In a week in which mobs are forming around DHS chief Kirstjen Nielsen, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Secretary Elaine Chao and CNN’s David Gergen is claiming that the civil rights movement and the protests against Vietnam “were much more civil in tone” than what we’re experiencing today, we thought a thread on the resiliency of America as a nation would be welcome.
Megan McArdle is a columnist for the Washington Post, and hers is actually a two-day thread, but it’s all worth reading. It started yesterday with her challenging the premise that we’re on the verge of losing our democracy.
"We're on the verge of losing our democracy". What does this mean?
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
America survived a civil war, during which habeas corpus was suspended and roughly 600,000 men a good percentage of the fighting-aged male population, were killed. Followed by a pretty harsh military occupation of the south.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
(Yes, it wasn't harsh enough. But "martial law" generally aren't the first two words you think of, when you think about "democracy")
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
We survived WWI militant progressivism, with its prosecutions of anti-war speech. We survived the Palmer raids and the over-the-top prosecutions of suspected anarchists.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
We survived WWII, during which many citizens of Japanese descent were interned in camps.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
We survived the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Hollywood Ten.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
Followed by mass rioting, Kent State, and several *thousand* violent actions by left-wing terrorists. (Most of which didn't hurt anyone. But if you place a bomb in a corporate building, that's just luck)
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
Am I saying these things are good? No! They're terrible! They are stains on our honor, blots on our escutcheon, terrible deviations from our ideals.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
But the fact that you are saying "we're on the verge of losing our democracy" implies that you must think it somehow survived those things. And what, right now, is happening that compares to those thrats to democracy? Or the ur-threat, the fact of slavery for our first 70 years?
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
You think Trump is Hitler? What's your mental model for how Trump prevents the 2020 election from happening, thus depriving us of our democracy?
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
Let's say Trump cancels the election. What happens? 50 states just say "Yup, well, the president has spoken, guess we can't have an election this year".
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
Courts are like "Welp, I guess he's just king now!" The FBI rolls over and turns into his secret police. The army arrests dissenters. You think Trump has that kind of base of support in American institutions?
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
I mean, one cannot prove a negative. But I submit that in any reasonable reading of the news does not suggest this is the most likely outcome.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
Weimar Germany had an incredibly stupid article in its constitution that allowed the president to essentially rule by decree, unhindered. Also, its democracy was less than a generation old. We're just not in that situation.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
Which in turn makes all the FORGET NORMAL RULES WE'RE ABOUT TO TURN FASCIST hot takes a little hard to justify.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
Those hot takes are hard to justify, but some people are using them to justify, say, doxxing ICE agents to harass at their homes and children’s schools.
Of course, McArdle’s thread didn’t slip by without receiving plenty of criticism, particularly on the bit about Trump not being Hitler. On Tuesday, McArdle responded to an epic thread in response to her own arguing that Trump as the American Hitler is depriving us of democracy (we’re not going to include that whole mess here), and again — among all the noise in the media this week, it’s nice to hear some common sense.
Hi, @alexandraerin! I am in my house, and will now respond. https://t.co/XFQ70oTSHv
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
So first, I take your point that historical parallels are never exact, that fascism, if it arrives, will arrive by slow baby steps, and so forth. But this isn't really the question I was asking.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
For us to be "on the verge of losing our democracy", we should have *some* sense–not a perfect sense, but some sense–of which institutions will be compromised in such a way as to allow Trump to remain in power regardless of the outcome of elections.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
There are obviously some scenarios in which, through a long chain of events in which no institution acts to stop it, an authoritarian dictator could take over the US But that's not a mental model for how Trump seizes autocratic power. It's the plot of a novel.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
I enjoy those novels! But I don't think they're roadmaps for reality.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
I could have told a similar story about how Obama slowly seized power and didn't leave office in 2016, because most of the work would be done by my fantasies rather than actual real-world people who aren't following a plot outline.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
Now, as someone who has dabbled in novel-writing, I really wouldn't want to set such a novel in the US, if I could avoid it, because federalism makes it so effing unwieldy for a would-be autocrat to go around stealing all the elections.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
But I have a soft spot for my own country, so maybe I'd try to work it out. The first thing I'd want to do is give my would-be dictator a huge base of support in AT LEAST two out of four of: the judiciary, the press, the the federal bureaucracy, or the military
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
Someone has to do the work of stealing that election It's not just going to happen all on its own. You need a lot of footsoldiers. It's vital to either compromise or eliminate the free press so folks don't know it's happening.
At the moment, Trump commands zero out of four.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
The next thing I'd want to give him is time. I'd want, oh, at least four years after he has total control over the judiciary and the press, ideally. It's just going to take a long time to pass all the voter suppression laws and get your suppression apparatus set up.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
Could these things happen? In theory. But Trump has no organized base of power, the party he nominally controls kind of hates him and offers him public lip service to assuage their voters, and the institutions he needs really don't like him.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
The ruling on the travel ban today was a reluctant "Well, under the law we can't really stop this" followed by a stinging rebuke from Kennedy. That is not the scenario I'd set up for my would-be dictator.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
Now, I'd probably give my imaginary dictator either the support of a bunch of generals, or paramilitaries like Hitler had, because you could then use violence to overcome those problems.
Trump is not beloved by generals, and he doesn't have a paramilitary wing
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
Which brings me back to my point: you can't say "Well, it's possible" because anything's possible. (Actually, several of the things you described are pretty much impossible by 2020–the timeline for legislative change plus court challenges is now too short).
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
If you make a factual assertion that "we are on the verge of losing our democracy", you should be able to point to, not a long chain of fictional events that could happen, but the events that already are.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
We can certainly point to bad policy. The travel ban. The child separations. But these don't make us not have elections in 2020, or not have elections that count.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
And Supreme Court cases involving the sort of longstanding disputes over voter-roll management which have at best very marginal impacts on election outcomes–more important at the district than the state level, and only in races that are already incredibly close–are not it.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) June 26, 2018
In other words, even if Trump were the American Hitler, he’s hardly in any position to establish an authoritarian state — and we can largely thank the system set up by the founders for that.
And you know what? Some of us will head to the polls in 2018 and 2020 and see how things shake out from there.
I think a really underrated check on “the President becomes a dictator” scenarios is our federalist system.
Granting the yuge leap that Trump somehow captures the federal government…what then? Moonbeam is going to dispatch the CA state patrol to round up dissidents, is he?
— Lukas Petersen (@LUKABUS89) June 26, 2018
God bless you, Megan. These asshats really don't deserve this much of your time and attention. But you've done a great service today.
— rockmom ? (@rockmom) June 26, 2018
‘MERICA!
Related:
Bloomberg writer explains why it's important to compare administration to Nazis BEFORE genocide starts https://t.co/lqtFzcU1SX
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) June 23, 2018
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