Giving Democracy One More Try

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Who Should Impeach: Schiff or Nadler?

Today the Washington Post reported that Speaker Pelosi is, for the first time, beginning to plan an impeachment inquiry. Her discussions reportedly involve whether to set up a special committee, headed by Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D. Ca.), or to let the Judiciary Committee run by Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.) continue its work. There’s no way for outsiders to know which man does better work behind the scenes. They are both consummately skilled lawyers. But for the public face of the impeachment process there’s a clear choice: Schiff. Adam Schiff is simply the most brilliant and effective House member I can remember at 74. I can’t recall him ever exaggerating, downplaying, or “spinning” the facts. He’s like a human oracle. He speaks truth with full force, using just the right words. His understatement is barely perceptible, just enough so listeners prone to disbelieve him can never accuse him credibly of exaggerating. Schiff is also superbly articulate and polished in speaking. I can’t remember him ever using an incomplete sentence or making a grammatical error. That’s not always easy when you’re speaking about complex things without notes. But Schiff’s best advantage is that he never, ever loses his cool. He describes the most egregious wrongdoing by this Administration with a sense of bemused wonder, as if to say softly, “How in the world did we ever sink so low? Isn’t it strange?” This, I think, is Schiff’s key advantage over Nadler. Nadler, too, has a brilliant legal mind, which I respected as such long before I knew Schiff’s name. But when confronted with a man for whom law and rules are just more underlings to push around, Nadler loses his cool. When his witnesses don’t answer questions, or (worse yet) stonewall legitimate, lawful subpoenas, Nadler simply doesn’t know what to do. He all but sputters in helpless indignation, a highly visible form of weakness. I don’t think helpless indignation—or even the public perception of it—is going to help impeach Trump, win the next election, or get our democracy back. And it bears repeating—something Speaker Pelosi knows full well—that a futile impeachment with no conviction entails a risk of losing the coming election and suffering four more years of corrupt, incompetent, clueless, Mafia-like leadership. Impeachment is such an existentially important process, and so delicate, as to render personalities irrelevant. Nadler and his supporters in his committee and the House must do whatever it takes to win, loyalties and feelings aside. Every House member is, or should be, a professional—the more so as those like Schiff and Nadler got their starts as lawyers. This is a time to show professionalism and self-sacrifice above all. That said, it would be foolish to give up all the good work Nadler and his committee have done and start over. Perhaps Pelosi could avoid that disaster by appointing a special committee to investigate only the latest and biggest charge, concerning Trump’s asking Ukraine’s president to investigate Joe Biden and his son. The special committee might also be in charge of putting all the dots together and presenting them to the public. No one who has seen both Schiff and Nadler presenting their respective committees’ results to the public could possibly believe that Nadler could do that job as well as Schiff. Nadler is simply no match for Trump and his scofflaw apparatchiks. Schiff, with his bemused approach, penetrating insight, absolute accuracy, and understated self-confidence, just might be. It‘s now time to put turf, loyalty, pride and feelings aside and let the best man run this process, at least insofar as the public can see.

[The principal post on trying democracy one more time follows:]

It’s official. The “Oracle” of Western liberal democracies, the British weekly The Economist, hath decreed it. Our species’ democracies are in intensive care, if not on their deathbeds.

This goes for not just the obvious ones, like Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Turkey, and not just for perennially shaky democracies like Italy’s. Today it also describes the biggies: Britain and the United States.

Our own country became an oligarchy at least five years ago. In 2014, a careful study of 1,779 public issues showed that the elite and business interests get what they want most of the time, while the general population seldom gets what it wants. What’s more, our nine most populous states together have over half our total population but only 18 out of 100 senators. And several other peculiarities of our “democratic” structure give us something quite different from majority rule.

If practical proof were needed, look at gun control. Vast majorities of us Americans want universal background checks and bans on assault weapons and large magazines. We have wanted these things for decades. But we have none of them, and we probably will get none, except perhaps for a tiny expansion of background checks that closes no loophole, or a red-flag law that works only when people are forewarned.

The irony is that the oligarchs don’t want weapons of war on our streets any more than the rest of us do. But they travel in bulletproof limousines. More important, they use the issue as a distraction, to divide and conquer us. They want guns to remain an issue in perpetuity, so we don’t see them stealing the fruits or our labor and the substance of this nation.

Here’s how the whole rotten charade works. The oligarchs tell us that government is inefficient, incompetent and corrupt. Their GOP lackeys join the chorus. They all insist that business can do everything better. Then they all support pols who make government fail, in order to “prove” these lies.

The pols get themselves elected with the aid of the oligarchs’ money. Then they downsize government. They deprive it of sustenance by lowering taxes and cutting budgets. They appoint inexperienced, corrupt and incompetent people to work in it. Then they prove their point about corruption by indulging in it themselves. They support laws and policies that are short on ethics and transparency and long on benefits for themselves and for the oligarchs who support them, not the nation.

