The second impeachment of King Joffrey the Superannuated following the 6 January 2021 assault on the Capitol led me to ponder the Athenians’ use of ostracism to take the starch out of potential tyrants and how closely impeachment was analogous to it. The product of this reverie was this unpublished editorial.
I wasn’t certain what to do with it. My Beloved, with my consent, passed it to a friend whose opinion I value. She was enthusiastic and asked to use it in her classes as an example of how pre-modernity holds relevance for the present. I blushed. I flogged it to The New York Times and The Washington Post. No dice. Events then pushed it past its sell-by date.
An American Ostracism.
The nation finds itself at a disconcerting juncture in its democratic story, yet the crisis is one far from unique for democratic governments. The forty-fifth president made an attempt, unprecedented in the American experience, to subvert the democratic process and to extend his rule through unconstitutional seizure of power. The effort failed but left in its wake the thorny problem of how best to restrain a politician and a faction that remain a threat to democratic governance.
The risk posed by the unscrupulous actor willing to employ any means to arrogate power for personal benefit has plagued democracy from its inception. Millennia ago, the classical Athenians contended with it. Peisistratus (600-527 BCE) seized power on three occasions and ruled Athens continuously from 546 to 527 BCE as a tyrant. Tyranny, however, for the Greeks did not bear the dark connotations attached to it in the American idiom. It was understood neutrally and simply as rule by unconstitutional means. It was possible for an Athenian tyrant to be broadly popular and Peisistratus mostly was. A tyrant often aspires to cement the position as a family business and therein is the problematic nature of tyranny exposed. Hippias (d. 490 BCE) followed his father Peisistratus as tyrant. His rule became so oppressive that the Athenian statesman Cleisthenes helped to engineer his ouster and exile in 510 BCE and then two years later introduced the reforms that earned him the sobriquet “father of democracy.”
This democracy was narrow in its franchise (only free men; no women, no slaves) but ultimately more radically participatory than the American representative model. It introduced a measure to forestall the ascent of a future wannabe tyrant, ostracism. Athenian citizens convened annually and voted whether there should be an ostracism. If yes, a second, secret balloting was held two months later. Every citizen incised a name on a potsherd (ostracon) and, if a quorum voted, the top vote-getter had ten days to settle his affairs and leave Athens for ten years; however, his property and citizenship were protected and a return to politics was permitted once the exile ended. The goal was to break a threatening, dangerous politician’s power and to hobble his faction. Perhaps a dozen Athenians suffered ostracism during Athens’ classical era.
Historical analogies are, of course, inherently limited. Classical Athens is not twenty-first century America; nonetheless, the past should not be wholly discounted and can at least whisper in the present’s ear. The universality of human experience should never be dismissed. The question becomes, then, what democratic methods are available here and now to thwart a potential tyrant. The situation in 2021 is complicated by a further disturbing reality: A swathe of politicians in one of the nation’s two political parties has been marinating in varying measures of cynical ambition, authoritarian fantasy, delusion, and fecklessness, a toxic mixture with the potential to initiate a downward spiral into autocratic, illiberal governance.
It is difficult to think that the Constitution’s framers, classically educated as they were, were ignorant of the Athenian example. It, moreover, seems unlikely that they, having rebelled against what was in their perception tyrannical rule in its pejorative sense, would not have devised a provision to safeguard their fledging democratic republic from a tyrant. They in fact did. This mechanism was set into motion last month with the House’s bipartisan vote to impeach the forty-fifth president for fomenting the assault on the Capitol on 6 January.
Unlike Athenian ostracism, this procedure requires three rather than two steps, and here the third step is crucial. The former president must not just be convicted in his upcoming Senate trial but then he must also be disqualified from further federal officeholding. This American ostracism is the only constitutional remedy for a dangerous demagogy driven by an amoral, conscienceless political opportunist suffering from more than a soupçon of sociopathy.
Would that we now had a political counterpart of another classical Greek, Diogenes the Cynic (414/404-323 BCE), that prince of gadflies who made a career of exposing the hypocrisy and cant of the political elite. What would Diogenes conclude should he stroll through the impeachment trial and, as was his wont, hold aloft a lamp lit in daytime in a search for an honest person? Whatever he might make of the American brand of ostracism, the behavior on 6 January of the onetime president, now decamped to Florida, has proven true an aphorism credited to Diogenes: “The mob is the mother of tyrants.”
