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The Visionless Society
The Visionless Society
Imagine yourself in early 2019. The Democrats, despite never articulating a political vision other than not being Donald Trump and refusing to roll back Republican legislation such as the 2017 tax bill, have regained the House of Representatives by a slim majority. They vote articles of impeachment. The Senate Republicans, pressured by many within their own party to abandon Trump because of his ineptitude, increasingly erratic behavior and corruption, call on the president to resign. Trump refuses.
He uses the megaphone of his office to incite violence by his small, fanatic base. The military, whose deployment as a domestic police force is authorized by Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, is called into the streets to quell unrest. The United States, by the time the violence is snuffed out, is a de facto military dictatorship.
That such a scenario is plausible to public figures such as Ralph Nader is a sign of the deep decay of democratic institutions. The two major political parties lack a coherent vision. They are subservient to corporate power. They have abandoned the common good. They have turned politics into burlesque. They have rendered the citizenry impotent.
The press, especially the electronic press, has transformed news into a grotesque reality show filled with trivia, gossip and conjecture. The elites in both parties, along with the rich and corporations, profit from a naked kleptocracy.
Everything is for sale, from public lands to public education. And the juggernaut of corporate power impoverishes the people as it willfully destroys the facade of the hollowed-out democratic state.
“There is no democracy,” Nader said when I reached him by phone in Connecticut. “The only democracy left in this country is they don’t haul you to jail for speaking out. What’s left of democracy is a significant due process, habeas corpus, freedom of speech and probable cause, and that’s violated when there’s a terrorist attack and people are rounded up, like Muslim Americans.”
“Can there be a democracy when you don’t have a competitive electoral system?” he asked. “No.
Can there be a democracy when people who come in second win the election? No.
Can there be a democracy when it’s tougher to get on the ballot than in any other Western country in the world by an order of magnitude? No.
Can there be a democracy when money rules? And not just the money that politicians raise, but the third-party money. No.
Can there be a democracy when people have no influence on the military budget? No.
It’s not subjected to hearings. It’s ratified on the floor of the House and Senate, but it doesn’t go through the appropriations process. It’s subject to the most anemic, pathetic, servile questioning you can imagine.
The Congress has destroyed any kind of democratic participation … in the military and foreign policy.
The Congress is [supposed to be] invested in the sovereignty of the people. They [those in Congress] do not comply with the Constitution and the declaration of war authority. They don’t comply with the appropriations process. They have increasingly less public hearings.
They are cocooned on Capitol Hill with a force field of money, militarism and materialism. Self-interests block the American people, who can hardly call their member of Congress [because the calls are diverted to voicemail]. This is the latest racket.”
The Visionless Society
Imagine yourself in early 2019. The Democrats, despite never articulating a political vision other than not being Donald Trump and refusing to roll back Republican legislation such as the 2017 tax bill, have regained the House of Representatives by a slim majority. They vote articles of impeachment. The Senate Republicans, pressured by many within their own party to abandon Trump because of his ineptitude, increasingly erratic behavior and corruption, call on the president to resign. Trump refuses.
He uses the megaphone of his office to incite violence by his small, fanatic base. The military, whose deployment as a domestic police force is authorized by Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, is called into the streets to quell unrest. The United States, by the time the violence is snuffed out, is a de facto military dictatorship.
That such a scenario is plausible to public figures such as Ralph Nader is a sign of the deep decay of democratic institutions. The two major political parties lack a coherent vision. They are subservient to corporate power. They have abandoned the common good. They have turned politics into burlesque. They have rendered the citizenry impotent.
The press, especially the electronic press, has transformed news into a grotesque reality show filled with trivia, gossip and conjecture. The elites in both parties, along with the rich and corporations, profit from a naked kleptocracy.
Everything is for sale, from public lands to public education. And the juggernaut of corporate power impoverishes the people as it willfully destroys the facade of the hollowed-out democratic state.
