I think one distinctive thing about getting older, and a source of much contention about activism between students and faculty, is a disagreement about the general value of freaking out.
There seems to be an implication here that the response from the adults in the room is feeble, and that some "stronger" response would somehow defeat Trumpism. I don't think that's right. The value of institutions is that they work, and they work neutrally. That doesn't mean they work equally. For instance, there are lots of criminal counts against Trump personally, both those he's been convicted of and those he's supposed to stand trial on (if he loses the election). Those aren't brought because Democrats are "fighting hard"; they're brought because Trump is a habitual criminal. The media, however, reports uncritically on Trump and his allies' claims that the legal system is being weaponized against him, and also some incoherent rambling about Hunter Biden that I can't really decipher. I think it's pretty self-evidently right that Democrats shouldn't ACTUALLY weaponize the Justice Department against Trump (though that's what he's yelling from the rooftops that he would do to Democrats were he to be re-elected), but rather to point out that the legal system is functioning just as it is intended to, and if Trump doesn't want it to work against him, perhaps he should stop committing crimes.
But that message falls on deaf ears when Republican voters read it as lies, and loosely attentive voters read it as both sides (and also hate that Big Macs are 25% more expensive than they were three years ago, and are eating most of the 35% raise that they earned with their hard work). It seems pretty clear to me that the institutions that are failing are the mainstream media, which has forgotten how to report the truth and instead reports that opinions about the shape of the Earth differ.
I think there's an excluded middle between weaponizing and excessive timidity, however. Legal action from the DOJ in the wake of Jan. 6 should have come more quickly and across a broader span of investigation and possible charges. I also think one of Biden's top priorities should not have been to just return to the norms as he understood them but to actively reinforce those norms in the face of considerable damage in the previous four years. In particular, I think he should have issued an overall instruction to the Offices of Inspector-Generals in every single Cabinet-level department to review policies and activities over the past four years with the specific intent of reporting on violations of standing procedures, improper expenditures, etc.
But agreed that the media's tendency to fall back into "both sides say" is an especially woeful habit. For the moment, for example, it's not debatable whether Trump is a felon; he IS one. Full stop.
I don't think there's actually that much flexibility within the range of normal to bring charges. It would be highly improper for Biden to direct his DOJ to bring charges in any specific manner-- the department should be making those decisions independently. And that itself takes substantial time and effort. It's technocratic work that requires a lot of fact finding, interviews with relevant players, sometimes bringing or threatening charges against lower players to secure cooperation, etc. That process probably moved more quickly than these processes usually do. And still, half the country imagines that they were some kind of witch hunt, which is absurd on its face. Anything less outside of those norms would get you plenty of howling and backlash.
The big issue, I think, is that all of our institutions are quite fragile, and rely on norms and good faith to function. Our economic system is the same way. I've been watching a Netflix series about a young woman who defrauded a bunch of restaurants, hotel chains and banks (as well as ostensible friends of hers) by posing as an heiress. The series creator's takeaway seems to have been that the fact that she got as far as she did was evidence of how greedy and blinded by money everyone was. I think that takeaway was perfectly wrong. I think all of our institutions are built on trust and good faith. Realistically, it's not hard to dine at a high end restaurant (or any restaurant) and dash without paying the bill. Or to leave a non-working credit card with a hotel and do the same. Or deposit a check and make a withdrawal from a different branch before the full amount bounces. People don't typically do this both because they believe in the system and because they're really easy to catch, and there are consequences to getting caught (in the case of this fake heiress, she was caught, as she was always going to be).
But what if authorities refuse to adhere to those norms? What if they stop punishing people who dine and dash, and the public decides that actually dining and dashing or skipping out on hotel bills is fine (for whatever reason)? Or, in the case of our democracy, what if institutions decide that cracking down on election interference or vote buying or prosecuting political enemies is fine? Even if it would be right (in some platonic sense) for Biden to direct the DOJ to prosecute Trump for his various crimes, the appearance of politically motivated prosecution is probably enough to break the system irreparably. Then the next Republican in power (whether that's Trump or JD Vance or Ted Cruz or whoever) could actually open those kinds of investigations with impunity, and the public's perception is all but certain to be that that's just where we are now.
And once you break that institutional trust, you're probably not getting it back. It makes this a very precarious moment for democracy, where the adults in the room have to both use the system to ensure that crimes are prosecuted properly and avoid any perception that they're the other side of the same coin, using the instruments of state to promote their own interests, as Trump and his ilk do without any compunction.