Televised political conventions are inherently propagandistic; however, the backdrop of the coronavirus, The Benighted One’s exploitation of the Executive Mansion as a prop, and the hyperbolic expressions of fealty to His Sublimity, along with shaky production values, placed the 2020 Republican National Convention in its own subgenre. The unpublished letter below was written in response to The Washington Post’s account of the event.
Toluse Olorunnipa, “In Prime Time An Alternate Reality That Bolsters a Flagging Campaign,” The Washington Post, 28 August 2020, A1, A17 (www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-convention-falsehoods/2020/08/27/41a07f5a-e888-11ea-970a-64c73a1c2392_story.html).
And so the Republican National Convention has mercifully concluded. Toluse Olorunnipa ably exposes the convention’s dishonesty and the political desperation driving it. Beyond this, perhaps the convention’s most disturbing quality is how unsurprising it was.
Is anyone shocked that the clownish enablers who have flocked to Mr. Trump’s campaign would subject the nation to a bloated, low-rent analogue to Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will? Ms. Riefenstahl, whatever her defects, was a talented filmmaker able to impart a cinematic sheen to appalling totalitarian dreck. Even this dubious achievement evaded the Republican National Committee. It should be remembered that Ms. Riefenstahl, despite her considerable moviemaking skill, could not disguise the profound smallness of her subject and she indeed, regardless of her intentions, made apparent the banality of evil. The ham-fisted, reality-television-addled doyens of Trumplandia could not help but do the same. It is to be hoped that voters will not be deceived by Mr. Trump’s deluded medicine show.
This is another crack at an editorial that never took off. I was teaching Norman and Plantagenet England at the University of Richmond and the Plantagenet portion spoke to me in a way it hadn’t theretofore. President Supersize Me was much on my mind because of his “acquittal” in the impeachment trial early in February 2020. Henry III of England seemed a little “Trumpy” to me in ways big and small; moreover, the sense of limited executive authority as understood by Simon de Montfort and the rebelling barons, to say nothing of their courage and commitment to their cause, offered a counterpoint to the behavior of the national GOP, a contrast further sharpened by subsequent events.
I put a thing together and sent it to a couple of outlets (The Washington Post, The Virginian-Pilot), who passed on it but were nice about it.
A Medieval Presidency?
2020 seems to have completed President Trump’s seduction of the Republican Party. The unwillingness of GOP senators and representatives to rebuke Trump in the impeachment process for disregarding rule of law, violation of constitutional principles, and flouting of political norms was telling. Now congressional Republicans largely stand aside while the president removes inspectors general, interferes in judicial processes, smears his predecessor with baseless conspiracy theories, and employs the military against peaceful protestors.
A cottage industry devoted to finding historical analogies for Trump’s misbehavior has emerged. Does he belong with the twentieth century’s totalitarian despots or does his clownishness place him alongside tin-pot dictators of banana republics? Or is he a throwback to the Ur-tyrant of the American mind, England’s George III?
One of George’s medieval predecessors may be a more apposite historical precursor. Henry III (r. 1216-72) was the successor to John of Magna Carta fame and father of Edward I, the Longshanks, the opponent of Braveheart’s William Wallace. Henry had exaggerated personal qualities. He loved sumptuous living and was enchanted by construction projects. He built castles and palaces and rebuilt and enlarged Westminster Abbey, all the while fussing over furnishings. He judged character poorly and surrounded himself with foreign favorites, to his English barons’ displeasure. He took advice only from a small, intimate circle except when he dispensed even with this and made decisions unilaterally. His autocratic tendencies were barely concealed.
His arbitrariness and profligacy reached a crisis when he agreed to purchase the kingdom of Sicily for his younger son. Unable to raise enough money, he asked his barons for an extraordinary tax. This request engendered baronial resistance led by his brother-in-law Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester. The barons compelled Henry to accede under oath – a grave commitment in the medieval mind – to the Provisions of Oxford (1258). Henry was obliged to consult a council of barons on state matters and to “parlay” three times a year with a larger council in a “parliament.” The immediate crisis passed, Henry voided his promise and left his opponents with little choice but to submit or fight. The barons bested Henry at Lewes (1264). Henry and his son Edward were captured, the latter made hostage to ensure the king’s good behavior. Simon and the barons became England’s de facto rulers for fifteen months.
