National Psychosis, its Cure and Prevention

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

The United States’ recent national psychosis is nothing unusual. Something like it has happened at least four times in just the last century, in major powers alone.

Let’s count the ways. The first and most acute example was the Nazi psychosis in Germany that triggered the Second World War. The second was brutal and murderous consolidation, mass internal deportation, and industrialization of the Soviet Union under Stalin. The Third was the similar psychosis of Communist “leadership” in China under an increasingly erratic and senile Mao Zedong. The most recent, of course, was the psychotic rule of our latest ex-president, the only man in US national history ever to have served not a single day in elective office or the military before becoming president.

We won’t even mention the cases of minor powers: Pol Pot’s killing fields in Cambodia, the Rwandan genocide, or the epidemics of desaparecidos under murderous dictatorships in Argentina, Chile and even Uruguay late in the last century.

All these cases distinguish themselves from “normal” war and conquest by oppression and/or mass murder of a nation’s own people. That’s one reason why I don’t consider Japan’s role in World War II, although extraordinarily brutal and cruel, an example of national psychosis. Among the examples of psychotic atrocities against one’s own people, only German Nazism also involved a catastrophic attempt at regional conquest.

So what qualified the four major-power regimes as “psychotic”? The answer comes in two parts. First, although sometimes claiming a facade of popular will or even “democracy,” they all were essentially the product of a single man: Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and our own Demagogue. Second, that single man held views and imposed policies that, from the safety and distance of history, few would accept as effective, humane or even rational. To put it starkly, the maximum leader, in each case, was at least partially demented, and he somehow made his dementia into national policy that gravely harmed his own people.

It’s worth a bit of ink to specify how. In Hitler’s case, it was his over-the-top persecution of Germany’s own Jews and other minorities, eventually including conquered peoples. Many Soviet peoples—Ukrainians for one—welcomed the German Army and fought Russian domination alongside them. A smarter and less demented German leader might have exploited their sentiments, treated conquered people well, never opened death camps, and sued successfully for peace from a position of strength rather than insanely invading the heart of Russia in midwinter. A practical leader like General Erwin Rommel, whom Hitler had executed, might have expanded the German Empire to most or all of Eastern Europe and changed the course of Eurasian history forever.

But you don’t get to replay the tape. Instead of a shorter war and a return to traditional German practicality and rationalism, we saw the Holocaust and three-quarters of a century of painful recovery.

Stalin’s effect as the Soviet leader was similar. His historical task was to consolidate the Russian Revolution, industrialize Russia and prepare for the coming Armageddon with Germany. Yet from the day he stuffed the ballot boxes and had his rival General Kirov shot the next morning, Stalin became the worst sort of medieval despot. An ethnic Georgian suspicious of Russians and other ethnicities, he deported various ethnic minorities to Siberia by the millions, for no apparent reasons besides bigotry and paranoia. He industrialized the nation badly and painfully, by forced labor and forced deportation, rather than monetary and patriotic incentives. And after war came, his constant inexpert meddling in military affairs nearly sealed Russia’s fate, as when he removed his most competent general, Zhukov, temporarily from command.

In 1996, I found myself in Russia on a democracy-building project sponsored by USAID. Alone in my once-Soviet hotel room, I listened to a Russian radio program describing the hour of Stalin’s death in 1953. He had been lying in bed at one end of a palatial room, with his doctors and closest advisers huddled at the other. As he died, he raised his arm, as if to point at one of them. Everyone, including the doctors who had tried vainly to save his life, quaked in fear of being sent to the gulags, or executed, with a mere word or gesture from the tyrant. His caregivers and closest colleagues waited, fearful and trembling, until Stalin had breathed his last breath. This was the monster who, still today, some 70%-80% of Russians think “saved” their country.

Mao was different. At least he started out that way. As a general fighting his way from the Caves of Hunan to eventual control of his war-torn country, he had broken with Chinese warlord tradition. He actually had paid peasants for their crops and the use of their homes and barns as barracks. That’s probably why he won; he got the people on his side with fair treatment.

But after achieving absolute power Mao ruled more by whim than any tyrant in modern history. His forced collectivization of agriculture, called the “Great Leap Forward” is “credited” with a famine that killed an estimated 45 million Chinese. Among other idiocies, he ordered peasants to make steel for heavy industry by melting down their kitchenware and iron farm tools, thereby impeding their farming. Mao’s later Cultural Revolution purged educated and commerce-friendly Chinese from positions of wealth and influence, killing an estimated two million of them, and sending the rest to the fields to “learn” from peasants.

Mao had perhaps the most ironic history of all the four major powers’ psychopathic leaders. As a general, he was a stunning success. He unified a war-torn and disorganized China using methods that kept peasants’ human needs in mind. As a civilian leader in peacetime, he was a complete and catastrophic failure, delaying China’s modernization and industrialization by decades and killing tens of millions in the process.

Mao’s career may have been the greatest argument for term limits in human history, so far. Let’s hope that Xi Jinping’s does not become second “best.”

And so we come to our own American avatar of psychosis. His cult of loyalty, his psychopathy, his ability to project his own flaws and misdeeds onto others (a “stolen election”), his obsessive focus on himself, and his utter lack of stable, rational principles are now so well known as to have become incontrovertible. Today’s salient question is how he remains where he is, even after fomenting the Capitol Insurrection in what purports to be a stable democracy. So far, only our own four-year term limit has saved us.

