Over at his substack blog, Notes from the Middleground, Damon Linker has a disturbing—though not in the way he imagines—post up, titled Dialectical Contributions to Democratic Breakdown, commenting on varieties of “bad news for democracies” from around the world—including South Korea, Romania, and, unfortunately, the U.S., which is, unsurprisingly enough, the only one I’m going to treat here.
Damon faults the Democratic Party for having argued, in Kamala Harris’ failed campaign for the presidency, that, while the Democratic Party was committed to our democratic way of government, the Republican Party, particularly as headed by Donald Trump, was not. What was wrong with that approach? Well, according to Damon, poker-playin’ pollster Nate Silver hit the nail on the head with his recent X, “The issue is that Democrats claim to have the moral high ground whereas the Trump claim is basically just that everyone is a self-serving hypocrite, so when Democrats behave like self-serving hypocrites it not only invalidates their brand but validates the other one.”
The proof of Nate’s assertion, says Damon, is all around us:
The Biden administration’s Justice Department indicting and attempting to convict the former president while the latter was running to defeat the current president was one example. We saw another when allies of the Biden administration sought to use a novel interpretation of the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause to disqualify the former president from running for or serving once again as president. Both are good examples of what might be called a “just so happens” maneuver, whereby the pro-system, rule-enforcing party declares it just so happens that the candidate it will otherwise have to face in an upcoming election has violated a rule that should prevent that candidate from running.
Here’s the thing, Damon. You’re full of it. Donald Trump was indicted on numerous occasions because Donald Trump broke the law on numerous occasions. Donald Trump broke the law as no other American in history has ever done, not even the arch traitors Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. Trump tried to overthrow our system of government, illegally maintaining himself in office on the utterly vacuous grounds that widespread voter fraud—of which there was no evidence whatsoever—had deprived him of the massive majority he had won both in the popular vote and the Electoral College. He also committed a large number of other crimes in the pursuit of this seditious goal, notably pressuring election officials in Georgia to “find” enough votes to give him the victory there. Oh, and he also took a large number of classified documents with him when he left office, lied about doing so, and later deliberately lied when he said he had returned them all.
All of Trump’s outrageous and unprecedented crimes were then compounded, first by a majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives, who voted against recognition of Joe Biden as president elect, quite possibly the most partisan and corrupt “vote” ever recorded in the House. This was then later matched by the Republican Senate, which shamelessly refused to act on the thoroughly merited bill of impeachment of Trump presented by the House, and finally by the U. S. Supreme Court, handing down a pair of decisions that future generations will rightly place on the same shelf as the Dred Scott decision and Plessey v. Ferguson. But for both Nate and Damon, this is all “ancient history”. The entire Republican Party is wiping its ass with the Constitution and Nate and Damon are telling us that the Democrats are lousy tippers.
It is, well, “interesting” to notice that, over the past year or so, as it became clearer and clearer that Biden’s obvious decline would all but guarantee a big win for Trump in November, a likelihood that the “Harris revolution” only briefly arrested, that more and more people would “discover” that, “hey, you know, I think it’s the Democrats who are really screwing things up here. They started it! They’re provoking Trump, and it’s not surprising that he’s responding in kind.” According to Nate and Damon (Damon also includes Andrew Sullivan as a “fellow traveler” in all of this, which I think is “reasonable”), Big Donnie is more or less the King Kong of American politics. He was really happy on his own little island home, where he could wrestle dinosaurs till the pterodactyls came home, but then the Democrats started messing with him with all their “lawfare” and stuff, and he just had to show them who was boss, and maybe he flew off the handle from time to time. Well, they asked for it! You poke the bear,1 you pay the price!
Look, Nate n’ Damon, if you don’t like the Democratic Party, I understand. I don’t like it that much either. If you’re tired of people whining about “late capitalism” or the white patriarchy, I get it. Don’t be a Democrat. I voted against Obama for a second term, thanks to his clear lack of respect for civil liberties, and only voted for both Hillary and Kamala to swell their vote totals. If I thought they were sure to win I would have voted Libertarian, even though I’m definitely not a Libertarian. But don’t tell the lie that the Democrats are worse than Trump, that they’re somehow the cause of Trump. You’re just looking for a “respectable” reason to support Trump. People who support Trump do so for one reason: they want a bad ass who will “protect” them.2 I don’t know what you want protecting from—the Notorious AOC, perhaps?—but you want it, and you want it more than you want to maintain your sense of honor. You’re well on your way to becoming “thoughtful” semi-Trumpers, one might say—not shameless dittoheads like True-Trumpin’ Lindsey Graham, of course. And the difference between the two is palpable: the semi-Trumpers don’t swallow.