I think Presidents can say to the DOJ: this class of infractions should be a high priority for investigation and resulting charges for the department, within the norms. There is nothing even within the norms that prevents a President from saying "I would like to see a lot of priority placed on drug trafficking" or "A lot of priority placed on bribery" and so on.
I am also not sure that anything faster would give you a more intense reaction ("howling and backlash") considering that we are at a point where there is howling and backlash for the most modest and most timid of approaches.
In a sharper sense, I would say this: a liberal government unprepared to defend the baseline commitments of liberal governance against patently illiberal approaches is not long for this world. That is the frequent precursor of coups, collapses and civil wars in many other modern nation-states. If you dither too much in policing your own government or state bureaucracy against individuals and groups that are blatantly tearing it down, you are announcing that it's open season, go ahead and start the March on Rome. The complexity here is that a sign of a government that is being torn down in that fashion is that it can't muster the alignment required to stop dithering.
Of course, as Trump's people already pointed out in 2016-20, all of this is just a conventional position about the executive--there is nothing Constitutional that prevents the President from instructing the DOJ far more directly than that. The point is not that it is allowed or not allowed, but that DOJ independence is a *good thing*, a good norm that has taken shape over time.
Which points in the end to your deeper analysis: a government of laws always falls when people stop believing in the laws. You can call that a Foucauldian take on liberalism, I suppose, but if liberalism and a kind of allied bourgeois common sense aren't internalized and strongly felt *as* norms, writing stronger laws or making stronger policies is not going to work. It's a bottom-up problem first. But I actually think this is where we are all strongest--the bottom-up moral intuitions are stronger than the weak and tentative default neoliberalism of the political classes and managerial leaders we have.
I don't think indicating that prosecuting these things is a priority was going to move them any faster-- there are established ways of prosecuting these things that involve meticulous fact gathering, interviewing witnesses, laying out the statutes under which crimes are being charged along with evidence underlying each indictment, etc. It's all very technocratic when done properly.
I think the issue is precisely that the machinations of state are deliberate and intentional, by design. Anything otherwise is going to seep into hastiness. One of the worst violations of this norm came, incidentally, when Comey rushed out to declare that he was reopening Clinton's email investigation a couple of weeks before the election, which fatefully probably swung the election to Trump.
My frustration is ultimately that we know that Trump has no interest in following anything resembling democratic norms. But I think where we differ most significantly is the last paragraph-- I don't share your faith that we have collective moral intuitions as a society. I think liberal democracy is somewhat of a fortunate mistake. It's great when it works and things are humming along. As soon as something goes wrong, we retreat into populist tribalism, and it really makes no difference whether it's coded as left-populism or right-populism-- Stalin or Lenin aren't material improvements over Hitler. In the US, we were probably quite lucky that we ended up with (imperfect as he was) Roosevelt in 1933 rather than a Lindbergh or Father Coughlin offshoot.
Our issue, as I see it, isn't that conventional center-left elites (I would say center-right as well, but you can count those on one hand) aren't pushing democracy and liberalism strongly enough; it's that our populace doesn't really care very much about liberalism. There's a chunk that does. But the Trumpist right actively loves the idea of using the instruments of state to punish their political enemies. Plutocrats are largely amoral and think that paying more in taxes under Obama was a greater threat than Hitler invading Poland (the founder of Blackstone, in fact, used those exact words). And, somewhat crucially, you've also got a small but not negligible chunk of the left that sees political life as a game, and thinks that Trump getting reelected is an intermediate step to getting their imagined workers' paradise or something. And then a very significant chunk of the populace is just very loosely engaged-- they see their own financial situation, the prices they pay at the pump, what the televised media reports on the economy, and kind of take their political cues from there. Unless the media clearly articulates the dangers of Trumpist politics to them, they won't be alarmed or really notice it-- they'll remember that the country, from where they sat, looked mostly normal from 2017 until 2020, and assume that re-electing Trump will get them to the same place. Unfortunately, I think liberal democracy is one of those things that erodes very slowly until it collapses all at once. And the great swath of the populace that ends up missing it when it's gone doesn't really have any inclination to defend it while it's eroding.
I think one distinctive thing about getting older, and a source of much contention about activism between students and faculty, is a disagreement about the general value of freaking out.