We know how our Demagogue got to be president. He confused policy with entertainment, and he had his enablers. He had Fox and he had Rush. He had Republicans like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, who hated and resisted him yet quickly knuckled under and kissed his ring like medieval vassals. Most of all, he had our social media, who unwittingly gave the most demented among us prevalence on the Internet, the most powerful means of communicating ever invented.

The Demagogue is out of office now. But is his absence temporary? Will he come back? Can he? And can we cure our national psychosis while he sits waiting in the wings, deliberately spreading his psychosis day after day?

Others’ histories of national psychosis are hortatory and cautionary tales. Today’s Germany is once again an exemplary nation. It’s superior in a lack of aggressive forces, the strength of its democracy, its outlawing hate speech, its assimilating desperate refugees, its belated but powerful agreement to help finance its neighbors’ growth, its including labor in corporate governance, its noted economic equality, and its leadership in converting energy to renewable sources. With laws against hate speech and denying the Holocaust, today’s Germany is even making a credible attempt to root out modern Nazis from its police and armed forces. But it took this, plus 75 years of growth and struggle, for Germany to get there after its Nazi psychosis.

In comparison, Russia and China have had only partial cures. Both have leaders who’ve extended their terms in office. Putin has by amending the Russian Constitution, Xi by changing the unwritten custom of reconsidering with every second five-year plan. Both leaders seem intent on “serving” for life, making Putin the most recent Tsar and Xi the most recent emperor. Old habits of alpha-male rule are hard to break.

That said, both Putin and Xi are respectively smarter and less brutal than Stalin, or than Mao in his dotage. Putin may have killed rival pols like Boris Nemtsov, renegade spies, and journalists to stay in power, but so far there have been only a handful of each. As far as we know, nothing like the mass murder or mass famines under Stalin or Mao is ongoing in either country. Even the Uighur “genocide” in China is only cultural genocide, not actual. As far as we know, mass murder is not part of the current forced-labor regime, aka “re-education.”

The psychosis in both countries appears to be over, but the risk of recurrence is real. Absolute power can produce rule by demented whim; that’s one of the best reasons to avoid it.

Here at home, the risk is just as real. The Demagogue’s Republican enablers had two chances to convict him and remove the risk of recurrence. They flubbed both. They did so despite the fact that most of them have every reason to hate and fear him.

This sad outcome arose as much from a defect in our system as from flaws in their character, as patent as the latter may be. For it all happened once before. The white-supremacist and Southern fifth columnist Andrew Johnson became president on Lincoln’s assassination, perhaps the most consequential in our history. Johnson had vetoed the second Freedman’s Act, thereby depriving freed slaves of their “forty acres and a mule” and an economic leg up. But he survived conviction and removal (for other alleged misdeeds) by a single vote.

Andrew Johnson avoided removal after our nation’s most brutal war, in which the winning side opposed everything he stood for. So the Demagogue’s survival today was a mere corollary. We have never convicted and removed a president from office, and we probably never will. Our much-vaunted “safety valve” of impeachment just doesn’t work, at least not during times of deep division, when we need it most. (Nixon’s resignation after a credible and bipartisan threat of impeachment and removal occurred at a time of little inter-party polarization, nothing like the post-Civil-War period or today.)

So what practical measures can we take to insure our own rapid national recovery from the Demagogue’s deliberately transmitted psychosis? There are at least two.

First, we could require that every candidate for president have served at least eight years in elective public office. That would be a consummation devoutly to be wished in any event, for our existing constitutional requirements are too loose. Our nation and the world are much more complex and advanced than in the late eighteenth century, when 35 years of age, natural-born citizenship and fourteen years of US residence—but no practical experience whatsoever—seemed enough for the top job.

Imposing an experience requirement legally would take a constitutional amendment—a near-impossibility today. But the political parties themselves could impose it unilaterally.

Better yet, they could do so through the services of minor and obscure party functionaries. Unknown party officials could save the Republican Party from the Demagogue, by imposing a eight-year experience requirement for running on the party ticket, without risking anyone’s decades-long elective political career. People like Brad Raffensperger could do the job without risking the careers of pols like Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, or even Josh Hawley. Likely this approach would force a quick and clean break in a party that seems ready to split more slowly and painfully anyway.

The other option is riskier and less likely to happen, although in theory a better solution to demagoguery and national psychosis. Candidates for president, or even Congress, could be required to take and pass a battery of psychological tests designed to weed out such traits as psychopathy, sociopathy, extreme Narcissism, disordered thinking, etc. We require our airplane pilots and those who man our nuclear-missile silos to take such tests, so why not candidates for president? We could do the testing at the outset of their careers, before they gained power or a popular following.

One objection is that, with so much at stake in selecting our supreme leader, the pressure for corruption of and undue influence over the testers would be much more intense. Nevertheless, a rational society with the scientific means to weed out those unfit for vital jobs ought to have measures to do so. Here again, the political parties could avoid the delay and difficulty of a constitutional amendment by adopting these measures internally for their own candidates. One advantage of psychological testing is that it might not eliminate relatively inexperienced candidates with sound minds, like Pete Buttigieg, Andrew Yang, or Michael Bloomberg.

As hated as he is from all sides, Mitch McConnell is today the best avatar of our democracy. Asked to balance power for his party and ideology against the fundamentals of democracy, he predictably chose power. He tried to have things both ways by excoriating the Demagogue afterward, but his choice was clear. You can maintain power for its sake alone despite democracy, or you can have democracy. You can’t do both.

