6 attack.
Each of these efforts has been motivated by a worthy desire to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his actions. Each of them has failed. As we head into the heat of an election season, we need to confront a simple truth: The Constitution isn’t going to save us from Donald Trump. If anything, turning the page on the man — and on the politics he has fostered — will require fundamentally changing it.
It is not just that Mr. Trump would never have been president without the Electoral College. Think about why those previous efforts to use the Constitution to hold Mr. Trump accountable failed. Impeachment processes collapsed in the Senate because it lopsidedly grants power to rural, conservative states. The Supreme Court was able not only to keep Mr. Trump on the ballot in Colorado, but also to narrow the circumstances in which disqualification could ever be used, because Republicans have been able to appoint a majority of the justices on the court, despite losing the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections.
For years, liberals were squeamish about acknowledging these facts, perhaps out of habit. While most countries view their documents as rules for governing — rules that may become outdated and can be reworked if necessary — our own politicians routinely tell a story of American exceptionalism rooted in our Constitution. It is a sacred document that, as Barack Obama once put it, “launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy,” grounded on shared principles of equality, self-government and personal liberty.
In these Trump years, as polls have shown some Americans drifting away from those shared ideals, liberals are clinging even more tightly to the document as a symbol under threat.
A year and a half ago, for instance, when Mr. Trump called for the “termination” of existing election rules, liberals were understandably outraged. . . . . The problem is that these pledges of constitutional fealty can’t substitute for actually convincing the public of the importance of inclusive democracy.
Rallying around the Constitution means embracing the very text that causes these pathologies. Its rules strengthen the hand of those indifferent or even opposed to the principle of one person, one vote. After all, those rules smooth the path for a Trumpian right to gain power without winning over a majority.
The shock to the constitutional system that Mr. Trump represents didn’t start, and won’t end, with him. The best — and perhaps only — way to contain the politics around him is to reform government, so that it is far more representative of Americans. The goal is to keep authoritarians from ever again gaining power without winning a majority and stacking powerful institutions with judges and officials wildly out of step with the public. But this requires extensive changes to our legal and political systems, including to the Constitution itself.
We need new campaign finance laws and expanded voting rights. We need to end the Senate filibuster, eliminate the Electoral College, combat gerrymandering and partisan election interference, adopt multi-member House districts and add new states like Washington, D.C. We need to reduce the power of the Senate . . .
Such reform requires pushing back against the extreme power of the Supreme Court through measures like judicial term limits and expansion of the size of the court. And an easier amendment process would give Americans the power to update their institutions and incorporate new rights into the document, rather than having to rely only on what judges decide.
No doubt these changes can seem politically unfeasible. But it would behoove Americans concerned about the dangers posed by Mr. Trump to take seriously such a comprehensive agenda, if for no other reason than because many on the right are already working on constitutional reforms of their own.
Groups like the Convention of States (which counts Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as a vocal supporter) have succeeded in getting 19 of the 34 states required under Article V of the Constitution to agree to convene a new constitutional convention. The Convention of States package of potential changes includes giving “a simple majority of the states” the ability “to rescind actions by Congress, the President, or administrative agencies,” empowering Republican officials to nullify any policies they oppose, regardless of whether those policies enjoy vast national support.
These efforts will persist even if Mr. Trump is no longer on the political stage. And so long as liberals refuse to confront what needs to be done to fix the Constitution, his supporters and groups like the Convention of States will control that debate.
It now falls to Americans to avoid learning the wrong lessons from this moment. Mr. Trump may lose at the ballot box or be convicted in one of the four criminal cases he faces, including the one that started this month in Manhattan. If he is held accountable, it will not be because the Constitution saved us, given all its pathologies.
Thursday, April 25, 2024
The Republicans Who Want American Carnage
Tom Cotton has never seen a left-wing protest he didn’t want crushed at gunpoint.
On Monday, the Arkansas senator demanded that President Joe Biden send in the National Guard to clear out the student protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war, which he described as “the nascent pogroms at Columbia.” Last week, Cotton posted on X, “I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands. It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.”
This is a long-standing pattern for Cotton, who enjoys issuing calls for violence that linger on the edge of plausible deniability when it comes to which groups, exactly, are appropriate targets for lethal force. During the George Floyd protests of 2020, Cotton demanded that the U.S. military be sent in with orders to give “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters,” insisting unconvincingly in a later New York Times op-ed that he was not conflating peaceful protesters with rioters.