Political poems reflecting the baronial viewpoint appeared, the most famous perhaps “The Song of Lewes.” The “Song” underscores how a king must govern for the community’s benefit and honor the rule of law: “We give first place to the community; we say also that the law rules over the king’s dignity; for we believe that the law is the light, without which. . .he who rules will wander from the right path. . .” The poem’s broader community was the king’s natural counsellor: “Therefore let the community of the kingdom advise; let it be known what the generality [of the people] thinks to whom their own laws are best known.” Indeed, the leader’s submission to the law would not weaken but ennoble him: “And this constraint [of a free law] is not one of slavery but is rather an enlarging of the kingly faculty. . .” The “Song” emphasizes where the ruler’s focus should be: “And let the king never set his private interest before that of the community. . .” “He who does not know how to rule himself will be a bad ruler over others. . .” The “Song” leaves a disquieting impression: The barons, many of them little more than semi-literate armed thugs, surpassed the Solons of today’s GOP in understanding rule of law and separation and balance of powers.
The story has a coda. Edward broke his confinement, rallied his father’s supporters, and defeated the barons at Evesham (1265). Simon died in battle and his corpse was hewn to pieces. For the earl’s supporters, his remains became sanctified and the field where he perished hallowed ground. Miracle-stories spread. Henry could not abide this and in the Dictum of Kenilworth (1265) mandated that “[t]he injurious damnable acts of Simon and his accomplices. . .are nullified and have no force” and that “the vain and fatuous miracles told of him by others shall not at any time pass any lips. And that the king shall agree strictly to forbid this under pain of corporal punishment.” Simon’s rectitude, courage, and commitment to good governance were “fake news” to be suppressed. Henry had learned no lesson, though at least the barons had tried to instruct him. Would that the same could be said of today’s GOP. The Republican Party seems capable only of narrowly transactional impulses. Its abdication of its responsibility to the community leaves that community of voters to restrain Trump by every legal means and to ensure his departure from office.
[1] “The Song of Lewes,” in E. Amt (ed.), Medieval England 1000-1500: A Reader (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001), pp. 253-61.
[2] “The Miracles of Simon de Montfort,” in E. Amt and K. Allen Smith (eds), Medieval England 500-1500: A Reader, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), pp. 248-50. “Dictum of Kenilworth 1265,” The National Archives (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/magna-carta/dictum-of-kenilworth/ [accessed 16 February 2020]).
By the time I departed for the biannual hajj to the Bluegrass, The Gaslighter in Chief’s conduct had become so egregious that Nancy Pelosi could no longer temporize on doing something about it. I had my customary I-64 sleepover in Lexington and bought a copy of The Lexington Herald-Leader. The paper had picked up The New York Times’ reporting by Nicholas Fandos on the speaker’s announcement of the opening of an impeachment inquiry regarding President Perfect Conservation’s alleged shakedown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. I did a riff on Representative Adam Schiff’s soliloquy regarding what is “okay.” The Lexington Herald-Leader was not sufficiently amused to print it.
Nicholas Fandos, “House Opens Impeachment Inquiry of President Trump,” The Lexington Herald-Leader, 25 September 2019, 1A, 2A (www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/us/politics/democrats-impeachment-trump.html). If Lexington Herald-Leader posted an online version of this article, its search engine is unable to locate it. The link above is to the version that appeared the The New York Times.
This past week’s torrent of events demands an updating of Representative Adam Schiff’s litany of questions to his colleagues on the House Intelligence Committee on 28 March. The GOP members of the House and Senate should ask themselves whether it is okay that a president’s personal attorney dabble in foreign affairs outside of official channels. Is it okay that a president pressure a foreign head of state to gather and perhaps even to concoct damaging information on a domestic political opponent? Is it okay that a president, whether tacitly or explicitly, dangle the provision of congressionally appropriated assistance as a carrot or the withholding of it as a stick to compel the head of state to bow to his wishes? Is it okay that a White House flout the whistleblower statutes and stonewall Congress in its performance of responsible oversight of the executive branch? Would any of this be okay if done by any Democratic president or White House, past or future? The nation waits and watches. It is a sad reality that the GOP’s answer may already be easily enough guessed.
The Grey Lady failed to smile again, this time by proxy. June of 2019 found me in the Golden West and The (San Jose) Mercury News had picked up a David Brooks column. It’s difficult not to wonder whether Mr. Brooks assumes that no reader recalls who William F. Buckley Jr. was. Mr. Man-and-God-at-Yale was many things; a paragon of tolerance wasn’t one of them.
David Brooks, “The Generation Gap and the Imminent GOP Apocalypse,” The (San Jose) Mercury News, 5 June 2019, A7 (www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/opinion/republicans-generation-gap.html). If The Mercury News posted an online version of this article, its search engine is unable to locate it. The link above is to the version in The New York Times.
