Are Dan Drezner and Jack Shafer Brothers of the Asp? Because they certainly are Queens of Denial. Both Dan How scared should we be about 2024? and Jack Why the Fear of Trump May Be Overblown cast a cold eye if not cold water on Robert Kagan’s widely discussed and damn well verging on magisterial not to say scary as Hell “opinion essay” for the WashPost, Our constitutional crisis is already here, demonstrating that the Republican Party no longer believes in democracy and is positioning itself to claim the presidency in 2024 regardless of the popular vote or the Electoral College.
Kagan leads off his article with a solemn (and accurate) warning, which he then fully substantiates in great and powerful detail:
The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial.
Dan, whose piece has a definite flavor of “well, Hell, I could have written that if I had thought of it”, ends up quoting/hiding behind Jack’s piece, which in turn hides behind its evasive “yes and no” head—the sentence “Why the Fear of Trump May Be Overblown” is logically indistinguishable from the sentence “Why the Fear of Trump May Not Be Overblown”—to concede the plausibility of Kagan’s argument while denying its substance:
The only person or party that attempts a coup d’etat is the one that cannot win by other means. Gearing up for a coup—which we can concede that Kagan gets right about Trump—is not a sign of political strength but one of political weakness. By signaling an attempt to regain power by any means necessary, Trump essentially confesses that Trumpism is not and is not likely to become a majoritarian movement.
In other words, we don’t have to worry about Trump pulling off a coup because if he were powerful enough to do so he wouldn’t need to do so—because he would be leading a “majoritarian movement”. Pardonnez-moi, but huh?
Shafer continues to try to downplay the danger by ridiculing John Eastman’s repulsive memo outlining his “plan” for maintaining Trump in power regardless of the outcome of the 2020 election:
The Keystone Cops quality of the Eastman plan, which posits one impossible political pirouette after another, is a pastiche of fantastic thinking by a minority never encountered in American politics before.
Uh-huh. So why was it endorsed by a majority of the Republicans in the House of Representatives? If it was so ka-wazy, as Jack so earnestly wants us to believe, why did Vice President Pence, rather than simply rejecting the whole thing, feel it necessary to “consult” with former Vice President Dan Quayle as to his “duty”? What if Dan had said “go for it”? What would Pence have done?
As Kagan hammers home in his piece, over and over again, the Republican Party has sold its soul, to the extent that it had one, to Donald Trump. There was a moment, shortly after the horrible events of January 6, when Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell dared to openly and even harshly criticize Donald Trump, and even House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy dared to chip in with his two cent’s worth of daring, but those days are long gone. It’s true that Trump won’t be able to force McConnell out of office, just as he won’t be able to bully Chief Justice John Roberts to decide every case “his” way, but he won’t need to. “Good Republicans” like McConnell and Rberts may passively resist Trump—may encourage others to “speak out”—though not publicly, of course—but they will never directly cross Trump on an issue he cares about. They will submit to whatever is the will of the Republican masses, and the will of the Republican masses is unconditional obedience to the will of Trump.
The one question that Kagan ponders, without really supplying an answer, is why the (supposedly) “good Republicans” like McConnell and former Attorney General William Barr are so submissive to Trump, willing to acquiesce in any evil he commits, though not willing to initiate it on their own. Well, here’s Bob’s answer: because, long ago, Republicans realized, to their horror, that a Republican presidential candidate could never expect to win more votes than his Democratic counterpart.
In the halcyon years from 1968 to 1992, Republicans innocently/honestly believed they had a “mortal lock” on the presidency. How that particular phrase became established I have no idea, but the words themselves seemed to carry a talismanic message to Republicans, as if simply saying them made them true.
All this blew up in the Republicans’ faces in 1992, with draft-dodgin’ hippie Bill Clinton’s victory over genuine war hero George H. W. Bush, as I’ve previously explained. The horror was not doubled but rather squared in the year 2000, when super square Al Gore somehow defeated George W. in the popular vote even after the full squalor of the Clinton years was exposed. It was then, not in 2020, that Republicans realized that they couldn’t win the presidency honestly. And it was then that they started cheating. In a separate opinion in the infamous case of Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonine Scalia and Clarence Thomas gave a preview of Republican 2024 thinking waaay back in 2000, when they argued that the Constitution gives sole control of the appointment of presidential electors to the state legislature, as discussed in this law review article by University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey R. Stone, a minority view at the time, but likely to become, I suspect, more popular in 2024, at least when it assists the Republican Party. As Kagan points out in his article, legislatures in states controlled by Republicans are eagerly strengthening the power of the legislature to override local authorities, and are very likely, if it becomes “necessary”, to arbitrarily exclude “corrupt” votes without any evidence, simply relying on claims of plenary authority to control the appointment of electors. And it will be “interesting” to see how willing the right wingers on the Court will be to back them up.
Virtually all conservatives, though they come to this conclusion by different directions, believe they are living in “End Times”, when all of “civilization”, however they define it, is sliding into a vast gaping pit of moral anarchy, where the monsters have already assumed control, where the supposedly “legal” is in fact criminal, and, in turn, only the “criminal” is pure. It’s kill or be killed, America! Whose side are you on?
The Democratic Party is, to say the least, divided, far more capable of forming a majority against rather than for. Republicans love Donald Trump because he is a criminal, because his lust for power is absolutely unfettered by any moral considerations whatsoever. The danger is very real. People like Dan and Jack don’t want to believe the bad news because, well, who wants to believe that, you know, America is bad?
Afterwords
As I have pointed out numerous times, perhaps in most detail here, the Republican Party has been deeply corrupted and dishonest ever since its loss of the presidency in 1992. The end of the Cold War deprived it of its reason for being, and it has not found another. The party’s supposed domestic policy of small government and balanced budgets was always a lie, simply a cover for a largely racist hatred of “welfare”—that is to say, any legislation that benefited black people—but only the lazy ones! Donald Trump has simply allowed the post-Ronald Reagan Republican Party to become openly what it always wanted to be—the naked will to power, unencumbered by law.