Afterwords
I found Damon’s post so disappointing that I entered a sour “comment” on his blog in response, which I reproduce below, stating in a grumpy nutshell most of the points I have “expanded” above.
What a disappointing post. Please cancel my subscription. The claim that the Democrats are, in effect, turning into Trump in attempting to defeat him is nonsense, a new form of “what about” that Nate Silver seems to have invented and you have eagerly seconded. If you really think that the indictments brought against Trump constitute “lawfare” rather than the deserved result of his many, many crimes, then you are remarkably stupid, and I don’t think you are remarkably stupid.
It’s overwhelmingly true that Biden’s pardon of his son was abysmal, and his “defense” of it more abysmal still, but it’s very much on a par with Trump’s worst pardons as well, and what about (to coin a phrase) George H. W. Bush’s pardons of senior government officials who committed perjury regarding the Iran-Contra Affair, and could very likely have been “persuaded” to testify against Bush, who undoubtedly committed perjury himself?
For some reason, it seems to me that people like Nate and yourself are preparing to transition from Democratic centrists to semi-Trumpists. People who support Trump usually do so because they want protection--if only, like Jeff Bezos--protection from Trump himself. I don’t know who you are afraid of, but I definitely get the feeling that you are afraid of something, that you feel somehow “safer” criticizing the Democrats than Trump, as if his “excesses” are really somehow the Democrats’ fault. Well, no matter how you slice it, it sounds like hypocrisy to me, and I’m not interested in subsidizing it. So, as I say, please “cancel” me.
Damon responded—a bit churlishly, I thought—“you can cancel your own subscription” but then sportingly did the job himself, so he’s not all bad. I would also remark that the very worst aspect of Uncle Joe’s decision to pardon his son, which “the right” quite naturally and quite correctly used against him, was his ugly claim that his son’s prosecution was politically motivated—an extremely unattractive lie. He could have just said “He’s suffered enough”, which would also be false, but certainly less offensive.
Still, this gives me a hook to return to “Aigh Dubya’s” pardon of the Iran-Contra bad boys, claiming as he did so that the whole thing was “criminalization of policy differences”, which is an equally disgusting lie, not to mention stunningly self-serving, because the pardons also protected Bush from being indicted on perjury charges himself, as he eminently deserved to be. (See the discussion at the end of a previous post here.) What Bush was really claiming is that presidents (Republicans at least) and their minions have plenary power in foreign affairs and can do as they please and lie about it as they please and no one has the right to be any wiser.
In fact, the only “flaw” in the Iran-Contra indictments that Bush negated was that Reagan himself wasn’t indicted, because he was (obviously) the Boss of the whole affair, from start to finish. A president has no right to convert government property to his own use and profit and equally no right to use that profit to finance activities that are forbidden by law for the government to pursue. The ban on the expenditure of federal funds for military aid to the “Contras” in Nicaragua was contained in legislation passed by a Democratic House and a Republican Senate and signed by Reagan himself. Imagine if Bill Clinton had sold weapons to Iran, lied about it, and used the money to fund abortion clinics in Africa, after having signed legislation forbidding such aid. Every Republican in the House would have voted to impeach him, and every Republican in the Senate would have voted to convict him. But Reagan enjoyed a bipartisan popularity that Clinton, of course, entirely lacked, and, anyway, Reagan’s second term was ending and so was the Cold War, so why waste time arguing over spilt milk when the Berlin Wall was falling. Yeah, I miss those days too.
1. Okay, so I’m varying the metaphor; excuse the fuck out of me!
2. As I explained, eight long, sad Januarys ago, in a post titled The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald Trump, Trump supporters seek a “master”, “an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them against the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above” (quoting Karl Marx on the appeal of Louis Bonaparte to the French peasantry).