David Brooks correctly diagnoses the demographic and electoral buzzsaw into which the GOP is pushing itself through its stance on “immigration, diversity, (and) pluralism,” but he misses the mark on two points. Progressive multiculturalism is in no wise pessimistic. It merely recognizes that the sine qua non for redemption, whether for individual or society, is acknowledgment of and contrition for past misdeeds, something Mr. Brooks, with his boundless capacity for moralizing, surely understands.
Mr. Brooks, moreover, does not acknowledge how a calculated brand of intolerance has been inextricably woven into the Republican Party’s DNA since the adoption of the “Southern strategy.” The GOP has no credibility to assert an “optimistic multiculturalism.” It is rich that Mr. Brooks mentions in this context his “mentor” William F. Buckley Jr., a man whose homophobia is enshrined on videotape (see Gore Vidal) and whose racial attitudes cannot withstand cursory scrutiny.
In September 2018, I was in the United Kingdom for several weeks and grabbed The Guardian at a newsagent every morning. My stay fell between the initial phase of the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and the later part involving Christine Blasey Ford. The Guardian published an unsigned opinion about the irregularities of the process, which were legion. The Guardian was on point on the overarching story but didn’t address the underlying dynamic in the lower federal courts, so I sent a note. It was essentially a replay of the details in an earlier letter to The Richmond Times-Dispatch regarding appointments to the US district and appellate courts. The Guardian passed on it.
“It Has Required Multiple Wrongs to Move the Supreme Court Right,” The Guardian, 10 September 2018, journal 2 (www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/09/the-guardian-view-on-the-us-supreme-court-the-wrongs-required-to-move-right).
The “rottenness” driving the GOP’s confirmation of judges to the American bench runs far deeper than President Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court. The selfsame Senate Judiciary Committee that questioned Brett Kavanaugh last week did all in its power to slow walk and withhold confirmation from President Obama’s nominees to federal district and appellate courts prior to the 2016 election. The scuttling of Merrick Garland’s appointment was merely the high-profile apotheosis of a broader dereliction of senatorial responsibility. As Mr. Obama left office, a trove of judicial vacancies fell into Mr. Trump’s lap. Mr. Trump and a suddenly energized Republican Senate have filled these positions at light speed. Some of Mr. Trump’s nominees are woefully unqualified. Others are ideologues. Many manage to be both. Few have been denied confirmation.
The federal bench is now poised to roll back hard-won individual rights and to remove sensible restraints from corporate interests for a generation. Mr. Kavanaugh is merely the final piece of the puzzle. The Guardian notes correctly that Americans should reject the GOP in November. To hobble the GOP’s assault of the judiciary, the Democrats must win the Senate, a taller hurdle to clear than gaining control of the House. A favorable outcome is by no means assured.
The GOP perhaps realizes that it controls a minority government whose days may be numbered and consequently is determined to ram through whatever it can while it can, damage to the American constitutional system be damned. Such cynicism is a marvel.
It was inevitable that the letter-writing would lead to tinkering with an editorial. This spur for this virgin effort was The Grand Prevaricator’s tapping of the bellicose John Bolton as his National Security Adviser. This was not the choice of a chief executive determined to pursue a reasoned, sober foreign policy. Many hoped that President Stable Genius would never face a crisis for fear of an awful outcome. The installation of the incessantly saber-rattling Mr. Bolton magnified the chances for the genesis of crises where none need exist.
The piece is essentially a call for a Republican, any Republican, to restrain Mr. Trump. No one in the national GOP had done so to this point. The Richmond Times-Dispatch justifiably passed on it because it was double the length of a typical editorial. A pitch was then made to The Huffington Post, but nothing came of it. I then set the essay aside and never returned to it.
Freedland, Trump, Bolton, Lee, Chirac.
While in London in late 2017 I was reading local newspapers and stumbled across an editorial by a favorite writer, Jonathan Freedland (“The Year of Trump Has Laid Bare the US Constitution’s Serious Flaws,” The Guardian, 30 December 2017). As the first year of the Trump administration lurched toward its close, Mr. Freedland reflected on a book he had written two decades ago in which he had professed his admiration for the ideals enshrined in the United States’ founding documents and for the intricate constitutional mechanism devised by the nation’s founders (Bring Home the Revolution: the Case for a British Republic [London: Fourth Estate Ltd., 1998]). In Mr. Freedland’s view, the colonies had purloined a revolution that by right belonged to the English, hence his call to “bring home the revolution” and reshape the United Kingdom’s government on the American pattern. On 2017’s penultimate day, Mr. Freedland was disillusioned. The first year of the Trump presidency had revealed inherent flaws in the American constitutional order and he despaired of its capacity, despite its manifold merits, to correct itself.
