‘This crisis was resolved by Americans with character who rose to their moment’
Some flesh. I’ve long had a love affair with America. I’m also lucky to have seen much of that great expanse, worked and lived there, and engaged with lots of different Americans in and outside government. I’m a 30-year fan of the San Francisco Giants.
In saying all of that, the contradictions inherent in its history, its sectional and racial fault-lines, and entropic constitutional architecture, mean that any rose-tinted affection is tempered by experience and a heavy dose of realism.
Back in 1998, while in Columbus, Ohio, I watched Bill Clinton fess up about his mad dalliance with Monica. He cut a lonely figure that weekend, skulking round the White House lawn with only his retriever Chappaqua for company.
Clinton’s was a tumultuous presidency. A chaotic transition, a prolonged battle to pass an economic plan, Hillary’s failed health care reform, Newt Gingrich’s ‘‘Contract with America’’, a shelling at the ’94 mid-terms, the Oklahoma Bombing, re-election and finally impeachment.
I was glued to CNN throughout and remember thinking when Bubba was acquitted by the Senate that things couldn’t get any weirder in their politics, or more hyper-partisan. Then they did.
Hanging chads, 9/11, an invasion of Afghanistan, then one of Iraq (but no WMDs), Hurricane Katrina, the 2006 mid-terms, Obama, Tea Party protests, Trump’s populist insurgency, another impeachment, his fatal abrogation of leadership over Covid, and finally, Trump and his enablers disputing an election in defiance of all reality.
After 30 years of studying these events I thought there were no surprises left in me. Dispassionate resignation rather than passion greeted each fresh crisis, the only exception being Obama’s election, which brought tears of joy. Perhaps I’d become desensitised. Or maybe it was denial because whenever the state of America got depressing it was easy to get lost reading about America’s rich past.
But neither ambivalence nor denial worked on Wednesday (EST) after the head of the executive branch of government, having stoked mob anger in his followers through destructive falsehoods, incited them to storm the legislative branch of government. It was an act of sedition.
It produced some of the most distressing scenes ever witnessed in Washington.
You have to go back to 1814, when the British set fire to President James
Madison’s White House and the Capitol Building, to find a like desecration. But this time it was done by Americans to themselves.
During the Civil War, and with much effort, no confederate flag ever flew in the nation’s capital. On Wednesday it was waved around inside the Capitol Building. It was revolting to see that flag raised there.
The world watched Washington explode into anarchy, chaos and insurrection.
The question now is how was it that the country’s law-makers were left so physically exposed? Also why, because this risk must have been foreseen. Yet no defence existed.
While there is talk of impeachment or invoking the 25th Amendment against Trump, it isn’t necessary.
Both in fact risk further inflaming a highly unstable equilibrium.
Instead, the threat of removal seems likely to see Trump see out his presidency quietly, at Mar-a-Largo or on the golf course while Vice President Pence and others ensure no further harm is done before Joe Biden is sworn in on the 20th.
Now that Trump’s game is up, pardoning himself and his family will be front and centre, the last outrage(s) of an outrageously unqualified president.
Notwithstanding the critics’ obsession with the most aberrant, norm-defying president since Andrew Jackson, Trump has been to me the symptom of a deeper malaise in the American Party system, not its cause.
What is that malaise? It’s the collapse of the Republicans as a party of principle. Their institutional weakness made Trump’s presidency possible. He is their creature, their mutation.
Will they own that?
In the 1960s, a new cycle of conservative politics emerged in response to Franklin D Roosevelt’s ‘‘New Deal’’. Conservative thinkers like William J Buckley and politicians like Barry Goldwater gave it intellectual heft and a populist underpinning, if not political popularity. Richard Nixon was still constrained domestically even as Lyndon Johnson’s ‘‘Great Society’’ consensus collapsed. Watergate was a reaction to liberal constraints.
The conservative era’s zenith was the ‘‘Reagan Revolution’’. Reagan successfully transformed the language of politics if not its substance.
Absent Reagan’s sunny optimism, the decline phase began. George H W couldn’t maintain the good times and George W’s ‘‘compassionate conservatism’’ collapsed after 9/11 and his bungled response to Hurricane Katrina.
Since W, the ideas that once fuelled the conservative movement – limited government, low taxes, a strong military and family values – have mutated into a maladaptive brew of nativism, nihilism and paranoia.
William F Buckley’s intellectual conservatism has been sucked into a black hole called QAnon.
Trump made the toxic brew even more potent by employing a propaganda model to first penetrate, then mobilise hitherto unreachable parts of the electorate.
Moderate Republicans became alienated and that is why suburban Republicans in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia offer a big reason why Trump lost the general election.
Repudiating Trump’s character had for them become a matter of taste.
In the absence of any intellectual renewal, the Republican Party faces an existential threat.
Trumpism could conceivably split from the party if establishment Republicans regain control of it, fatally wounding it. But if Trumpists retain control, the party can’t evolve or adapt.
As for President-elect Biden, the attempted insurrection will only fortify his ambition to restore normalcy to government and decency to politics.
Don’t be looking for any great progressive policy changes. The Georgia run-off victories may have handed the Senate to Biden’s party but the leverage now sits with a small number of conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans, and that might be no bad thing.
As distressing as this week’s events have been this crisis was resolved by Americans with character who rose to their moment on behalf of their institutions and in defence of their constitution.
There will be many other heroes who emerge from that terrible Wednesday, and indeed during the weeks since the election; people who will have protected their democracy.
That is a strength of American democracy, individuals of character who protect it when its threatened.
As diplomat Jean Monnet said, ‘‘Nothing is made without men (and women); nothing last without institutions.’’
But given the constitutional and institutional inertia inherent in a 244-year-old Republic, the realist in me thinks the United States can only act in response to crisis these days, and then only unevenly.
Its misfortune is that there have been too many of them.
It reminds me too much of the 1840s, a period of intractable racial and sectional politics, hyperpartisanship, problematic legislatures, and a succession of oneterm presidents.
Wednesday’s insurrection proved that leadership still matters. If Joe Biden can turn some of America’s hurt into healing over the next four years that will be good enough.
Now that Trump’s game is up, pardoning himself and his family will be front and centre, the last outrage(s) of an outrageously unqualified president.