I am not a Republican. I don’t think I have ever voted for a Republican. Certainly not for national office.
I have to begin with those words, even though they are irrelevant to this post, because so many Democrats are partisans now. In other words, I am indulging illogic — I am talking about something irrelevant — because the Democratic mindset now requires illogic. And that, unlike my voting record, actually *is* relevant here.
Let’s clarify the terminology. I’m using “partisan” as Dictionary.com defines it: “an adherent or supporter of a person, group, party, or cause, especially a person who shows a biased, emotional allegiance.” Emotions have their place. But they are often unfortunately opposed to logic. Example: your head tells you you’re freezing to death, but your feelings say it is so comfortable, lying here in the snow, and you should just go to sleep.
In politics, partisan thinking is destructive. It says, I want my person elected, even if that person is corrupt, bad for the country, and unfair to the other side. Partisan thinking is not about finding the best solution. It is about winning, even if winning is ultimately harmful. That is, it is an emotional solution — personally satisfying, but often unintelligent.
So when I say my own voting record is irrelevant to this post, that’s because I’m not a partisan. My voting for the Democratic candidate is not due to any misplaced loyalty to a corrupt political party. If I believe the Republican candidate is better, I will vote for him/her. I haven’t had much sympathy with many Republican policies, so I have voted Democrat. But that is always subject to change.
It may seem unfair that I would criticize Democrats for becoming partisans. Haven’t the Republicans done exactly the same? Wasn’t the impeachment of Bill Clinton, more than 20 years ago, an example of partisan politics?
I believe it was. Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky was not relevant to his qualifications or obligations as President of the United States. He cheated on his wife. In our legal system, that was no longer a crime. Newt Gingrich and the other Republicans tried to leverage moral outrage to remove a president for lying about non-criminal misbehavior. That was wrong. I know of no way in which that impeachment charade was beneficial to this country or to its people.
The Republicans were even worse during the Obama years, responding to his bipartisan gestures with scorched-earth tactics. Part of the problem is that Congress (especially but not only its Republican side — see Roll Call, 2018) has become filled with wealthy people, and wealthy people often become wealthy through their willingness to lie, cheat, steal, and wreck things — whatever it takes to win. Whatever the reason, it was clear that the Republican Party rejected bipartisanship, and the best interests of the country in the big picture, in a rather successful effort to neutralize Obama. That said, his biggest failings were self-inflicted — and the ability to be honest about his failings, despite generally approving of him, is another form of behavior that many partisans find difficult. (It has taken a while, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have finally reached the day when the often partisan New Republic (Pareene, 2019) would frankly criticize some of Obama’s mistakes.)
It is understandable that Democrats would react emotionally to those Republican behaviors. Understandable, that is, but not defensible. If you want a better country, you don’t get it by making the country worse — and that’s exactly what partisanship does. I’m not advocating turning the other cheek. I’m saying that, even if you are preoccupied with winning, there’s a difference between lashing out and keeping your eye on the ball.
More than eight years ago, in September 2011, I wrote a blog post advising President Obama to seek a constitutional convention. There were signs that the Democrats were in a relatively strong position to push for changes to the Constitution. Not to say it would have happened, but at least there could have been an attempt. I said that Obama’s prolonged but weak efforts at bipartisanship had proved to be “the right approach at the wrong time.” As elaborated in another post (“Heads Must Roll,” 2009), Professor Obama did not understand power, and thus failed to respond adequately to the Great Recession and to use its opportunities to seek badly needed reform of our financial system.
I recommended a constitutional convention because the country has gone off the rails on the most fundamental level: our three branches of government have become dysfunctional. First, the executive branch. There are too many educated, experienced, qualified people out there, for us to ever be left with a choice of a crook like Donald Trump (for whom many conservatives saw no alternative but to hold their noses and vote), a buffoon like George W. Bush, or a well-meaning but unsuited man like Jimmy Carter. Likewise, with the other branches: public approval of Congress has been in the toilet for decades (Gallup, 2019), and the Supreme Court has long presided over a profoundly unjust and incompetent legal system.
A constitutional convention would have provided an opportunity to revisit the Electoral College. With an Electoral College revised to fit the nation’s developmental trends, Donald Trump would not have won in 2016. But, again, calling for a constitutional convention would have required Obama to demonstrate some backbone, some courage, and courage is a virtue that liberals have tended to denigrate. Liberals themselves seem confused about this. For instance, the liberal Atlantic (Traub, 2018) perpetuates the belief that Republicans are the party of selfishness — while simultaneously admitting that the Democrats have become the party of elite entitlement. As better grasped by Haidt (2008), liberals have generally encouraged the pursuit of allegedly meritocratic personal advantage, rather than self-sacrifice and other values that have long persuaded conservative blockheads (as they seem to liberals) to sign up for the military, vote against their personal economic interests, and otherwise sacrifice themselves for larger causes.