The bought pols lower taxes and cut regulations so that their oligarchs can wax rich and do what they want. That way, both the pols and the oligarchs accumulate ever more power. This is also how they cause the public trust to die of cynicism.

There is, of course, a paradox in all this. No sane board of directors of any successful corporation, let alone a multinational, would hire as its CEO a man as inexperienced, incompetent and erratic as Donald Trump. Can you imagine a CEO of Apple, Boeing, Caterpillar, or Ford who didn’t read his briefing papers and made decisions by watching Fox? He wouldn’t last two weeks.

Yet the oligarchs support Trump as leader of the whole nation because he mostly lets them alone. He rolls back taxes and regulations so they can make yet more money and accumulate yet more economic power. They keep silent about Trump’s own corruption because it distracts attention from theirs. And Trump’s stupidity, incompetence and flagrant abuses of the law play right into the oligarchs’ story: that government is useless and only their businesses can serve us well.

There’s more. A careful, book-length academic study, summarized by its authors here, shows that the oligarchs don’t telegraph their punches. They do all this mostly in secret, without taking public political stands.

The few progressive billionaires, such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and George Soros, try to do good with their cash. They often speak out. But nearly all the rest keep totally silent about politics. At the same time, they work in secret to kill Social Security, lower taxes, cut regulations, and abolish the estate tax, so they can pass their great wealth to their progeny.

Our Supreme Court, having “reasoned” that money is “speech,” lets the oligarchs do all this with secret “dark” money. It says our Constitution requires this, as if it had built an oligarchy in. This is democracy?

How do we end this downward spiral? As The Economist’s page-long epitaph for democracy recognized, the key threat is failing public trust, both in our government and in each other.

If we, the people, continue to think that all pols are corrupt and continue to turn against each other, the downward spiral will continue. The oligarchs will not just win, which they mostly have done already. They will literally take all.

The only possible way out is for voters to focus on what matters: who deeply kens the rigging of everything and asks for our trust in de-rigging it? Nothing else matters. Not guns and all the innocent people they kill. Not what other people do between the sheets and with whom. Not abortion; not religion. Not immigration, which will sweeten only as our more basic problems improve. Not even climate change; it won’t stop accelerating until the people in control now lose their rigged power.

The only thing that matters is whether a candidate sees what’s going on—what’s destroying our economy and our democracy—and knows what can be done to fix it. If we don’t solve the rigging of everything, everything will get worse, either in the oligarchs’ direct self-interest or (like guns and abortion) as a distraction from their taking all.

That’s why an aging, “go along to get along” guy like Joe Biden will either lose the election or lose our democracy. That’s why Booker, Buttigieg, and Harris won’t cut it, as attractive, vital and young as they all are. That’s why Klobuchar’s sweet moderation falls far short of the task.

How can you be “moderate” when a few hundred people are rigging everything and making the rest of us hate each other just to get their way? Anyway, what does “moderate” mean in this case? letting the oligarchs take just half? three-quarters? Will people who act as they do ever be satisfied with anything less than all?

There is only one issue in the coming presidential election: the rigging of our nation. Everything is rigged. Our politics are rigged, by our skewed political structure, by the dominance of dark money, and by deliberate vote suppression and gerrymandering. The economy is rigged: gross inequality is built in. Racism, bigotry and discrimination are rigged because getting us to hate our neighbor takes our eyes off the ball. Our insane reliance on fossil fuels is also rigged, for self-evident reasons: fossil fuels made many of our oligarchs and continue to be the source of their wealth.

All these things are rigged for a single overweening purpose: to keep the pols and the oligarchs who are on top now on top forever, or at least until the oil and gas run out and we begin having killer heat waves in “winter.”

We have to break this vicious cycle. To do that, we must keep our eyes on the ball. When all the dust settles, if we still live in a society rigged by the oligarchs and their political lackeys, nothing will change.

So we have to focus on de-rigging our energy, our taxes, our regulations, our markets, our civic life, our so-called “democracy,” and our perpetual, needless wars. When we’ve not been attacked directly since 9/11, what’s another needless war, but a big distraction that kills?

There are only two candidates in the entire presidential field who see the writing on the wall: Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. All the rest offer just more or less of the same, perhaps with a few better policies.

If Trump wins a second term, US democracy will be finished. If he loses, our democracy could limp on for a lap or two. Then it could succumb to another, less outrageous or more skillful rigger.

History warns us that democracy is like milk. Once it sours, it never gets sweet again. Rome lasted centuries after the Pompeian civil wars, but it was never the same. It stopped being a democracy. It decayed into empire, and a slowly dying one at that.

The only way to cure and save our democracy is to stop and reverse the rigging, and the hating that promotes it. And the only way to do that is to elect pols who see through both and will focus single mindedly on undoing them. Nothing else will fix what ails us.

So vote for the pols you think are best at doing that. Give our democracy one last chance to recover and survive.

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