Overt rather than clandestine
Adan Gopnik observes that Trump’s protection is that he does it all in plain sight. (Well not all, but a lot. He does so much in plain sight.)
Any one of a dozen things that Trump has done overtly would have resulted, if done clandestinely by another President, in near-universal cries for impeachment, if not for immediate resignation. Just for a start, his firing of the director of the F.B.I. and then confessing to both a journalist and the Russian foreign minister that he did it to end an investigation into his own campaign’s contacts with Russians follows the exact form of one of the impeachable offenses—obstruction of justice—that was applied against Richard Nixon. The “smoking gun” tape smoked because it showed that Nixon had tried to stop the F.B.I. from investigating the Watergate break-in on phony “national security” grounds.
Trump just does it right in front of us – in an interview for a network news program! His boast to the Russian foreign minister wasn’t meant to be right in front of us, but nobody’s perfect.
Pragmatism is not a way of negating principle but, rather, the realist’s way of pursuing principle. The arguments against impeachment today are primarily pragmatic, the arguments for it primarily principled, but the principled course could, before long, turn into the only practical course. Impeachment may be too good for Trump. It may yet prove just the thing for the country.
In other words it’s not really all that pragmatic to let flagrant criminality and corruption proceed unhindered.
Unless your overall goal is to break things. Which for most of Trump voters, it appears that was the desire, to break the system.
They shared this with a surprising number of Bernie voters. Bernie also advocated for breaking the system. Neither man had (or has) any plan for putting things back together in a new, better (or even a new, worse) system once they are broken.
Breaking things can be useful, if by breaking them you are able to reassemble them in a new way that improves them. Breaking things just to smash is counterproductive, and pretty soon will leave you with a mess of pieces that can never be used for anything again. The Russians want to break the US government; the Trumpistas agree.
Tillerson’s comments suggest that there are a number of things Trump would have liked to do but was talked out of because they were not legal. Tillerson’s not there any more; neither is Kelly. Other people might not be as good they were at steering him away from illegality. Hell, there might be some in his circle more than happy to aid and abet. Given the way he pushed behind the scenes for security clearances for the Prince and Princess, one wonders what else he’s done, or attempted to do, in secret. That would be remarkable in itself as Trump’s inner editor seems to do such a shitty job that it gives all appearances of not operating at all, leaving, as far as we can tell, few thoughts unuttered or untweeted.
iknklast:
In theory, yes. In practice it hardly ever happens, with even the best will in the world.
It certainly doesn’t happen much in the software business even though we have whole swathes of theory about how to do it in software design and development practice, much of it very good.
It works like this:
1. The boss says “build me a system, don’t worry about the budget, we can sort that out later, just bring me a design”.
2. The boss sees the design, her eyes pop out on stalks at how expensive it looks and she crosses out a bunch of modules saying “combine those into one, get rid of that, make this happen by magic instead of code” etc.
3. We redo the (worse) design according to the same best practice and start building it. Then the budget changes, half the devs get moved to other projects and we are forced to cobble some hideous thing together in the same time with less money. The boss, of course, has already sold the spec to the stakeholders so if we can’t actually achieve it given the new circumstances, it’s our jobs on the line.
4. The boss realises there’s quite a lot of time and budget set aside for testing and just crosses it out saying we’ll have to test each module as we produce it and hope it all works when we put it together at the end, which it never, ever does.
So we build a shitty bit of software that doesn’t work properly or – usually – even do what anyone wanted in the first place. It is also completely unmaintainable; it is so poorly built by necessity that nobody really knows how it works and making even the smallest change is likely to break the whole thing and we probably won’t even notice until months or years down the line.
So a year later the boss finally realises she’s spending more on maintenance than she would if we just rebuilt the whole thing from scratch along the lines of our original design. She promises us untold budget to rebuild and… well, you can see where this is going, can’t you? We always end up trying to break the shitty system and put it back together in a better way, even though this is certain to be way more expensive and take much more time than rebuilding it from scratch.
This is what happens (always) in the relatively simple and well-understood world of software, which usually has at least some design principles lurking around somewhere. It is only through the dedication of developers (to solve ridiculous problems, not dedication to the firm) that any software ever works at all.
I can’t imagine how breaking things for the better can work in such things as polititical or legal systems, which have grown organically according to hugely divergent and regularly changing requirements, motivations and principles, sometimes across vast spans of time. Humans really don’t know how to do that. Or rather, we do, but the overheads are always unacceptably expensive so we always end up fudging it and making the outcome objectively worse and more difficult to tinker with in the future.
To be clear, I am in full agreement with your point. I’m almost always on the side of breaking things. Sometimes for the sake of it, usually with the aim of making it better. But when something isn’t built well in the first place, options are limited. The type of breaking Trump is doing is such that it will be virtually impossible to put the old system back together again, let alone build a better one, even if anyone had an idea about what a better system would be.
If I sound pessimistic it might be because Brexit is supposed to be happening in a little over a fortnight and we don’t seem to have decided anything yet. Now that is an example of breaking something to make it ‘better’ without understanding what ‘better’ means, what ‘breaking’ even means or how to go from one to the other.
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