Looking on & doing nothing
The degradation of America continues apace
Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
— John Stuart Mill, 1867
What happened Friday evening was shocking, but not surprising in the least. Of course Donald Trump commuted Roger Stone’s prison sentence in what Charlie Pierce called a “straight-up Mob-style transaction”. It was shocking only because of how blatant it was, but even so: this is who Donald Trump is, and this is what Donald Trump does. He is a penny-ante gangster slumlord from Jamaica Estates, Queens, who’s grifted, conned, lied, and exploited the racist & sexist sensibilities of his chosen Republican Party to win awesome, awful power. Having done that, he befouls and desecrates the office he occupies in precisely the same squalid, vulgar way he’s desecrated and befouled everything and everyone he’s come across.
None should be surprised by now. And, honestly, it’s not just Trump; it’s the whole rotten husk of the Republican Party. Again, Charlie Pierce:
I hate to be That Guy all the time, but the fact remains that Roger Stone worked for that presidential campaign because it was a Republican campaign, albeit one on behalf of an old pal of his. Stone committed his crimes on behalf of that campaign because it was a Republican campaign. And, ultimately, his sentence was commuted because there was a Republican president* in position to do so, and as part of a continued cover-up by an attorney general because Bill Barr is a Republican attorney general. Res ipse loquitur.
Which is why the rage I feel isn’t so much towards Trump and the Republicans (although, trust, it’s there); it’s towards Democrats.
I quoted Pierce because he succinctly stated the screamingly obvious: Republicans, for the better part of over forty years, have constantly and consistently engaged in official corruption large and small. People love telling the story of Watergate to make themselves feel better, but the reality is that Watergate is the exception, not the rule. The rule is better exemplified by the Iran-Contra affair, not Watergate*. In short: you can get mad at Republicans doing this shit, but this shit is what Republicans do. We should expect this by now, and we damn well should know it, and any shock or surprise is simply the result of willful ignorance.
At this point, I’m like Pierce: I hate being That Guy. I don’t just hate it, I’m actively sick, tired, and disgusted of pointing it out, and screaming about what should by now be something as obvious as the noon-time sun hanging overhead. I am so incredibly fed up with the routine Democratic response to Republican criminality essentially being this, over and over:
The president literally engaged in the kind of blatantly corrupt quid-pro-fucking-quo that the Original Dads warned against, and the Democratic response was the shruggiest of fucking shrugs:
Like, first of all, that’s not even fucking responsive to what Trump did Friday night; it was a commutation, not a pardon. And second of all, nothing in the language of Article II, section 2 — "he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment" — provides for Congress to modify that power. As a proposed remedy, it's fucking nonsense, and I suspect that Nancy Pelosi knows that it’s nonsense.
But it’s entirely emblematic of Pelosi’s second go-around as Speaker. It’s designed to give people who don’t know any better the illusion of action while actually doing nothing. People who know politics and law know that Pelosi’s proposal is nonsense. The larger Democratic population is ignorant, will see this proposal as “proof” that Democrats will Do Something™, and accuse critics (like me) of never being satisfied.
It’s an exhausting con game where Pelosi - and the House Democrats - escape any real pressure so that she can amass power and do absolutely nothing with it, as David Dayen pointed out last week. Not just exhausting; it’s infuriating.
And I’m fucking over with it.
We fucking worked our asses off two years ago to elect Democrats across the country so that they could provide — at fucking minimum — some level of checks and balances towards Donald Trump’s untrammeled corruption and myriad abuses of office. Instead, historians will rightly write that Trump colluded with a hostile foreign power to win the Presidency, that the evidence was right fucking there…and Democratic leaders basically shrugged it off. And that’s being extremely charitable to them.
Because the reality isn’t just that they shrugged. To the contrary, they dissuaded members from doing so and impeached him on an unrelated topic. That's the record, in fucking black and fucking white. In politics, you win power in order to wield power. Democrats willingly declined to use their power and all the tools at their disposal to investigate Trump's collusion with Russia. That’s the bottom line.
This is why I quoted Mill up above: because for the entirety of Trump’s maladministration, Democrats with the actual power to do something about have instead looked on and done nothing.
At this point, I’ve stopped caring. I'm just so exhausted. It's so hard to care when the leaders you elect clearly don't. To crib from Hamilton: all that Democrats want to do is be in the room where it happens. They don’t actually want to do anything in that room, they just want to be in it.
When it comes to holding Republicans accountable, it turns out it doesn’t matter if Democrats have the majority or not. If Democrats don’t, their cheerleaders will say they need it, and nothing can be done without it; if Democrats have the House majority, nothing can be done unless the Senate is in their control as well; and if they control both, nothing can be done for fear of a mythical popular backlash that will rob them of power.
All Democrats can do, it turns out, is look on impassively, do nothing but Tweet, and point towards November — as if the election and the Constitution were immutable forces of nature, instead of just more things that Trump and the Republicans can corrupt, befoul, desecrate, and in the end, ignore as they see fit.**
This would be one of the reasons why this newsletter, once so regular, is now irregular. I cannot write about the same things over and over again. I cannot look at what’s going on and treat it as a normal political process, because for one, it’s not, and for two, I refuse to engage in that level of willful self-deception. It’s not fucking healthy!
I remain convinced that the reason Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination is because people are beyond exhausted. They want to go back to a time when their days weren’t spent in paroxysms of rage and fear. I get it. There is nothing I’d rather do than go back to wondering just how badly the Mets or Indians will disappoint me, or whether I should spend the money on upgrading to the latest iPhone. This rage is back-breaking.
This rage is also legitimate and righteous, and we feel it because we are daily confronted with the comprehensive evidence of American injustice and illegitimacy. We are where we are because American society is corrupt and illegitimate, and we can no longer ignore what our eyes see, what our ears hear, and what our souls feel.
In this sense, Biden is correct: we are in a battle for the soul of America.
The thing is, the battle isn’t between Biden and Trump, or even between Republicans and Democrats. Rather, it is between those who see injustice and illegitimacy, and recoil against it — and those who are comfortable with that injustice and illegitimacy, so long as it is alien to their existence.
We deceive ourselves if we tell each other that this division cleaves along party lines. It does not. To paraphrase the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr: there are far too many Democrats who yearn for a negative peace which is the absence of tension, rather than fighting for a positive peace which is the presence of justice.
I say this not to contemn, but to contemplate.
We need to ask ourselves - and each other - what kind of peace we yearn for, and be honest with ourselves - and each other - about our answers. Millions of Americans are disemployed; hundreds of thousands are deceased; soon, tens of thousands will presently be ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-fed — further proof, as if more were needed, of our American system’s failure, injustice, and illegitimacy. If at one point, this system promoted our general welfare, it plainly no longer does.
It does not fill me with confidence, therefore, that at a moment when certain candidates fought to enshrine the presence of justice in America, Democrats instead chose a candidate who offers only the promise of a return to normalcy. What kind of peace do we yearn for, indeed?
And yet: if there is one thing I hold truer than most, it is the belief that in our hands, not those of any leader, lies the power to honor the perfect promise of an imperfect nation. America’s promise is imperiled now, but it is in our hands to rescue and redeem, independent of any party or leader.
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
I love all of you. Thank you for reading.