Decades ago, the two political parties together made a seemingly different choice. They abandoned their selection of candidates for office in the proverbial “smoke-filled rooms” of party elders. Instead, they wholeheartedly adopted popular primary elections.

That choice, in my view, was a big mistake. Not only do party elders know candidates far better than the average voter can, especially when fed incessant thirty-second lies on TV or the Internet. Party elders also tend to select pols whom they respect for good reason and who know the rules of democracy from having held public office or from prior campaigns.

Note that I am not suggesting letting elders choose our leaders, only the short list from which the people choose. That way they can use their accumulated experience and wisdom to weed out demagogues with no experience but skill at showmanship.

In our case, the Demagogue bypassed all that. With no experience and no knowledge of the rules, he went straight to the people, with his jokes, hate, crude boasts and rough entertainment, and with the help of self-serving for-profit propagandists like Fox and Rush. The advent of his ilk was predictable from the moment the parties changed their rules.

The supreme irony is that most Republicans hate and fear the Demagogue and his “base.” Why wouldn’t they? They spent decades working their ways up the political ladder, only to see him eclipse them with fanciful stories, conspiracy theories, rough insults, and popular showmanship. But having seen him garner so easily the power and office they’ve craved for their entire careers, they can’t seem to break his spell, at least not publicly.

The Democrats’ story is just as instructive. They were about to lose a clear chance to take the presidency due to internecine warfare between the Sanders-Warren wing and the so-called “moderates.” Who saved them from that sad fate? A relatively obscure party elder from a reliably “red” Southern state: Jim Clyburn. Without Clyburn’s decisive intervention, we might be facing a second term of the Demagogue and the end of our democracy.

There is value in the complex rules and procedures of democracy. There is value in party elders’ experience, wisdom and internalization of the rules. The rest of it can degenerate into mob rule at any time. Popular primaries create a carte blanche for propaganda and media manipulation. (Open all-party primaries with ranked-choice voting might be different, but that’s another discussion.)

With their lax rules, the parties made the Demagogue and his presidency. Now they can unmake him and prevent the recurrence of his psychosis. All they have to do is revert to elder-influenced or elder-made primary selections, or add an experience requirement or psychological testing as a prerequisite to running for higher office. And they can do it all internally, through their internal party procedures and their obscure rank and file, without jeopardizing the reputation or career of any major office holder. They ought to start now.

Endnote on Japan: Some readers may wonder why I didn’t include Imperial Japan’s brutal role in World War II as an example of national psychosis. There are two reasons.

First, Japan’s extraordinary brutality—including the Rape of Nanking and the Death March on Bataan—was quite self-consciously directed against foreigners, not its own people. Even genocide against foreigners had been part of human warfare, and often celebrated as “victory,” from as early as Rome’s obliteration of Carthage, which arose from squalid commercial competition.

Only recently, with the maturation of human civilization, has genocide been recognized as a crime. And criminal behavior is not necessarily an indicator of psychosis. Self-harm, it seems to me, is the best indicator of psychosis, and all of the examples discussed here share it. That’s also why I didn’t include the Turks’ genocide of Armenians.

The second reason to exclude Japan is more subtle. Like Germany, Japan came late to the colonialism party. Indeed, there is evidence that Admiral Perry’s Black Ships opened Japan to, and English influence trained Japan in, the arts of military imperialism using modern Western weapons.

When you compare the atrocities and near-genocides that British and European military colonialism perpetrated on native peoples throughout the world, the most you can say is that Japan’s atrocities came later and were more compressed in time. They lacked the key indicator of psychosis: self-evident craziness from the perspectives of a group’s own interests.

In contrast, Nazi Germany deliberately attempted genocide of its own Jewish and other minorities, most of whom—like Einstein and the other Jewish refugees who helped us invent the Bomb—had been enthusiastic participants in advanced German culture during the two-prewar generations. Contravention of the interests of Germany itself, which might otherwise have had the Bomb first, is clear. [Search for “curiously” in linked source.] I won’t even mention the diaspora of talented musicians, writers, actors and producers, including Billy Wilder, who had made pre-war Berlin and Vienna meccas for music, film and the dramatic arts.

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Unfit to Govern

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

To jump to the principal post, “Unfit to Govern,” click here.