The Democrats may have had an opportunity to rewrite the Constitution. It is too bad that our political horizons were limited by the party hacks who encouraged Obama’s meekness, starting in 2008, and who gave us the ill-suited Hillary Clinton instead of the (relative) firebrand Bernie Sanders in 2016. Polls said Bernie would have defeated Trump; and, once elected, Bernie would have belatedly delivered some of the change that Obama promised.
Trump’s election obliged us to face what happens when you don’t strike while the iron’s hot. Instead of leading, Democrats became the followers. This, they found, was not at all pleasant. They reacted like the spoiled children they had become — spoiled, that is, by the belief that they were entitled to have the president of their choosing, as distinct from the one designated by the constitutional process. The West Wing TV show of the 2000s nursed the undestandable resentment that a popular and effective president had now been supplanted by a gross loser, and likewise the Democrats in 2016 became proponents of the stupid claim that Trump was Not My President. He most certainly was, and they had only themselves to blame, for failing to insist upon constitutional change when it was needed, and for tolerating Bernie’s suppression. Perversely, the pro-black eagerness to see Obama as a sort of savior reduced pressure on him to actually perform as a savior. The Democratic cause would have been better served by a non-partisan willingness to criticize him in a timely manner, in place of a warm feeling that now our side had won and everything was going to be fine.
I think I did send emails to Obama’s White House, notifying them of my posts. I didn’t think those emails would carry much weight and, plainly, they didn’t. The thing is, I wasn’t the only one saying this stuff. My posts drew upon what published sources were saying. If Obama’s White House didn’t hear and respond, it wasn’t because people weren’t speaking; it was because Obama wasn’t listening.
Sometimes I’m right; sometimes I’m wrong. It seems, unfortunately, that I may have been correct in predicting, in March 2018, that Trump would win re-election in November 2020. As indicated in my updates to that post, Trump has not exactly gone down to flaming ruin in the 21 months since I made that prediction. At this point, we have endured more than three years of constant Democratic fulmination against him; and yet, according to FiveThirtyEight (2019), his approval rating is higher than it has been at any time since the first two months of his presidency.
During these past three years, the Democrats have marched in pussyhat protest; they have chanted Not My President; they have had their eyes glued to the tube as talking heads went on endlessly about the Mueller Investigation; and in the stupidest move of all, they have proudly announced their partisan determination to impeach Trump for any reason, or if necessary for no reason at all. The net effect of all this self-righteous sound and fury is that, as I say, his approval rating has risen.
There is a saying, sometimes rendered as “When you strike a king, strike to kill.” Another saying with a somewhat similar meaning is, “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” The latter, for all its untruth, does aptly describe what the Democratic partisans have done with their opportunities to get rid of Trump. They could not control themselves; they could not organize and implement a disciplined project of preparing and delivering a lethal blow. Like children with candy, they found it just too tempting to indulge their daily fascination with the latest micro-gossip, snark, and harebrained conspiracy theory about Trump, his family members, his business dealings, and so on ad nauseum.
Why am I critical of all that? Two reasons: this partisan behavior has been harmful to the country, and it has been counterproductive for the Democrats’ own purposes. By showing their hand so early and so often, they have made clear that they were not seeking truth, justice, or the national interest. They claim to be defending the rule of law, but that’s a crock: as just noted regarding the Electoral College (and as established in my own experience with corruption in Obama’s administration), they are quite ready to dislike and ignore the law — indeed, to endorse illegal violence — when that suits their interests.
What Democratic partisans have made abundantly clear, over the past three years, is that they just have a personal dislike for the man, and they have made the further mistake of spewing that all over everyone. The reaction, as we could predict from childhood experience in the playground, is that even sympathetic observers may feel a certain urge to shy away from the person who cries and screams and demands revenge. People just don’t want to get involved with your personal complaints — and that’s what the Democrats have made of what should have been handled as a principled, nonpartisan defense of the national interest.
Thanks to the Democratic Party, the many, sometimes egregious legal and moral problems of Donald Trump’s presidency have become simply tedious. What could have been a crushing accumulation of damning facts, sufficient at least to lose him the 2020 election if not to be impeached during his first term, has instead been converted into an incessant, tiresome whining. The “death by a thousand cuts” strategy has ignored the sage advice about striking to kill, and now we see the result. The Democrat partisans could not have done a better job of inoculating the public against concern with Trump’s behavior. With their assistance, many of us have had enough. Thus we have all become accessories to Trump’s crowing that he could shoot someone and not be prosecuted: we have participated in the creation of an America in which he can behave impeachably and yet, if anything, could actually benefit from all the attention.