There seems to be an implication here that the response from the adults in the room is feeble, and that some "stronger" response would somehow defeat Trumpism. I don't think that's right. The value of institutions is that they work, and they work neutrally. That doesn't mean they work equally. For instance, there are lots of criminal counts against Trump personally, both those he's been convicted of and those he's supposed to stand trial on (if he loses the election). Those aren't brought because Democrats are "fighting hard"; they're brought because Trump is a habitual criminal. The media, however, reports uncritically on Trump and his allies' claims that the legal system is being weaponized against him, and also some incoherent rambling about Hunter Biden that I can't really decipher. I think it's pretty self-evidently right that Democrats shouldn't ACTUALLY weaponize the Justice Department against Trump (though that's what he's yelling from the rooftops that he would do to Democrats were he to be re-elected), but rather to point out that the legal system is functioning just as it is intended to, and if Trump doesn't want it to work against him, perhaps he should stop committing crimes.
But that message falls on deaf ears when Republican voters read it as lies, and loosely attentive voters read it as both sides (and also hate that Big Macs are 25% more expensive than they were three years ago, and are eating most of the 35% raise that they earned with their hard work). It seems pretty clear to me that the institutions that are failing are the mainstream media, which has forgotten how to report the truth and instead reports that opinions about the shape of the Earth differ.
I think there's an excluded middle between weaponizing and excessive timidity, however. Legal action from the DOJ in the wake of Jan. 6 should have come more quickly and across a broader span of investigation and possible charges. I also think one of Biden's top priorities should not have been to just return to the norms as he understood them but to actively reinforce those norms in the face of considerable damage in the previous four years. In particular, I think he should have issued an overall instruction to the Offices of Inspector-Generals in every single Cabinet-level department to review policies and activities over the past four years with the specific intent of reporting on violations of standing procedures, improper expenditures, etc.
But agreed that the media's tendency to fall back into "both sides say" is an especially woeful habit. For the moment, for example, it's not debatable whether Trump is a felon; he IS one. Full stop.
I don't think there's actually that much flexibility within the range of normal to bring charges. It would be highly improper for Biden to direct his DOJ to bring charges in any specific manner-- the department should be making those decisions independently. And that itself takes substantial time and effort. It's technocratic work that requires a lot of fact finding, interviews with relevant players, sometimes bringing or threatening charges against lower players to secure cooperation, etc. That process probably moved more quickly than these processes usually do. And still, half the country imagines that they were some kind of witch hunt, which is absurd on its face. Anything less outside of those norms would get you plenty of howling and backlash.
The big issue, I think, is that all of our institutions are quite fragile, and rely on norms and good faith to function. Our economic system is the same way. I've been watching a Netflix series about a young woman who defrauded a bunch of restaurants, hotel chains and banks (as well as ostensible friends of hers) by posing as an heiress. The series creator's takeaway seems to have been that the fact that she got as far as she did was evidence of how greedy and blinded by money everyone was. I think that takeaway was perfectly wrong. I think all of our institutions are built on trust and good faith. Realistically, it's not hard to dine at a high end restaurant (or any restaurant) and dash without paying the bill. Or to leave a non-working credit card with a hotel and do the same. Or deposit a check and make a withdrawal from a different branch before the full amount bounces. People don't typically do this both because they believe in the system and because they're really easy to catch, and there are consequences to getting caught (in the case of this fake heiress, she was caught, as she was always going to be).
But what if authorities refuse to adhere to those norms? What if they stop punishing people who dine and dash, and the public decides that actually dining and dashing or skipping out on hotel bills is fine (for whatever reason)? Or, in the case of our democracy, what if institutions decide that cracking down on election interference or vote buying or prosecuting political enemies is fine? Even if it would be right (in some platonic sense) for Biden to direct the DOJ to prosecute Trump for his various crimes, the appearance of politically motivated prosecution is probably enough to break the system irreparably. Then the next Republican in power (whether that's Trump or JD Vance or Ted Cruz or whoever) could actually open those kinds of investigations with impunity, and the public's perception is all but certain to be that that's just where we are now.
And once you break that institutional trust, you're probably not getting it back. It makes this a very precarious moment for democracy, where the adults in the room have to both use the system to ensure that crimes are prosecuted properly and avoid any perception that they're the other side of the same coin, using the instruments of state to promote their own interests, as Trump and his ilk do without any compunction.