Saddened by Mr. Freedland’s loss of faith, I sent a letter to the newspaper, perhaps as much to “buck up” myself as Mr. Freedland and to assure our transatlantic admirer that, in the words of a British comedy troupe, “we’re not dead yet” (“Trump’s ‘Clown Fascism’ and the US Constitution,” The Guardian, 2 January 2018, 29). The letter underscored the potency of the “resistance” to Mr. Trump and identified the ultimate corrective to his misrule: the electoral repudiation of his GOP enablers in the 2018 midterms, the removal of Mr. Trump through the ballot box in 2020, and a gradual restoration of normative political practice.
In the months since my sojourn among our British cousins, the United States’ circumstance has gravely worsened and Mr. Freedland’s outlining of a pair of defects in American governance grows in resonance. He asserted first that the proper functioning of the American constitutional system depends upon the election of a chief executive with personal integrity and an unwavering commitment to the public weal. By this standard, it is now incontrovertible that the incorrigible Mr. Trump is a lost cause. Appeal neither to reason nor common decency gives him pause. He stands as a moral and ethical cypher, a man deficient in understanding and allergic to principle, a living syllabus of our darker impulses, the untrammeled national id exposed and unleashed.
Mr. Trump now jettisons one after the another the members of the small and shrinking coterie of “adults” supposed to blunt his impulsivity. He liberates himself from relevant experience, informed opinion, and sober analysis. Still more vexing is his selection of former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton as his National Security Adviser. Mr. Trump is installing in this critical post the most unreconstructed, most unapologetic of the neoconservative Iraq War deadenders. A probable Islamophobe and a certain saber-rattler unable to pass the scrutiny of confirmation by a Republican Senate in 2005, Mr. Bolton was a leading light in the Project for a New American Century and among its members who ultimately insinuated themselves deeply into President George W. Bush’s administration. He was a signatory to this cabal’s infamous 1998 open letter exhorting President Clinton to remove Saddam Hussein from power, three years before the 9/11 attacks and five years before Saddam Hussein’s mythical weapons of mass destruction became the pretext for the greatest blunder in modern American foreign policy, a misstep whose toll in lost American credibility on the world stage still mounts.
Mr. Trump on his own abrogates American leadership in the community of nations and, when abroad, inflicts misinformed diatribes on America’s allies and seems at his ease only in the company of despots and thugs, a sadly embarrassing affront to every thinking American. Mr. Bolton will neither restrain Mr. Trump nor offer him sage counsel and likely will only encourage Mr. Trump to intermingle American foreign policy with his vanity, vindictiveness, and projection. One must wonder whether Mr. Trump’s personal peccadilloes – his ceaseless need to shift the narrative from his past and present transgressions – will become a driving force in foreign affairs. Be this as may, the elevation of Mr. Bolton near the seat of power pushes the hands of the doomsday clock a few clicks nearer to midnight.
Mr. Trump’s manifest deficiency as chief executive leads to Mr. Freedland’s other critique of the state of play in American governance, his understanding that the constitutional mechanism runs smoothly when political groups operate in good faith, accept the legitimacy of their opponents, and, at any critical juncture, prioritize the national interest above narrow partisan advantage. Neither the Democratic nor Republican Party is a paragon of political virtue but their defects are asymmetrical, the sins of the GOP active and those of the Democrats reactive. The Democrats in any event are in power in no corner of government. Restraint on an unfettered and perhaps unbalanced executive must come from the GOP. A few months back, one could hope that a drubbing in the 2018 midterms and a few electoral cycles in the political wilderness – an overdue pause for introspection – might return the Republican Party to itself. Mr. Trump’s mercurial conduct unfortunately eliminates the luxury of waiting for a gradual political realignment. Action is imperative. It is incumbent on the governing party to act. The Republican Party must demonstrate that, unlike Mr. Trump, it is not a lost cause.