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who had raised a fist in apparent solidarity with the mob that assaulted the Capitol on January 6 before fleeing through the halls to avoid them once the riot began, echoed Cotton’s call for deploying the National Guard to Columbia.
What Cotton and Hawley are doing is simple demagoguery. When Donald Trump was inaugurated president, he spoke of an “American carnage” that he would suppress by force. Trump’s attempts to apply the maximum level of violence to every problem did not solve any of them. Migration at the southern border surged in 2019 until a crackdown in Mexico and the coronavirus pandemic brought it down; Trump’s presidency ended with a rise in violent crime . . . . and with widespread civil-rights protests.
There have been documented instances of anti-Semitic rhetoric and harassment surrounding the protests; a rabbi associated with Columbia University urged Jewish students to stay away, and the university’s president, Nemat Shafik, recommended that students not living on campus attend classes remotely for the time being. In the same way that the Israeli government’s conduct does not justify anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitic acts of some individuals associated with the protests do not justify brutalizing the protesters.
[T]the kinds of mass violence and unrest that would justify deploying the National Guard are currently absent, and the use of state force against the protesters is likely to escalate tensions rather than quell them. . . . NYPD Chief John Chell told the Columbia Spectator that “the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.” The arrests did not end the protest.
The calls from Cotton and Hawley to deploy the National Guard are not about anyone’s safety—many of the pro-Palestinian protesters, against whom the might of the U.S. military would be aimed, are Jewish. As the historian Kevin Kruse notes, sending the National Guard to campuses facing Vietnam War protests led to students being killed, including some who had nothing to do with the protests, rather than to anyone being safer.
As we approach the summer of 2024, the economy is growing, migration to the border has declined at least temporarily owing to what appears to be a new crackdown by Mexican authorities, and in many major cities, crime is returning to historic lows, leaving protests as the most suitable target for demagoguery. The Biden administration’s support for Israel divides Democrats and unites Republicans, so the longer the issue remains salient, the better it is for the GOP. More broadly, the politics of “American carnage” do not work as well in the absence of carnage. Far-right politics operate best when there is a public perception of disorder and chaos, an atmosphere in which the only solution such politicians ever offer can sound appealing to desperate voters.
This is why the Republican Party is constantly seeking to play up chaos at the border and an epidemic of crime in American cities, no matter what the reality of the situation might actually be. Cotton and Hawley are demanding that Biden use force against the protesters not just because they consistently advocate for state violence against those who support causes they oppose as a matter of principle, but also because any escalation in chaos would redound to their political benefit. They don’t want to solve any problems; they want to make them worse so that the public will warm to “solutions” that will continue to make them worse. They don’t want order, or safety, or peace. What they want is carnage.
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
THe GOP and Turning White Anxiety Into a Movement
The twin pillars of today's Republican Party are racism and white "Christian" extremism, both of which Donald Trump has skillfully played to his advantage in all of his campaigns. Both are powered by fears of whites and Christofascists that they are losing their privilege and power and ability to dominate and ride rough shod over the rest of American society. Republican "friends" and acquaintances would deny these motivations in their support of someone as morally bankrupt as Trump, yet for the non-super wealthy who care only about lower taxes, there really is no other explanation, especially when the American economy is currently the envy of much of the world. Trump, of course, was not the first Republican to use white racial hatred and anxiety and white Christian nationalism to turn out voters. Richard Nixon used the former as the keystone of his "Southern Strategy" and George W. Bush used gay marriage opposition in his 2004 campaign where anti-gay referendums were placed on state ballots, including here in Virginia, to drive evangelicals to the polls. Indeed, Trump and his acolytes have only taken fanning white/Christofascist anxiety to new levels such accusing immigrants of "poisoning the nation's blood." A piece in The Atlantic looks how pandering to and inflaming white anxiety became a hallmark of today's GOP. Here are highlights:
In May 1995, Pat Buchanan appeared at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to announce an immigration policy that would become the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. “We have an illegal invasion of this country,” Buchanan warned. To resist it, he called for a “Buchanan Fence” patrolled by the military along the southern border, a five-year moratorium on legal immigration, and a constitutional amendment that would deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents.
The platform was designed to stave off something Buchanan had long dreaded: “If present trends hold,” he noted a few years earlier, “white Americans will be a minority by 2050.” Buchanan was the first major politician to transform white anxiety about that prospect—which the Census Bureau first predicted in 1990—into an organizing principle for the conservative movement.
Buchanan never came close to winning the presidency, but the fear he incited of a majority-minority future has become integral to the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Like Buchanan, Trump has made opposition to undocumented immigration the cornerstone of his presidential bid. Although he and his supporters try to portray this as a matter of law and order, they often admit that their chief concern is America’s shifting ethnic composition.
