Live from Capitol Hill
The Guardian Live is reporting on the impeachment.
Jerry Nadler talked about the history of impeachment:
[Andrew] Johnson, who took office after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, was the first president to be impeached but was narrowly acquitted by the Senate.
Johnson’s impeachment ostensibly centered on his violation of the Tenure of Office Act, a law that was later ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
But Johnson’s impeachment was actually the culmination of the president’s bitter feud with Republican lawmakers, who accused Johnson of trying to nullify the Union’s victory in the Civil War by being lenient toward former Confederate leaders and opposing the expansion of political rights for former slaves.
Reconstruction failed, and former slaves continued to be lynched, arbitrarily imprisoned and thus re-enslaved, denied rights, confined to bad jobs, bad housing, and bad schools, for another damn century. This stuff matters.
As Bill Clinton faced removal from office in 1998, Dershowitz said of the constitutional standard for impeachment, “It certainly doesn’t have to be a crime. If you have somebody who completely corrupts the office of president and who abuses trust and who poses great danger to our liberty, you don’t need a technical crime.”
Oops.
He also had a gotcha moment for Lindsey Graham.
Nadler just played this 1999 clip of then-congressman Lindsey Graham, who served as an impeachment manager during Bill Clinton’s trial.
“What’s a high crime?” Graham said at the time. “How about if an important person hurts somebody of low means? It’s not very scholarly. But I think it’s the truth. I think that’s what they meant by high crimes. Doesn’t even have to be a crime.”
Oops.
Pity pretty much no-one in the GOP feels a shred of shame these days. They’re interested in nothing but power for the sake of power and what it provides them.
Not sure if this embedding code will work without a preview button…
I’m sure I’ve written about this before but I love history and one of the periods that fascinates me is the pre-WWII era and the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany. The question that always haunted me was how a civilized modern democracy, albeit a relatively nascent one, devolved into fascism and unimaginable violence against whole classes of people, not to mention plunging the world into another war while it was still recovering from the previous global conflict.
When you read about how the German establishment reacted to both Hitler himself and the Nazis more broadly, the answer begins to emerge. But it always feels academic, distant, a historical curiosity. It’s a different thing to see many of the same themes play out here. The fragmentation on the left, too busy fighting with each other to recognize the real threat. A buffoonish political figure whose stupidity, intellectual incuriosity and bombastic self-regard make him bizarrely charasmatic to whole swathes of the population who feel that they have been robbed in some way. Simple answers offered to complex problems that sounds like ‘man of the people’ wisdom. The power plays and scheming of politicians on the right who thought they could leverage the popularity of this man as the perfect puppet chancellor they could control.
I’m not trying to overstate this. But we have already seen concentration camps, the demonization of specifically identified groups by race or religion and the rise of a self-assembled militia who are fanatically loyal to their messiah.
There is an odd fallacy that people think that the sequence of events that led to 1933 needs to occur in the same way, in the same order for a similar slide into fascism or a dictatorship in the US. I’ve had arguments over this. History as a guide is not a jigsaw that needs to be assembled, or a checklist we need to tick off. Its a collection of themes that will not coalesce in the same way each time, but the essence remains the same. The roots of WWII stretch back not only to WWI but beyond even that. The point is this: authoritarianism is not a aberration. Historically speaking, it is the norm.
Yes, I very much think it’s entirely possible for Trump to be another Hitler (with the inevitable variations). I have all along. I don’t think it’s the least bit far-fetched, let alone alarmist. I wish it were. Hitler wasn’t special. He didn’t have some special kind of evil. Trump is perfectly capable of being as horrendous as Hitler if conditions are right.
Indeed. Trump was totally cool with letting troops fire live rounds at stone throwers. I doubt he would care that there were children or non-stone throwers in the crowd. I think if someone made the case for him that certain classes of people should be excluded from society, he’d be totally down with that. Oh, they’re such trouble makers – lock them up. Oh, it costs so much to lock them up – well, seize their assets and make them work, don’t spend too much on keeping them (poor food, lighting, no furniture and rubbish health care)*. A whole bunch of the animals we’re detaining are unproductive – well, get rid of them.
* if this seems far fetched, consider existing conditions in detention facilities and many US prisons.