I think Presidents can say to the DOJ: this class of infractions should be a high priority for investigation and resulting charges for the department, within the norms. There is nothing even within the norms that prevents a President from saying "I would like to see a lot of priority placed on drug trafficking" or "A lot of priority placed on bribery" and so on.
I am also not sure that anything faster would give you a more intense reaction ("howling and backlash") considering that we are at a point where there is howling and backlash for the most modest and most timid of approaches.
In a sharper sense, I would say this: a liberal government unprepared to defend the baseline commitments of liberal governance against patently illiberal approaches is not long for this world. That is the frequent precursor of coups, collapses and civil wars in many other modern nation-states. If you dither too much in policing your own government or state bureaucracy against individuals and groups that are blatantly tearing it down, you are announcing that it's open season, go ahead and start the March on Rome. The complexity here is that a sign of a government that is being torn down in that fashion is that it can't muster the alignment required to stop dithering.
Of course, as Trump's people already pointed out in 2016-20, all of this is just a conventional position about the executive--there is nothing Constitutional that prevents the President from instructing the DOJ far more directly than that. The point is not that it is allowed or not allowed, but that DOJ independence is a *good thing*, a good norm that has taken shape over time.
Which points in the end to your deeper analysis: a government of laws always falls when people stop believing in the laws. You can call that a Foucauldian take on liberalism, I suppose, but if liberalism and a kind of allied bourgeois common sense aren't internalized and strongly felt *as* norms, writing stronger laws or making stronger policies is not going to work. It's a bottom-up problem first. But I actually think this is where we are all strongest--the bottom-up moral intuitions are stronger than the weak and tentative default neoliberalism of the political classes and managerial leaders we have.
I don't think indicating that prosecuting these things is a priority was going to move them any faster-- there are established ways of prosecuting these things that involve meticulous fact gathering, interviewing witnesses, laying out the statutes under which crimes are being charged along with evidence underlying each indictment, etc. It's all very technocratic when done properly.
I think the issue is precisely that the machinations of state are deliberate and intentional, by design. Anything otherwise is going to seep into hastiness. One of the worst violations of this norm came, incidentally, when Comey rushed out to declare that he was reopening Clinton's email investigation a couple of weeks before the election, which fatefully probably swung the election to Trump.
My frustration is ultimately that we know that Trump has no interest in following anything resembling democratic norms. But I think where we differ most significantly is the last paragraph-- I don't share your faith that we have collective moral intuitions as a society. I think liberal democracy is somewhat of a fortunate mistake. It's great when it works and things are humming along. As soon as something goes wrong, we retreat into populist tribalism, and it really makes no difference whether it's coded as left-populism or right-populism-- Stalin or Lenin aren't material improvements over Hitler. In the US, we were probably quite lucky that we ended up with (imperfect as he was) Roosevelt in 1933 rather than a Lindbergh or Father Coughlin offshoot.
Our issue, as I see it, isn't that conventional center-left elites (I would say center-right as well, but you can count those on one hand) aren't pushing democracy and liberalism strongly enough; it's that our populace doesn't really care very much about liberalism. There's a chunk that does. But the Trumpist right actively loves the idea of using the instruments of state to punish their political enemies. Plutocrats are largely amoral and think that paying more in taxes under Obama was a greater threat than Hitler invading Poland (the founder of Blackstone, in fact, used those exact words). And, somewhat crucially, you've also got a small but not negligible chunk of the left that sees political life as a game, and thinks that Trump getting reelected is an intermediate step to getting their imagined workers' paradise or something. And then a very significant chunk of the populace is just very loosely engaged-- they see their own financial situation, the prices they pay at the pump, what the televised media reports on the economy, and kind of take their political cues from there. Unless the media clearly articulates the dangers of Trumpist politics to them, they won't be alarmed or really notice it-- they'll remember that the country, from where they sat, looked mostly normal from 2017 until 2020, and assume that re-electing Trump will get them to the same place. Unfortunately, I think liberal democracy is one of those things that erodes very slowly until it collapses all at once. And the great swath of the populace that ends up missing it when it's gone doesn't really have any inclination to defend it while it's eroding.
Unrelated to your post, but the included image has me singing (to the tune of “Book of Love”), “Oh I wonder, wonder who, who grew the Freakies Tree…”