The purpose of a congressional representative is to represent the people of his/her district. Granted, the Republicans have made matters worse, in that regard, with their gerrymandering. But if Republicans don’t firmly believe in good national government, and seem to be doing their best to wreck it, it becomes all the more important for Democrats to make theirs the party of principle — not to join in the partisan corruption by urging representatives to cater only to their own party’s voters. Having failed to seek a constitutional rewrite that would focus citizens’ votes on policies rather than personalities, at least the Democrats might have taken the opportunity to show that, unlike the Republican gang attacking Clinton, they were going to treat the impeachment process with great respect, turning to that extreme measure only after establishing facts that demanded it.
The American public is not presently convinced that the facts demand impeachment. Despite these years of constant calumny, support for Trump’s impeachment or removal from office has remained at a pretty steady level, a bit below 50%, and the percentage favoring impeachment is now back to about where it was nine months ago, before the Mueller Report was made public (FiveThirtyEight, 2019). Going for the incremental percentages — 48%, 49%, 50% — may make sense to millionaires who have benefited, in their own careers, from fighting tooth and nail for every last penny. It makes much less sense to those who observe the big picture, who can see that this whole project is obviously stalemated.
The title of this post says that Democrats have only themselves to blame. That is because, first, as indicated above, they gave Obama a pass, instead of demanding that he deliver the financial and perhaps the electoral change the country needed; second, because Democrats put their faith in a corrupt party that resisted radical change when Bernie was ready to deliver it, so as to prefer the politically correct Hillary Clinton instead; and, third, because Democrats became more extremely partisan and, as such, behaved like children in their endless ranting about Trump, instead of focusing on the good of the country and saving their fire for the next election, when they could have used the accumulated evidence to deliver a crushing blow against his plutocracy. Democrats have essentially bought into Trump’s method — and haven’t used it as well as he does.
That brings us to the current situation. The House of Representatives has just voted to impeach President Trump. This has occurred in a setting where it is entirely clear that the Republican-controlled Senate is not going to vote to remove him — and where, moreover, the matter will have grown stale long before the 2020 election. In contending that this was consummately stupid — that it was a triumph of partisan emotionality over rationality — I have the support of the New York Times (Fandos & Shear, 2019):
Democrats, including the most vulnerable moderates, embraced the articles of impeachment with the full knowledge that doing so could damage them politically, potentially even costing them control of the House.
In effect, the Democratic Party wasted Trump’s first term on bitching and whining about an interminable series of frauds and scandals that could have been used as stepping stones but were instead overused to the point of public counter-reaction. Instead of standing for the country, or for any larger principle, the party handed Trump a golden opportunity to assert, in effect, that Democrats were no better than Newt Gingrich’s Republicans in making impeachment a cheap and ultimately weakened political maneuver.
It is not very surprising that one corrupt political party would behave like another. What is quite surprising is that supposedly intelligent people — people who, moreover, pride themselves on their morality — would encourage such behavior. It took harsh personal experience for me to grasp that, for some decades now, universities have been in decay, in the sense that professors have been increasingly selected and promoted according to their political biases and their willingness to go along with immoral, unwritten university ethics. Such professors imagine themselves to be truthseekers, even as they distort the selection of questions that will and will not be researched; they have contributed greatly to the creation of a Democratic electorate that, in their own image, sees truth not as an end in itself, but rather as a tool to manipulate for preconceived purposes.
Thus we are burdened with a morally bankrupt Democratic Party, vainly attempting to persuade a decisive share of the American public that its cause is more virtuous than that of the morally bankrupt Republican Party. The causes of the bankruptcies may differ, but the outcome is the same: never-ending efforts to manipulate voters to lash out emotionally rather than demand reasonableness or honesty. What we get from the supposedly superior Democratic Party is not visionary leadership, seeking to build upon the good in Americans across the political spectrum, so as to grow a wonderful society of the future. The Democratic Party has made sure we wouldn’t get that. Instead, what we have is an ongoing grind, a perverse memorial to the trench warfare of World War I that, a hundred years ago, cost millions of lives for virtually no gain.
Democrats have tied themselves to a corrupt party that prioritizes winning over principle, and thus makes itself as cheap and crooked as its adversary. I bet, two years ago, that the resulting dearth of inspiration would cost them the presidency again in 2020. It still looks that way. Somehow, against all odds, Democratic partisanship has repeatedly wrecked a winning hand — the Great Recession in 2008, Bernie in 2016, corruption in 2020. For this, Democrats have only themselves to blame.
The American System 