I agree with Ophelia. Trump isn’t special evil, he’s ordinary evil. Left unchecked ordinary evil is quite capable of doing especially evil things.
I don’t like Hitler comparisons either.
But he was enabled by a usually conservative, law-abiding ruling class at the time, who saw him as the solution to the lawlessness of the streets and the rise of Communism. You can identify the von Papens among the Republicans, the ones who would be straightforwardly constitutional under a normal President, but who have embraced the abnormality for their own political careers, to stick it to the libs, to appeal to the basest of bases.
On the other hand Trump is 74 now, whereas Hitler was 44 when he became Chancellor so Trump has fewer years to do mischief. And he doesn’t seem to have specific imperial ambitions, nor is he an ideologue. Trump seems to be motivated by personal aggrandisement, being the king of the castle and the celebrity among celebrities, personal enrichment and spite against Obama.
Just thought I’d amplify what Claire said in #3. I grew up in the 70s (b1965) and back then there were endless Time/Life book serieses(plural?) and one of many that I devoured was WWII. By my early teens I was grabbing the book from the mail before my dad could (he has since said he still hasn’t read them all, but it was partially his fault since they were stored on bookshelves in my bedroom at the time).
To my point, I had similar feelings at the time, how could such a civilization fall for such a disaster? And now the last few years I am seeing it live in full color and surround sound stereo home theatre. It’s now all too clear to me how it happened, and is happening again.
This is where my point about themes, not checklists comes in. Trump could be setting the stage here. I don’t think he’s Hitler, I think he’s Kaiser Wilhelm II. Hitler was as buffoonish but his style wouldn’t have flown had Wilhelm not prepped the ground for the mindset. I could summarize it here but Miranda Carter does a much better and deeper job at the New Yorker here:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/what-happens-when-a-bad-tempered-distractible-doofus-runs-an-empire
No, Trump isn’t Hitler. That person is still waiting in the wings, and we probably don’t know their name yet. Or maybe things will play out slightly differently, with an Urquhart-like figure controlling a parade of puppet Presidents. Either way, Democrats need to fight tooth and nail against what is becoming a global trend. I’m less than 6 months out from citizenship. The minute I get it, I’m all in.
Claire,
Thanks for laying that out; I’ve been thinking along similar lines for awhile. Another historical analogue that’s close to my heart is the Spanish civil war. As Anthony Beevor points out, the nationalists were unified along three axes: they were right-wing, centralist, and authoritarian. The Republicans, on the other hand, were an uneasy alliance of left-wing, centralist authoritarians (the Communists), left libertarians (the anarchists), and conservative regionalists (the Basque nationalists), along with more centralist democrats. They were incoherent, and the differences among them often overshadowed their differences with the Nationalists.
What worries me is that the differences among various flavors of leftists and moderates in the US could distract us from the more important fight of getting rid of Trump and Trumpism (which these days encompasses the entire Republican party). We saw that in 2016, and now with the recent conflicts between Warren and Sanders and then Clinton and Sanders I’m afraid it’s happening again. There are of course important differences and important arguments to be had about the role of government and the influence of the moneyed class, and more broadly about our constitutional structure, but none of that will matter if we don’t stop this slide into authoritarianism.
@What a Maroon I don’t know much about the Spanish civil war, I’ll have to do some reading.
If you’re interested in a really deep dive and comprehensive narrative, I highly recommend Richard Evans’s book The Coming of the Third Reich. He has a slightly peculiar style in that he focuses on themes rather than a chronological narrative but it fits with the way my brain works. The audiobook version is a little more accessible than the written text in my opinion but YMMV. He also wrote two more books – The Third Reich in Power and The Third Reich at war.
If TV documentaries are more your thing, the excellent BBC documentaries The Nazis: A Warning From History and Rise of the Nazis are an excellent place to start. I also have to plug Kenneth Branagh’s Conspiracy – a dramatization of the Wannsee conference that is packed with amazing actors and is a brilliant piece of filmmaking. The actors all play it very straight, no silly overdone German accents, and the whole effect is creepy and horrifying and utterly incredible. I love this movie and every time I watch it leaves me sick, but in the way it should, if you see what I mean.
Yes, I’ve read Evans’s trilogy; excellent work. And I’ve seen Conspiracy at the recommendation of someone either here or over at PZ’s place (perhaps you?).