The signs on this front are not encouraging. GOP senators and congressmen have by and large maintained a studied silence in the face of Mr. Trump’s antics. A few Republican senators – Messrs. McCain, Flake, Sasse, Corker, Graham – have from time to time uttered fine words but a concrete act to constrain Mr. Trump’s misbehavior and malfeasance is nowhere in evidence. The GOP seems to have forgotten a fundamental truth. Retired Sen. Harry Reid has recounted a reminder the late Sen. Robert Byrd gave his colleagues: “I don’t serve under the president; I serve with the president” (Carl Hulse, “Senator’s Farewell: ‘I Just Shake My Head,’” The New York Times, 24 March 2018, A11 [www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/us/politics/harry-reid-leaves-washington.html]). Do Republicans not recall that the legislature is a coequal branch of government and enjoys pride of place in the Constitution? The federal government is not a parliamentary system, though the GOP sometimes seemingly wishes it were. The political calculus in the US Senate is uncomplicated: A handful of Republican votes in concert with Democrats can serve as a bulwark against Mr. Trump’s excesses. This would be less an act of courage than a minimal declaration of fealty to the American constitutional system.
Should Republicans, nevertheless, require an example of political courage to emulate, they need not look far nor to the distant past. In 2001, Rep. Barbara Lee cast the lone dissenting vote in the House against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) and there was nary a nay registered in the Senate. Her opposition sprang not from pacifism but from her conviction that the legislature should not abdicate its oversight of the executive in making the most profound decision, to commit the nation’s treasure and its youth to armed conflict. She refused to grant the executive a blank check. To paraphrase Martin Luther, there she stood for she could do no other. The fullness of time has vindicated her adherence to principle. Would that a handful of GOP senators might muster the fortitude of a Barbara Lee.
Despite Mr. Trump’s willful misconduct, the nation still has friends abroad. The stock of goodwill has not yet been exhausted. Hope endures that the United States will return to the first principles that, while often observed imperfectly, made the American constitutional system admired and emulated. Jonathan Freedland’s distress at our present predicament underscores a useful truism: The outsider sometimes perceives us with greater clarity than we see ourselves. Friends also sometimes offer well-meaning advice, counsel that should not be summarily dismissed. The document though which thirteen colonies dissolved its bond to the British crown underscored the importance “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” as the nascent nation embarked on a fateful path. Perhaps in this moment America’s leadership should declaim less and listen more to what the world is saying to it. Nicholas Kristof recently acknowledged his experience of déjà vu, a feeling that 2018 seems uncomfortably like 2002 and 2003 (“I’m Worried Now, as Before the Iraq War,” New York Times, 22 March 2018, A21 [www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/opinion/iraq-war-north-korea-iran.html]). Mr. Kristof is not alone in this. The American political memory can be unforgivably short. As the drumbeat for intervention in Iraq moved to a crescendo, the late French President Jacques Chirac, a man with an abiding affection for America, warned that the country was on the cusp of a potentially momentous mistake. GOP congressmen in response replaced french-fries with “freedom fries” in the House cafeteria and the nation careered toward a grand foreign policy debacle. Must this partisan thickness be repeated? The time for both Democratic and Republican legislators to exercise the prerogatives and responsibilities of their offices is now. This cannot and must not be left to the election.
This letter was written in particular circumstances. The first anniversary of the “American Carnage” inaugural address approached. The GOP’s surrender to the “America first” onslaught and to President Small Hands’ faux populism was apparent, transactionalism stripped to its purest essence. For the Republicans, demolition of the constitutional edifice and open, nearly gleeful corruption and self-dealing were acceptable so long as the Federalist Society’s judicial nominees were jammed onto the courts and the affluent could stuff more money into their pockets through ill-conceived tax cuts. Grover Norquist’s infamous quip – that all the GOP required in a president is “enough working digits to handle a pen” – had proven too prophetic to amuse.
Personal context too is relevant. She Who Must Be Revered and I spent an extended Christmas holiday in California. My father-in-law’s death was a year past and my mother-in-law needed to be moved into an assisted-living apartment and to have her former residence emptied of belongings. It was decided – by whom I’m not certain – that The Better Half and I needed a vacation after this. Cancellation of a professional engagement had left The Beloved One with an unused hotel reservation in Earl’s Court, so a week in London was planned. Subsequent events told us that we might have contemplated before our departure the potential for the sunk cost fallacy being in play. The vagaries of travel soon intervened. Just as we cleared airport security in San Francisco, My Happiness began to feel unwell. We departed anyway, but she was ailing throughout our time in the United Kingdom.
