Robert Kagan is one of those Washington think-tankers who provided the intellectual impetus for our misbegotten adventures in regime change after 9/11 in societies of which we were manifestly ignorant. Not my kind of guy. He left the Republicans over the fascistic energies released by Donald Trump, so he's made himself part of the big resistance tent we all need if U.S. democracy is to survive.
Recently, in an interview with Johns Hopkins University political scientist Yascha Mounk, Kagan offered a dire, but imaginable, vision of where the Republican assault on majority rule might lead the country. I found Kagan's imaginings thought provoking because they go beyond the necessary description of our Constitutional dysfunction to what happens if ...?
... it's really up to people. It's up to individuals all the way up, down, and across society, from the president, the vice president, the Supreme Court, the members of Congress, down to volunteer election officials (those are the people who saved us, in a way, in 2020). Unfortunately, I don't know that there is a legal or constitutional fix to what ails us.
What I am most worried about is moving into a period where, let's say two or three states which hold the balance in the Electoral College are completely contested. There is every prospect of mass protests from both sides. People are increasingly tending to come to those protests heavily armed. We could be in a situation in 2024 where there is no obvious way out, and then we'll be left with President Biden, or whoever is in charge at that time, having to make what amounts to extra-constitutional decisions in order to save our democracy, because there is no constitutional remedy.
.. If you're a president in a situation where a couple of states are hopelessly deadlocked because you've got mobs in the street, how do you get out of that situation? At what point are you able to say, “No, I won,” or “they won,” and that's the end of it? Is he going to call out the National Guard? Is he going to call up the Army? Once you have gotten to the point where the established means of choosing a president and all that comes with that have been cast to the winds, you really are in an extra-constitutional situation.
That just means that whatever a president does in that situation, the other side will accuse them of being a tyrant, just the way Lincoln was accused of being a tyrant—to some extent, justifiably so. I don't want Donald Trump to be president after 2024 because I think he will then dismantle American democracy. Because he doesn't have any belief in American democracy. But even before you would get to Trump being in office, you would be in this crisis where we do not have a legitimate president. That's what I'm worried about.
... There's no question that there are conditions in the United States in terms of the way people feel about things, the way people behave, what they value and what they don't—that is a problem that exists apart from Donald Trump. And the question then is, has it always existed? Is there something new about what we're seeing today? I think there's a reasonable case to be made. But racism is certainly not new in America. White anxiety is not new. We never think about this, but the 1920s were a very similar period. What you had then was intense xenophobia, intense anti-immigration, anti-science in the Scopes Trial, the rise of the second Klan—these tendencies have, I think, always existed and are sort of inherent to the American experience, unfortunately. The 1930s were a time that was ripe for a Donald Trump, and the Donald Trumps were out there in Father Coughlin and Huey Long.
... as to these other problems that exist independently of Trump, we do need to work on them, and we need to fight that battle. And that battle now, as we can see, needs to be fought again, at every level of society. You know, you have to fight it at the school board and in the local community center. We are in one of those moments where we can't just wait for our elected officials to solve everything for us.
But to repeat myself for the umpteenth time, I do think that Trump is special. And so I do think if we can get past Trump, yes, there’s a chance that this group, which has always been around, will be out there simmering, bubbling, and occasionally giving rise to some politician’s trajectory, but it won’t be the kind of comprehensive threat that Trump has turned into.
The sign above was captured by a doorknocker in Reno. Passions are high out there.
2 comments:
Hi Jan, I always read you but rarely comment. I had to say thank you for that sign, which I will re-use somewhere. Not on my blog because I am nowhere near as brave as you and keep mine light. But we need people like you to keep up the good work!!!!
There is no god.
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