Unfit to Govern

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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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