We, whatever the circumstance, were in London. A good deal of time was passed in our postage-stamp sized room but, whenever The Better Half rallied, we ventured out and took in the sights. I maintained a longstanding custom: a copy of The Guardian on weekdays and The Observer on Sundays. On the eve of New Year’s Eve, The Guardian ran an opinion by Jonathan Freedland, a favorite of mine among British commentators. Mr. Freedland has worked in the American Empire as a reporter and he offers a view of the United States from an outsider, a well-informed and mostly sympathetic one. He doesn’t engage in kneejerk anti-Americanism. This undergirds his credibility when he takes America to task. Nearly two decades earlier I had read his delightful polemic, Bring Home the Revolution (1998), in which he argued that the American Revolution snatched away an Enlightenment political movement that belonged by right to the British. In short, Jonathan Freedland “gets” us. His understanding of the American project surpasses that of many citizens, a shameful reality. He realizes that for all its messiness, contradictions, and hypocrisies, much in the American constitutional system remains admirable and worthy of emulation.
Mr. Freedland was disillusioned as 2017 waned. President Big Mac had pressure tested the Constitution and exposed its inherent shortcomings. The opinion emphasized the system’s reliance on honoring of political and constitutional norms. There too is a tacit assumption that American political leaders will conduct themselves with moral integrity and devotion to constitutional principles, not moral turpitude and civic ignorance. The Bridge and Tunnel President’s yearlong tenure had been a practicum in the capacity of an unscrupulous actor to subvert American governance.
Mr. Freedland’s credibility made the editorial a painful read. The Guardian’s guidelines for submissions resemble The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s, so, availing myself of a hotel notepad, I drafted a letter and sent it. Its thrust was that the game was not over; cards remained to be played. The constitutional system had undergone assaults more existential than that posed by a former host of a reality show. There were also glimmers of hope: The Special Counsel’s investigation proceeded, resistance continued, the elections in Virginia signaled a repudiation of The Donald, and the ballot box remained a potent weapon in the arsenal.
The letter appeared online on New Year’s Day 2018 and in print the day after, a speedy turnaround. My Better Half was unwell, so I hiked to a Marks and Spencer Simply Food on Kensington High Street to feed us and found the paper there. It’s satisfying to call He Who Must Be Ridiculed a fascist in print. The photo attached to the letter’s online version is a classic.
The verdict on the letter after passage of time is mixed. Much of Mr. Freedland’s diagnosis of America’s political ills is valid; more will be said about that later. Nonetheless, the ballot box was a bulwark against the worst abuses. There was legitimate fear of authoritarianism had President Yeti Pubes been reelected and this threat remains plausible so long as the GOP continues its canoodling with Trumpism.
Jonathan Freedland, “The Year of Trump Has Laid Bare the US Constitution’s Serious Flaws,” The Guardian, 30 December 2017, 31 (www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/30/trump-us-constitution-weakness-founding-fathers).
“Trump’s ‘Clown Fascism” and the US Constitution,” The Guardian, 2 January 2018, 29 (www.theguardian.com/law/2018/jan/01/trumps-clown-fascism-and-the-us-constitution).
Jonathan Freedland mentioned the musical Hamilton, which he’d seen upon its London opening, as an example of American creative verve. One would be hard pressed to disagree. Because of The Most Excellent Spouse, I saw the original cast in the Manhattan in October 2015, then a touring production in Richmond, then the streaming version last summer. It was inevitable that it would reach London’s West End. I wondered, when I first saw it, how a British audience would respond because of the wicked comic portrayal of George III and because Alexander Hamilton was perhaps the most obscure of the principal founders for non-Americans.
I needn’t have been concerned. Jonathan Freedland’s was the prevailing critical and popular assessment. One afternoon, while in a queue at the Marks and Spencer Simply Food on Earl’s Court Road, I overheard the locals extolling the show’s virtues. Excitement for it was genuine and unqualified. It was the performance to see. To have a ticket was to be envied. Its graceful Atlantic crossing is a tribute to Lin Manuel Miranda.
A final fact about Jonathan Freedland. During a subsequent journey to the United Kingdom (September 2018), I was browsing in a bookstore on Tottenham Court Road and my eyes alit on a paperback entitled To Kill the President. Its cover image was a stars-and-stripes festooned pistol. It seemed like something for the moment, so I examined a copy. The author was Sam Bourne, a nom de plume of Jonathan Freedland, who in his other life cranks out thrillers. The novel has an alternative title – The Plot Against the President – and cover – the White House instead of a firearm – doubtless a concession to American sensibilities. I am curious to know the chronology of the book’s genesis and completion. The president under threat is a barely disguised version of The Mendacious One. The book reached print in June 2017, barely five months after the inauguration. Was Mr. Freedland inspired by The Perambulating Eructation’s candidacy but considered his election an implausibility and devised the plot as a flight of fancy? Or did he think that Mr. Crude Imposition might pull it off and consider his storyline quasi-plausible? Or was the novel mostly written speedily after the 8 November debacle? The paperback traveled to the US in checked luggage. It’s an airport novel no American should read in an airport.