“There is no democracy,” Nader said when I reached him by phone in Connecticut. “The only democracy left in this country is they don’t haul you to jail for speaking out. What’s left of democracy is a significant due process, habeas corpus, freedom of speech and probable cause, and that’s violated when there’s a terrorist attack and people are rounded up, like Muslim Americans.”
“Can there be a democracy when you don’t have a competitive electoral system?” he asked. “No.
Can there be a democracy when people who come in second win the election? No.
Can there be a democracy when it’s tougher to get on the ballot than in any other Western country in the world by an order of magnitude? No.
Can there be a democracy when money rules? And not just the money that politicians raise, but the third-party money. No.
Can there be a democracy when people have no influence on the military budget? No.
It’s not subjected to hearings. It’s ratified on the floor of the House and Senate, but it doesn’t go through the appropriations process. It’s subject to the most anemic, pathetic, servile questioning you can imagine.
The Congress has destroyed any kind of democratic participation … in the military and foreign policy.
The Congress is [supposed to be] invested in the sovereignty of the people. They [those in Congress] do not comply with the Constitution and the declaration of war authority. They don’t comply with the appropriations process. They have increasingly less public hearings.
They are cocooned on Capitol Hill with a force field of money, militarism and materialism. Self-interests block the American people, who can hardly call their member of Congress [because the calls are diverted to voicemail]. This is the latest racket.”
OldmanRob
Member
We have enjoyed the best economy in well over 20 years.
The unemployment rate is lower than any time in Odumbers presidency and getting better everyday.
We will see the biggest tax breaks since Regan within a few paychecks.
This year's income tax returns will be better for every middle class family in America and will result in many Americans finally having their eyes opened up to how bad Odumber truly hurt American families for eight long painful years.
I think you love President Trump, you just need some help saying it.
The unemployment rate is lower than any time in Odumbers presidency and getting better everyday.
We will see the biggest tax breaks since Regan within a few paychecks.
This year's income tax returns will be better for every middle class family in America and will result in many Americans finally having their eyes opened up to how bad Odumber truly hurt American families for eight long painful years.
I think you love President Trump, you just need some help saying it.
In the near-year he has been president, he has done or tried to do all of the things I flagged:
- He has demanded substantive outcomes from investigations.
- He has demanded investigations of political opponents.
- He has raged against the norms that prevent these wishes from being fulfilled.
- He has attacked—publicly and by name—people who have acted honorably to defend those norms.
- He fired the redoubtable FBI director whom I flagged as an inconvenient bulwark—for precisely the reason that James Comey was functioning as an inconvenient bulwark.
- He has harassed Comey’s management team and demanded publicly their replacement.
- He has made the environment for those assistant U.S. attorneys committed to their jobs so uncomfortable that one literally sat in my office and told me that he was going to resign because “I don’t want to stand up in court any more and say, I’m [his name] and I represent the United States.”
- He has appointed an attorney general he specifically intended to protect him and go after his opponents.
The interesting question, one year in, is how the apparatus of democratic government is weathering his onslaught. The answer to this question is complicated but, I think, ultimately encouraging.
...
This brings me to a final factor that has protected the country and its intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus from Trump’s tyrannical aspirations: Trump’s personality.
The first few weeks of the Trump administration raised the question of the degree to which Trump’s malevolence would be tempered by his incompetence. In the first year of the Trump presidency, the answer to that question was that incompetence did a lot of tempering. Trump blundered from crisis to crisis. The lawyering around him was comically dreadful—as was the broader executive functioning. Taking on established democratic institutions and wrecking them actually takes a certain amount of focus and energy—and Trump just isn’t very good at it. His heart may be in it, but Vladimir Putin he isn’t. And the United States isn’t a fragile new democracy with weak institutions either.