“People are just alarmed by what they see in the changes in the demographics in our country,” South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, a Trump surrogate, said in Iowa this year. A few weeks earlier, Trump accused migrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”
For Buchanan and Trump, immigration isn’t just about America’s ethnic identity. It’s also about electoral power. Even as the GOP slowly diversifies, white Americans continue to make up a disproportionate share of its base, leading many conservatives to view nonwhite immigration as an existential threat.
[T]he American right’s preoccupation with declining white power isn’t new; it shaped the right’s defense of slavery and the violent overthrow of Reconstruction. By the time Buchanan ran for president, it wasn’t new for him either. He’d begun politicizing white resentment at the start of his career, creating a blueprint that would prove hugely influential for the GOP.
As a young speechwriter for Richard Nixon, Buchanan helped conceive of the “southern strategy” that Republicans used to appeal to white voters who were alienated by the civil-rights movement. Buchanan counseled Nixon to ignore “liberal issues” like housing, education, and unemployment.
When he ran for president in the 1990s, Buchanan was still criticizing the civil-rights laws of the 1960s, trying to court revanchist white voters, such as supporters of the Klansman turned presidential candidate David Duke. He described the Voting Rights Act as “regional discrimination against the South” and visited Confederate monuments while campaigning in states such as Georgia and Mississippi. “Who speaks for the Euro-Americans?” he asked. “Is it not time to take America back?”
Buchanan first ran for president in 1992 under the slogan “Make America First Again,” a riff on Ronald Reagan’s “Let’s Make America Great Again.” . . . . Although Buchanan didn’t win a single state, Republicans adopted some of his positions on immigration as the official party platform, pledging to “equip the Border Patrol with the tools, technologies and structures necessary to secure the border.”
Four years later, Buchanan ran again and won the New Hampshire primary. During the campaign, he portrayed his effort to preserve Judeo-Christian values and white power in the face of a massive demographic shift as part of America’s oldest struggle, calling his followers “the true sons and daughters of the Founding Fathers.”
After he lost the nomination, Buchanan was sidelined by the GOP establishment. Instead of getting a prime-time slot at the convention, he was blocked from speaking entirely. . . . He spent the 2000s in the political wilderness, watching as the country’s white population grew by just 1 percent from 2000 to 2010 while the Black population grew by 15 percent, and the Hispanic and Asian populations by 43 percent. Every few years he published screeds with titles like The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization and State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. “The people who put the GOP in power are not growing in numbers nearly as rapidly as immigrants and people of color who want them out of power,” he wrote in 2006. “The fading away of America’s white majority entails an existential crisis for the GOP.”
These writings, mostly ignored at the time, appeared prophetic after Barack Obama’s election in 2008, when Republicans fretted over the diverse coalition assembled by the first Black president. As Buchanan became more marginalized, his ideas paradoxically found greater favor within the GOP. His concerns about white displacement, which Republican leaders had mostly tried to downplay in the 1990s and 2000s, were now being pushed into the mainstream of the party. . . .
These views clearly influenced Trump and his advisers. In August 2014, the GOP consultant Kellyanne Conway released polling showing that white voters who were unhappy about demographic change would turn out in higher numbers if a candidate emphasized “stricter enforcement of current immigration laws” and demanded that “illegal immigrants … return to their home countries.” While Trump prepared to launch a seemingly quixotic bid for the presidency, his chief strategist Steve Bannon called the missing-white-voter theory and Conway’s polling on immigration “the intellectual infrastructure” of Trump’s campaign.
If Buchanan helps explain the start of Trump’s presidency, he also helps explain its culmination on January 6. . . . Unlike many Republicans, the insurrectionists didn’t come from the country’s reddest or most rural counties. Instead, they were more likely to reside in counties whose white populations had experienced significant declines, such as Harris County, Texas, a majority-minority area that includes Houston. The study described a political movement “partially driven by racial cleavages and white discontent with diversifying communities.” . . .. Fears of a “Great Replacement” were the “most important driver of [the] insurrectionist movement,” the survey concluded.
The fact that Trump has found so much more political success than Buchanan did 30 years ago in exploiting white anxiety suggests that it will worsen as the supposed majority-minority tipping point approaches. That’s coming sooner than Buchanan once feared; white Americans, census data now suggest, will technically be a minority by 2045. Buchanan may have failed to hold back demographic change, but the backlash he sparked is only getting stronger.
Tuesday, April 23, 2024
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