January 6 and the Demagogue For my parents’ generation, the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor was their formative event. It debunked the misguided notion that Americans could live in blissful isolation from a world in flames. That event came about a decade after the height of the Great Depression. Both disasters taught us that great wealth, huge oceans and peaceful neighbors cannot protect us Americans from great suffering. My own generation has suffered two such formative events. The first was the Islamist-terrorist attack on 9/11. The second—still agonizingly fresh in mind—is the Capitol Insurrection of January 6, an assault of domestic and white right-wing extremists. Coming in the midst of the most terrible pandemic in a century, the Insurrection taught us how fragile and delicate is our democracy and how fragile and delicate are our lives. All but the pandemic—the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and the Insurrection—teach pretty much the same lesson. We humans can be our own worst enemies. Only one of these four seminal events involved a non-human adversary, a virus. Two of the four teach a valuable subsidiary lesson. If we use our Reason in a special way known as “science” we can stave off or overcome tragedies not caused by human enmity. We’re doing so right now with Covid-19, using mRNA vaccine technology “developed” and in readiness long before the pandemic arrived. Now, a mere year after its arrival, vaccines are going into millions of arms. A similar rational approach, known as “Keynesian” economics, prevented the Crash of 2008 from becoming another great depression. Even now, it’s softening the blow of the pandemic-caused recession, with more relief to come. The “dismal science” of economics has its uses. So we have learned to deal with the evolution of submicroscopic parasites and with economic collapse. But catastrophes caused by human enmity—Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and the Insurrection—we still haven’t gotten our arms around. We just can’t seem to control our own lizard brains. As a species, we seem dimly to understand that we can’t have another world war in the Nuclear Age. To do so would risk extinguishing our species, or at very least setting our global civilization back to the Stone Age. So we’re learning to fight our own worst impulses and get along, somehow. The almost instant agreement between the US and Russia on extending the New START Treaty (limiting nuclear arms) is evidence of that. So is the nascent effort to restart the Iran Nuclear Deal. But in many ways the Capitol Insurrection is unique among horrific events. It was an attempted coup by extremists in the world’s wealthiest and militarily strongest democracy. It probably would not ever have succeeded in overturning our government, but it might have succeeded in killing a number of our leaders, including our Vice-President, Speaker of the House, and several members of Congress. Thus a native, white-driven extremist putsch might have done what no attack by foreigners in our history had been able to accomplish—not Pearl Harbor, not World War II, not the Cold War, not 9/11 and (so far) not the pandemic’s submicroscopic attack. The sad thing about the Capitol Insurrection is how it tars our entire species as slow learners. For something very similar happened two millennia ago, in ancient Rome. Julius Caesar wrote his Gallic Commentaries, recounting his military conquest of primitive tribes in what are now large parts of Spain and France. Donald Trump wrote his Art of the Deal, with the help of a ghostwriter, outlining the deals that made his money, but leaving out most of the fraud, stiff-arming of contractors and students, lawsuits and bankruptcies. Today we have no good way of knowing how much of Caesar’s written work was lies and propaganda. Yet his most famous phrase—“veni, vidi, vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”)—was hardly rife with subtlety and nuance.  Nor did it bespeak a modest man. Anyway, we do know what happened next. Caesar built his meteoric rise to power upon his reputation as a victor and his careful nurturing of resentment and hate among aggrieved soldiers and the recently-assimilated minorities that provided an endless supply of them. Seeing his threat to democracy and their own interests, Roman Senators stabbed him to death, in a turning point dramatized, a millennium and a half later, in William Shakespeare’s great play Julius Caesar. Caesar’s untimely death did not save ancient Rome. The forces that he set in motion eventually made the Roman Senate an appendage to imperial rule. Although it took centuries more, Rome’s ultimate fall was inevitable. About two thousand years later, the world’s most powerful democracy now faces the very same fate. The Demagogue is out of office, but over one-third of our Senate seeks to avoid condemning him. They do not aim to prevent a recurrence of Caesar’s effect. Instead, the senators seek to exploit the Demagogue’s partial success and claim his mantle. Some want, somehow, to become the first emperor of the United States, the one who gives our democracy the coup de grace, of a kind that Caesar never saw but set in motion. The defense to conviction after impeachment was of course a charade. An old bit of law-school advice to lawyers goes as follows: “If the facts are on your side, argue the facts. If the law is on your side, argue the law. If neither the facts nor the law is on your side, pound the table.” That’s precisely what the Demagogue’s defenders did. Their arguments were short not because they were persuasive, but because pounding the table doesn’t take long. If it goes on for hours, it becomes tiresome. All the defenders accomplished was to please their client by using fanciful language, like “witch hunt,” that had become his mantras and his memes. As for the “verdict,” consider this: Could the Capitol Insurrection have happened under a President Jeb Bush, John Kasich, or Mitt Romney? Would even Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio have had the guts, let alone the idea, to mount such a putsch, if not instructed and inspired by the Demagogue? No, if the truth be told, the Demagogue and no one else was responsible. Nor could anyone else have been. His type at the top of a great democracy is a once-in-two-millennia aberration. So how do we hold him accountable? How do we signal his would-be successors that we are still a democracy? Stabbings in the Senate are no longer acceptable. Our heavy machinery of justice would mount a strong and irresistible response, with unpredictable consequences. Some day, one hopes, we will have rudimentary tests to weed out pathological liars, psychopaths, sociopaths, Narcissistic personalities and other dangerous misfits, before they get a foothold on power. In other words, some day we may employ the sciences of psychology and medicine to protect us from cunning but diseased minds that can lay us low. Yet even that expedient might not have worked with the Demagogue, who managed to parlay a checkered career in business into the top political job without any intervening experience. Maybe we need to amend the Constitution to require at least a decade in elective political office as a prerequisite to running for president. Constitutional amendments take time, a lot of it. Yet there is one thing that we can do now and henceforth, not just for the Demagogue, but for his henchmen and would-be successors, too. We can tie them tightly to the Capitol Insurrection they fostered and fomented, playing a ten-second clip of it every time their names or faces appear. After 9/11, our news broadcasts played incessant clips of the Twin Towers collapsing. They seemed to recur before or after every commercial break and often with station breaks. That practice at first appalled me. To some extent, it still does. It seemed not just the height of sensationalism, but an attempt, by constantly repeating trauma, to give the entire nation PTSD. Yet with time my views have mellowed. The constant repetition of our key moment of national agony had a purpose. It drove home how fragile and vulnerable our rich and presumably stable society really is. That understanding motivated the plenary review and enhancement of our national intelligence and the strengthening of our national defenses that is ongoing even now. Among many other things, it centralized our protection in a new federal department, the Department of Homeland Security. We have a long way to go with that fortification, especially as concerns cyberdefense. Yet incessant replays of our nation’s most terrible then-recent defeat help strengthen our resolve. So it can be with the Capitol Insurrection and the Demagogue. A video collage of the Capitol Insurrection, with clips from the funerals of dead Capitol Officers, should appear alongside his name and image every time they appear. Even if the Senate does not, the vast majority of us recognize his responsibility. We know instinctively how unlikely such a thing would have been under any other Republican president. And we know that the January 6 Insurrection actually occurred on the Demagogue’s watch as Commander-in-Chief. Our species has learned to limit the consequences of financial panics. We are learning to contain and suppress pandemics. We are working on the catastrophic consequences of war among major powers, with treaties, arms limits, alliances and sophisticated diplomacy. But the one thing our species seems not to have learned in the two millennia since Julius Caesar’s assassination is how to deal effectively with demagogues. It’s a lesson that we must learn, as a species, if we are to survive. For a skilled demagogue can exacerbate all our other problems—financial panics, pandemics, the risks of war, and our response to the coming devastation of global warming—just as our own Demagogue has done. Perhaps we can avert that danger by associating him, deliberately and irrevocably, with the Capitol Insurrection, the nearest we have ever come to losing our democracy to hateful domestic extremists fed on lies. Endnote: Credit for the core idea of this post belongs to Washington Post pundit Jonathan Capehart, who now accompanies David Brooks on the PBS Newshour’s weekly review of politics. He raised the idea in his commentary last night, on February 12. [Set the timer at 1:38 or search transcript for “had to happen.”] It merits much wider dissemination, especially among our media, which bear much responsibility for the Demagogue’s rise. Sensationalizing the Insurrection might help boost ratings; it might even do some good.  Our media should hang the Insurrection and all its blood, fear and angst around the Demagogue’s defenders’ necks like an accursed amulet.