Trump has another personality liability for the project at hand, one that fewer people notice: He is ultimately a wuss. He talks about his boldness all the time, and a lot of people—including his enemies—lap up the self-description. He likes to talk in sweeping, grandiose terms about the things he is going to do and the things he has done. In practice, however, he’s actually very cautious most of the time. Think about it this way: Leaving aside Trump’s words and claims about himself, do the actions of his first year in office generally bespeak boldness? Yes, he left the Paris Climate Agreement. And yes, he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. And yes, he did the travel ban. But think about all of the bold things Trump has promised and backed away from: scrapping NAFTA and waging a trade war against the Chinese, ditching the Iran deal, walking away from Europe, draining the swamp, and confronting conservative orthodoxy on taxation.
The boldest step Trump has taken, the firing of James Comey, was an accident. Trump actually appears to have believed that this move would be popular, because Comey had angered Democrats during the 2016 campaign. Most of Trump’s supposed boldness is just tweets and bombast and things he says. It’s a big part of his self-image, but the self-image is mostly a game of dress-up. When push comes to shove, he’s pretty paralyzed by circumstances much of the time.
Taking down an established democracy requires not merely words but also bold action. And paralysis won’t cut it. A genuine attack on American democratic institutions will require some heavy swings of a sledgehammer at a very well-built wall. And with one great exception, nothing Trump has done in his first year in office has really taken pieces out of that wall.
What’s that one exception? It’s Trump’s efforts to hollow out the bureaucracy.
...
All of which is to emphasize that we are emphatically not out of the woods. The situation remains dangerous, because Trump’s personality is so fundamentally incompatible with the nature and demands of the office he holds. His impulsiveness can get us into trouble any day. As his political situation, or his legal situation, continues to degrade, he could lash out and change the equilibrium at any time. Moreover, chipping away at institutions slowly, both by institutional and budgetary evisceration and by leadership attrition—one Chuck Rosenberg a few months ago, one James Baker last month, one Andrew McCabe in March—will take a big toll over time.
But Trump simply cannot look back on the last year and be satisfied with the success of his war on the Deep State. His battle to remake it in his image has been largely unavailing—and has come at far greater cost to his presidency than to the institutions he is trying to undermine.
And that is very good news.
OldmanRob
Member
This thread is a shining example of why we laugh at liberals.
Everything you try and accuse Trump of has actually been done by democrats, especially the Clinton Cartel.
Your the online version of this
Everything you try and accuse Trump of has actually been done by democrats, especially the Clinton Cartel.
Your the online version of this
It amazes me how the gop convinces do many to vote against their
No
It's an eye opener for sure I many ways.
OldmanRob
Member
Lol, denial is not just a riverIt amazes me how the gop convinces do many to vote against their
No
Over the course of the year, I have often heard top foreign officials express their alarm in hair-raising terms rarely used in international diplomacy—let alone about the president of the United States. Seasoned diplomats who have seen Trump up close throw around words like “catastrophic,” “terrifying,” “incompetent” and “dangerous.” In Berlin this spring, I listened to a group of sober policy wonks debate whether Trump was merely a “laughingstock” or something more dangerous. Virtually all of those from whom I’ve heard this kind of ranting are leaders from close allies and partners of the United States. That experience is no anomaly. “If only I had a nickel for every time a foreign leader has asked me what the hell is going on in Washington this year … ” says Richard Haass, a Republican who served in senior roles for both Presidents Bush and is now president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
So what the hell is going on? I’ve come to believe that when it comes to Trump and the world, it’s not better than you think. It’s worse. The president is not playing the leadership role the rest of the world has come to expect from the United States, and the consequences are piling up. Still, it is also true that the world hasn’t exactly melted down—yet—as a consequence, leading some to conclude that Trump is merely a sort of cartoonishly incompetent front man, a Twitter demagogue whose nuclear-tinged rhetoric and predilection for cozying up to dictators should be discounted in favor of rational analysis of the far more sober-minded, far less radical policies actually put in place by his team.
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