Foiled by the Grey Lady again. Drat. The Republicans engaged in procedurally dubious, middle-of-the-night ramming through of their 2017 tax bill. Political hypocrisy is undying. Bush the Younger’s 2001 and 2003 tax giveaways cleared the Senate through reconciliation as did this turkey, yet the Republicans hyperventilated in 2009 when Mr. Obama availed himself of the process to enact the Affordable Care Act and the GOP cried foul again when Mr. Biden resorted to it for the American Rescue Plan.
Anyway, the wee-hour shenanigans afforded another opportunity to hiss at the GOP’s Swiss Army Knife policy: Tax cuts yesterday, tax cuts today, tax cuts forever!
Jim Tankersley, Thomas Kaplan, and Alan Rappeport, “G.O.P. Scrambles to Push Tax Bill Through Senate,” The New York Times, 2 December 2017, A1, A12 (www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/us/politics/senate-tax-bill.html).
Would that the GOP’s passage of “tax reform” under cover of darkness could be read as political farce, not as an act of stark political cynicism. Nothing now obscures the GOP’s obeisance to plutocratic donors. No one need any longer take the Republican Party’s claim of principled fiscal responsibility as anything beyond politically useful but empty Pablum. How can Congress, as a coequal branch, blunt President Trump’s worst impulses when its majority party cannot restrain its own baser instincts and in fact tolerates Mr. Trump’s dangerous antics so that its donors can be satisfied?
Virginia’s off-off-year elections in 2017 were in the news as a barometer of popular sentiment after nearly a year of Trumpian rule. The Commonwealth was especially suited for this test. It had voted Democratic in three consecutive presidential contests, had two Democratic senators as well as a Democratic governor; however, its statehouse remained in Republican hands. A wave-category outcome sufficient to fracture GOP control of the House of Delegates would signal disenchantment with Queens’ Gift to the World, especially as a result from south of the Mason-Dixon line, the lone jewel of the old Confederacy a chagrined Sun President had been unable to duct tape onto his diadem.
The Democrats had a good night. Ralph Northam became governor, Justin Fairfax lieutenant governor, and Mark Herring attorney general; the Great Embarrassment lay in the future. The Democrats made substantial gains in the House of Delegates. The Republican advantage shrank from twenty-two to a single seat, then jumped to two seats when drawing of lots determined the winner of a putatively tied district. Had fortune smiled on the Democrat, the party would have wrested away control of the chamber. Nevertheless, there were encouraging changes. The incoming class of Democratic delegates boasted the nation’s first transgender state legislator (Danica Roem), a Democratic Socialist (Lee Carter), and much diversity beyond that. A friend from Manhattan, she of the senior women’s book club, expressed it best: “Thank you, Virginia!”
The letter below comments on The Richmond Free Press’s election coverage. The pleasing outcome did not bestow laurels on which to rest. The GOP would mobilize to pad its bare majority and deploy every tool available, including underhanded ones. Margins are fragile in a state gradually shifting its party allegiance. When the letter was composed, control of the House of Delegates remained uncertain. To satisfy my curiosity, I fed raw numbers from the House of Delegates races into Excel and discovered that the Democratic candidates in aggregate had taken nearly ten percent more votes than the Republicans statewide but could still conceivably fall short of a majority of seats. That’s what happened and that’s the crux of the matter.
Nonetheless, the hope engendered in Virginia in 2017 would be realized in 2019.
Jeremy M. Lazarus, “Virginia Elects Democrats to Top Posts, Other Offices,” The Richmond Free Press, 9-11 November 2017, A1, A4 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/nov/10/its-sweep/).
Jeremy M. Lazarus, “House of Delegates to Become More Diverse,” The Richmond Free Press, 9-11 November 2017, A1, A4 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/nov/10/house-delegates-become-more-diverse/).
“‘There Is No Space for Complacency,’” The Richmond Free Press, 16-18 November 2017, A9 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/nov/17/there-no-space-complacency/).