The principal post follows:

One-third plus one. That’s how many Senate Republicans it would take to convict the Demagogue. Then a simple majority vote, to make sure he never holds federal office again, would be a foregone conclusion. Yet our self-designated “Grand Old Party” can’t summon even that many of its members to stand up for free elections. At least that’s what everyone seems to expect.

Our Founders feared this would happen. During the Constitutional Convention and in their Federalist Papers, they worried incessantly about “faction,” “ambition” and pols of low character betraying democracy for personal power and glory. They did their best to arrange our system to keep that from happening.

Did they fail?

From the perspective of several months’ hindsight, one fact shines brilliantly through the fog. The Demagogue’s slogan “Stop the Steal” was the most dastardly and devious example of psychological “projection” in American history. For it was the Demagogue and his minions who attempted, albeit ultimately unsuccessfully, to steal the election. Neither President Biden nor the Democrats did anything of the kind.

The attempted heist began in August, when the Demagogue asserted that he could lose only by fraud. (If his prediction was accurate, why even bother to have an election? Why even vote?) It continued with his lies against mail-in voting, which was vital to public health and safety during the pandemic.

His Big Lie grew as the election came closer and passed by. After the polls closed and the counting of mail-in ballots began—all in strict accordance with various state laws—he lied that the normal process of counting them was somehow fraud. His slogan morphed from baseless predictions of fraud to a literal assault on democracy: “Stop the Count.”

If all that weren’t enough, the Demagogue pushed his ploy to the bitter end. He brought 63 baseless lawsuits and “won” only one—with an order to let his poll observers stand closer to the vote counters in Philadelphia. He incited weeks of delay in the vital transition between administrations, putting our national security at risk. Then he picked up the phone and tried to get honest public servants to throw the election. Among them were his own Vice President, Mike Pence, and Georgia’s then obscure Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. He pushed the latter to “find” exactly the number of fictitious votes needed to reverse the results of the election, in which once-red Georgia had turned blue.

So this was not a single horrific incident. It was not a single spasm of our national “crazy uncle” saying something reckless in a single rally before the Capitol Insurrection of January 6.

It was a months-long, concerted effort with a single purpose: to overthrow democracy and steal the election. Even before the Insurrection, it produced death threats and violent protests. It forced innocent functionaries like Raffensberger to cower in their homes and seek police protection for themselves and their families.

Sure, the attempted coup was crude. In retrospect some of it might even seem silly. And it failed in the end. But let’s be clear-eyed about what it actually was. It was a months-long, carefully orchestrated and deliberate attempt to overthrow our democratic government. It came the closest to succeeding of any such attempt—domestic or foreign—in our history. If that wasn’t treason, what is?

True to form, Republicans are trying to distract us and hide the ball. They made the abstract legal argument that you can’t impeach a president who’s already left office. That argument failed yesterday. Now they’re putting out the “meme” that they were just humoring the crazy uncle and that they never intended for things to go so far.

But “memes” aren’t truth. They never were.

As the great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, people are presumed to intend the natural consequences of their acts. Then Senate Majority Leader McConnell refused to acknowledge President Biden’s win until almost six weeks after the election. The vast majority of Republicans waited much longer. The consequences of their reluctance to speak truth were disorder, mass confusion, false outrage, death threats, and eventually death.

In all this, Republicans were massively complicit. The Demagogue’s impeachment and trial now gives them a final chance to redeem themselves. All they have to do is summon one-third plus one of their senators to condemn the instigator’s treasonous plan and preclude him from ever holding federal office again.

In a single stroke, they could reduce him from a potential president to what he is, a madman throwing stones at the citadel of democracy. They could deprive him of the awesome power of a top contender and reveal him for what he is and always has been: a screamer from the sidelines, like the demagogues before World War II, including Father Coughlin and aviator Charles Lindbergh, a Nazi sympathizer.

Maybe if the Senate could make the vote secret, enough Republicans would summon the courage to convict. At least House Republicans did something similar: they retained the leadership of House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney after she finally broke with the Demagogue.

But no one expects Republican senators to do likewise. It can’t be fear that stops them from doing the right thing, at least not reasonable fear. It’s already clear that the Demagogue is going to have his hands full with financial foreclosures, civil suits, criminal prosecutions and a commercial empire rapidly decaying as its engine of presidential influence and corruption sputters and dies.

Yet Republicans can’t seem to organize themselves or think straight. They seem immobilized by a toxic pixie-dust of fear, ambition, and lost dreams of serving a tyrant whose whim is law. With wishful thinking and grotesque dishonesty, they have tied themselves and their party to the Demagogue’s rapidly sinking ship.

Maybe they’ll come to their senses in the next few days. Maybe the light will dawn. But if not, they will have participated in our history’s most glaring and widespread treason: the first bald attempt to overturn a free and fair presidential election. As tacit and reluctant as their participation may have been, it will prove their unfitness to govern, as a group and as a party.

The epiphany of a few like Romney cannot excuse the months-long treachery of the many. If Republicans—at their very last chance—cannot summon one-third plus one of their members to do the right thing, they will have forfeited their legitimacy as a political party.

Then they ought to go the way of the Whigs. We can only hope they go quietly and don’t bring down honest conservatives with them.

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Common Sense and Trump’s Second Trial

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

We Americans like to think that no one in our land is above the law. But we all know that’s not really so. The higher you go among the “elite,” the more weak and confused the law becomes. If you want proof, just watch the second Senate trial of Donald J. Trump for treason and other high crimes and misdemeanors.

The trick to observing clearly is to compare how a similar trial would go for a common man—or even a member of Congress—accused in a civil or criminal court of the very same acts. So let’s compare the ordinary jury trial of that hypothetical man, named Sam J. Trump, who was never president.

Except for the standard of proof—more likely than not versus beyond a reasonable doubt—it doesn’t matter whether the trial is civil or criminal. There was enormous harm: the deaths of Officer Brian Sicknick and four others, numerous personal injuries, widespread property damage, and immense pain and emotional suffering among members of Congress, their staffs, and the officers defending the Capitol. The fundamental question would be whether Sam was responsible for that harm.

In our country, both criminal and civil courts observe a strict division of labor. The judge decides the law. Unless both parties waive their jury rights, juries decide the facts.

The question whether an ex-president can be tried for crimes committed while still in office is a pure question of law. It would be the very same abstract legal question if Don were accused of stealing White House furniture or robbing a liquor store. In the case of Sam, the judge—and only the judge—would decide any similar abstract question of purely legal immunity.

In Don’s case, many of the senators are trying to make that legal immunity the most important, if not the sole, issue. Yet the senators are the jurors, not the judge. The Constitution so designates them, and they even call themselves “jurors.”

So what business do they, as jurors, have in deciding a purely legal issue? In Sam’s trial, the judge would ignore their questions and statements on the subject of immunity and direct the court reporter to strike them from the record. Instead, the judge would direct the jurors to focus on two key factual issues. First, did Sam in some way intend to cause the harm? Second, did he in fact cause it, or did someone or something else?

These two factual issues are interrelated. A basic principle of law—both criminal and civil—is that a man is presumed to intend the natural consequences of his acts. If you stab, shoot or bludgeon someone, you are presumed to intend to cause the resulting injury or death, unless you can prove some extraordinary circumstances that exonerate you. The level of your intention—whether purposeful, reckless, or negligent—determines the degree of your culpability and your punishment, but not your responsibility. Your responsibility is a question of fact—of common-sense consequence—for the jury to decide.

Causation, too, is a matter of common-sense fact. If a Mafia capo orders his “muscle” to “whack” an informer, and it’s done, doesn’t the capo bear some responsibility for the murder? So the core question in both Don’s and Sam’s cases is the same. Was what happened more like what the Mafia capo did, or more like a newspaper columnist viewing the election with alarm and nothing more? Juries decide this point in ordinary cases because it’s a question of fact—what actually happened—or at worst a mixed question of fact and law, which juries can decide.

In Sam’s case, that’s precisely what the judge would ask the jury to decide. But in Don’s case, the Republican jurors don’t want to decide it at all. They want to confuse the public by making them think the pure legal issue—which juries are never supposed to decide—is more important. They want the public, and especially the 75 million who voted for Trump—to take their eyes off the ball, namely, core question of whether Don was responsible for the Capitol Insurrection. This is par for the course for a party that has made distraction the engine of its politics.

The First Amendment and “free speech” are also irrelevant because neither wiped out criminal or tort law. The age-old law that holds all people responsible for injuries they cause others and others’ property still exists. That’s what Oliver Wendell Holmes meant when he said that free speech is no defense to crying “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

Whenever speech creates a “clear and present” danger of real harm, it’s no longer protected. But in Sam’s case, the jurors don’t get to decide where to draw that line. Only judges do. If the jurors go too far in condemning speech as acts, the trial judge or (more likely) the judges on appeal will correct them. All Sam’s jurors are supposed to decide, based on common-sense understanding of cause and effect, is whether Sam intended to cause the mayhem and actually did so, or whether some other intervening cause exonerated Sam.

So who plays the role of judge in Don’s case? Who decides the purely legal question of whether an ex-president can be tried by the Senate after leaving office? Who decides where to draw the line between speech and action?

Here’s where our Founders nodded. In a Senate trial after an impeachment, there really is no judge. The Chief Justice of our Supreme Court is supposed to “preside” over the trial. But his or her powers and duties are unspecified.

Anyway, our own Chief Justice Roberts has declined the honor. No doubt he did so because the job would do neither him nor his Court any good. If he performed his role like an ordinary trial judge, he would take the heat for depriving Republicans of their abstract red herrings (the legal issues). He also would impair the public’s trust in our Supreme Court. Even in ducking the job, as he did, he failed in his duty to hold the “jurors” to the ordinary function of juries in every other case and to require them to find the facts like real jurors.

So who will preside? It will be eighty-year-old Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat from Vermont, who holds the post of “President Pro Tempore” of the Senate by virtue of his seniority. But Leahy will also be a juror, thereby raising an obvious conflict of interest and inevitably mixing the two functions that in Sam’s case would be strictly separate. And if Leahy attempts to separate them in Don’s case, he will inevitably be accused of egregious partisanship. So most likely no one at all will perform the function that the judge would perform in Sam’s case, leaving random jurors to claim that it’s all their bailiwick.

Our judicial branch could not resolve the legal issues in Don’s case because the Senate is supposed to be the supreme and unreviewable authority in trials of impeachment, so as not to impair the separation of powers. Impeachment and conviction are supposed to be “political questions,” on which the Supreme Court cannot comment, even if the proceedings confuse the facts with the law, and even if that result confuses and disappoints the public.

There are three points to take away from this dismal state of affairs. First, Don will never be held to account for his behavior, even in theory, because about a third of senators will steadfastly refuse to address the factual issues of intent and responsibility that would be for jurors to decide in Sam’s case. Instead, they will focus on the pure legal issues that the judge would decide in Sam’s case but in Don’s case there is no one definitively authorized to decide.

Second, in our age when facts and truth mean nothing and everything is arguable, there will be no closure, ever, on whether the ex-president caused the Capitol Insurrection or intended to do so. Historians will continue to debate the issues as long as our nation’s memory survives. In the short term, our people will continue to live figuratively on different planets while actually inhabiting the same rapidly warming one.

Finally, the straitjacket of a written constitution that our Founders left us will continue to strangle us in unforeseen ways. Not only does California, with its 39.5 million people (in 2019), have the same two votes in the Senate as Wyoming, with only 0.58 million. Not only has the Electoral College given us five presidents elected by a popular minority, including the one now under trial. Not only is the filibuster hog-tying us into inaction while we face five distinct existential threats. But our people also will never have any official closure on the key factual questions in the Capitol Insurrection. The Internet’s sewage will bury all.

All our species can hope for is that, millennia in the future, when the US is as dead as ancient Rome, those who wish to revive democracy will do better than to bind it to a deeply flawed contract between slave states and free states, and to make it nearly impossible to change. Instead, they will do what the Brits have done: respect an unwritten constitution that wise leaders can change gradually, with great respect and great wisdom, as society evolves. At the present rate, our democracy has little hope of surviving even half as long as the Brits’ has, namely, 805 years (so far) since Magna Carta in 1215.

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Fear of Flying Filibusterless

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

For analysis of ways to circumvent the filibuster and more specific reasons to abolish it, click here.

In an important recent column, New York Times pundit Charles Blow aired a chilling fear. Mitch McConnell, he suggested, might be pulling a Br’er Rabbit-style trick by pushing so hard to save the filibuster.

Blow wrote that demographic change could give Republicans a durable Senate majority. That could make minorities and white progressives helpless to stave off retrogression without the filibuster. Here’s why I think he’s wrong.

The essence of Blow’s fear is long-term demographic change. According to Norm Ornstein, whom Blow quotes:

“By 2040 or so, 70 percent of Americans will live in 15 states. Meaning 30 percent will choose 70 senators. And the 30 percent will be older, whiter, more rural, more male than the 70 percent.”

The result, Blow predicts, will be permanent minority rule in the Senate without a filibuster.

If this is so, we are doomed as a nation anyway. In order to stave off retrogression and reaction, we would have to up the vote to cut off a filibuster from the present 60% supermajority to over 70%. The Senate would become even more of a useless debating society than it is already. Nothing would ever get done in Congress, and our imperial presidency would go on steroids. We would morph from a Republic to an empire, just like ancient Rome.

But none of this is foreordained. The reason is changing demographics within states, specifically in the South.

The open secret resides in another column of Blow’s. There he reported his own relocation from New York City to Atlanta, after 26 years up north. He invited other Black voters to follow, in a reverse Great Migration. That reversal, he wrote, “would create dense Black communities, and that density would translate into statewide political power.”

Black voters in the South may never again have the absolute majorities that they enjoyed immediately after Emancipation, before white terror drove so many north in the Great Migration. But they don’t have to have statewide majorities all by themselves. Now they have allies.

Black voters are not the only group growing in the South. Latinx people and progressive whites are also growing. Black voters are now part of a progressive coalition that supports their push for racial justice and local control of their own communities.

That’s precisely what I had hoped for, supported and predicted in 2017. And it came to pass in 2020—at least in part. Local demographic change flipped Georgia, helping to put Biden and Harris in the White House and giving us Chuck Schumer as Senate Majority Leader. That’s all a done deal now.

But there’s more, much more. We can’t ever deprive any state of its two votes in the Senate, but we can admit new states. Specifically, we can make both the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico states. Both trend heavily progressive.

According to the Constitution’s Admissions Clause (Article IV, Section III, Clause 1), Congress could admit new states by simple majority votes, if there were no filibuster in the Senate. If we abolished the filibuster, Congress could get this done before the 2022 congressional elections. (Other states need not ratify new admissions, as they must constitutional amendments.)

There’s still more. We have 11-plus million undocumented immigrants living among us. Give them a path to citizenship, and more of them—neglected and demonized by the GOP—would vote blue. An estimated 1.6 million live in Texas, with its 38 electoral votes. (Scroll down below the table.) That’s more than double Trump’s 2020 margin of 631, 221 votes in Texas.

Then there are voting rights. Only strong, federal voting-rights legislation can reverse the abomination of Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted our Voting Rights Act. Only a new law can make voting simple and easy for everyone. It could insure safe voting by mail (with a paper trail) during the pandemic, uniform early voting nationwide, adequate polling places and drop-off boxes in minority communities, and election days on Sundays or public holidays, so that more working people can vote. Once every citizen has the right to vote for real, not just in theory, Congress can attack the final frontier of voting rights: stopping gerrymandering so that every vote counts equally.

All this would require legislation: new states, new voting citizens, stronger voting rights, and legislative curbs on gerrymandering and other forms of voter manipulation. None of it can be done by the budget reconciliation process, because none of it directly involves money. (I’ve suggested that some progress can be made by imposing conditions on money grants, but recalcitrant states could avoid the conditions by refusing the grants.)

So abolishing the filibuster is vital not just to realizing a progressive wish list. It’s also vital to enacting the parts of that wish list that can entrench a progressive coalition in national politics and in the South. As my 2017 table shows, if Democrats can flip Florida and North Carolina as they did Georgia last year, they can have a lock on the presidency, with 273 electoral votes, without relying on any of Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin, without any new states, and without Texas, which could soon flip, too.

More fundamentally, Blow’s fear neglects a hopeful sea change in national politics. Black voters are no longer alone. At long last, millions of white voters like me, plus other minorities, recognize Black voters’ crying need for justice and the power of their political perseverance.

We all know in our souls that Black pols and Black voters, starting with Jim Clyburn, were instrumental in saving our Republic from the Demagogue and from Mitch. They deftly leveraged the great white awakening sparked by the video of George Floyd’s police murder.

Call it a long-overdue epiphany. Call it a renewed instinct for self-preservation. But whatever you call it, it’s real. Black pols and Black voters are not just parts of a new coalition; they are leading it.

The trick now is to keep that coalition growing. To that end, I just re-upped my monthly contributions to the following grass-roots organizers (albeit at a lower level than last year): Black Voters Matter, Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight Action, Nsé Ufot’s New Georgia Project, Helen Butler’s Coalition for the People’s Agenda, Daily Kos, Democracy for America, the Democratic National Committee (now led by Jaime Harrison), Progressive Turnout Project, Voter Protection and Marisa Franco’s Mijente.

These are some of the groups whose relentless hard work, on the ground, day after day, will transform our nation. They will bypass the expensive media circus and conspiracy-crazed social media. They will avoid the overpaid consultants and “operatives” who drive workers’ justifiable distrust of the “elite.”

So no, Mr. Blow, there is little reason to fear. There is reason to hope. Hope gave us Obama. Hope gave us Biden, Harris and a diminished Mitch. Timidity gave us too small a stimulus in 2009, “Obamacare” without a public option, and recent a GOP “offer” of a two-thirds cut in relief, massive evictions, and states and cities left adrift on a pandemic sea. We can’t be timid and maintain hope.

Hope could give us a totally transformed nation without a filibuster. All we have to learn to do is (as Paul Krugman puts it) not let the GOP Lucy pull the football away again. We can fix this nation quickly and for good, if only we can entice Senators Manchin and Sinema, with carrots and sticks, to do what must be done.

With a succinct and incisive history, Blow’s colleague Jamelle Bouie has skewered the myth of the filibuster as an “improvement” in democracy. It’s not. It’s not any part of our Constitution. It’s not even our Founders’ afterthought. It’s a blunt instrument of obstruction and minority rule, spawned by a series of historical accidents and nurtured by political schemers like Mitch. Its “beneficence” and ability to foster compromise are pernicious myths, just like Old South’s “contented” slaves and “genteel” culture.

Three structural evils hobble our democracy: our permanently malapportioned Senate, the Electoral College, and the filibuster. The filibuster is the only one we can change by a simple majority vote in the Senate, without a constitutional amendment or a national compact. It’s time we did so and joined most of the world’s democracies, plus the ancient Greeks and Romans, in enjoying majority rule.

Right after pandemic relief, killing the filibuster should be Job One, in a sustained full-court press. We will have suffered decades of deliberate suppression of Black voters (with “surgical precision”), a badly botched pandemic response, an epidemic of police killings of Black citizens, a full-term delay in rebuilding our infrastructure, the Garland stiff-arm, the Barrett cram-down, two acquittals of a guilty and treasonous president, the Big Lie of a stolen election, and the Capitol Insurrection that it caused. After all that, neither Mitch nor any lackey of the Demagogue will have valid reason to complain about losing one sneaky tool of minority rule.

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