A lack of sharpness and clarity
Decline from a not very great height.
“It’s kind of remarkable, I’ve been watching the clips from Trump’s visit to Iowa and I’m stunned having spent a lot of time with him in 2020 and years before—he is slowing down,” Griffin said. “There’s a lack of sharpness in what he’s saying and a lack [ ] of clarity,” she continued. Griffin was once in Donald’s inner circle–and was one of his most spineless sycophants. This gives her comments about his cognitive decline even more weight.
If only he would slow to a stop.
Oh, come off it! His cognitive decline was something the rest of us were pointing out as soon as he started running for the nomination – comparing interviews then with ones he did in the eighties, showed a brain which had already started to collapse. His vocabulary had shrunk markedly. Nobody took seriously the idea that such a poor mind could get anywhere near the presidency, and thought that it was just a publicity stunt.
It’s so sad to see the sharpness and clarity of “covfefe” deteriorate to this…
Of course, even if Trump himself kicks the bucket tomorrow, Trumpism is going to be with us for the rest of our lives (so not for very long, admittedly). It’s outright terrifying that Mr. Stable Genius’ incompetence may very well have been the only reason he failed to cement in permanent minority rule already in his first four years. A smarter would-be dictator could probably have done a much better job of exploiting the Covid 19 crisis to claim emergency powers that he had no intentions of ever giving back. We may not be so lucky next time.
Speaking of “minority rule”, I recently finished reading Tyranny of the Minority by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, a follow-up to their previous best-seller How Democracies Die from 2018.
In their first book the authors look at how democracies have failed elsewhere and identify common patterns: Most modern-day authoritarians are legally elected, usually with the aide of mainstream politicians who – either out of opportunism or miscalculation – hope to use the popular appeal of the authoritarian demagogue to their advantage and believe they can control him, a Faustian bargain that backfires badly. Once in power, the demagogue then starts subverting the very system that helped him get elected, putting foxes in charge of all the hen-houses etc., to make it practically impossible to be un-elected. Levitsky and Ziblatt stress that the best way to protect democracy is to prevent authoritarian demagogues from coming to power in the first place and emphasize the gate-keeping function of parties, a role that the Republican Party failed in 2016.
Most notably the authors provide a handy litmus test for identifying an authoritarian demagogue ahead of time, a test in which Donald Trump earned a perfect score:
1. Indifference to democratic rules of the game (e.g. refusal to commit to accepting the results of elections)
2. Denying the legitimacy of opponents (“Crooked Hillary”, “Lock her up!”)
3. Encouraging or failing to condemn violence (e.g. encouraging followers to beat up protesters and promising to pay their legal costs, hinting that “the 2nd amendment people” take care of one’s rival etc.).
4. Readiness to curtail the civil liberties of critics, including the media (“enemies of the people”, “If I’m elected, boy are they in trouble!”)
Levitsky and Ziblatt also emphasize the importance of unwritten norms that uphold the “spirit of the law” above the “letter of the law”. Indeed, most of the subversive steps leading to democracy’s demise are not technically “illegal” (in fact, they are often passed off as attempts to improve democracy by, say, eliminating voter-fraud) although they certainly violate the spirit of the law. The most basic of these norms are what the authors call “mutual toleration” (recognizing the legitimacy of opponents) and “forbearance” (not using the powers granted you by the letter of the law in ways that subvert the spirit of the law). To explain the erosion of such norms the authors emphasize extreme polarization in which parties come to see each other, not as legitimate rivals, but as enemies, traitors, or even an existential threat with whom no negotiations, compromises or even peaceful co-existence is possible (in violation of the norm of mutual toleration), thus tempting parties to do whatever it takes to keep them out of the government (in violation of the norm of forbearance).
Levitsky and Ziblatt are on record as saying when they published How Democracies Die in 2018 they saw Trump as a dangerous demagogue with strong anti-democratic tendencies, but they did not see the GOP as an anti-democratic party (although the party’s unprecedented norm-violation when refusing to let President Obama to fill the missing seat on the Supreme Court following the death of Justice Scalia was a major red flag!). They have been forced to revise their views on this last point, however. In Tyranny of the Minority the authors make a useful distinction between “loyal democrats” and what they call “semi-loyal” democrats. Loyal democrats must unambiguously accept the results of elections, regardless of whether they win or lose, they must unambiguously and publicly condemn violence, even (indeed especially!) from their own side, they must unambiguously and publicly distance themselves from anti-democratic forces withing their own ranks, and they must work with political rivals to isolate and defeat authoritarians on their own side, even if it means alienating their base. Semi-loyal democrats do none of these things. Although they may not start out with any particular ambition to kill democracy – as the authors put it, they are careerists who enable authoritarians because they see it as the most expedient way to achieve their own short-term political ambitions – their role in democracy’s demise is non the less of vital importance.
As many other have pointed out the danger of democratic backsliding is especially great when a previously dominant group (in this case white Christians) is in the process of losing its dominant status. In order to accept defeat a party has to think it stands a chance of winning next time. It also has to feel recently confident that losing won’t bring ruinous consequences. With whites making up a dwindling majority, soon to lose its majority status altogether, Republicans have lost faith in their ability to win elections by democratic means. At the same time they have increasingly come to see losing as a catastrophe (and, of course, the very real excesses of Wokism are not helping to say the least).
The GOP could have decided that this meant they had to make serious efforts to appeal more broadly, reach more urban whites, more ethnic minorities, more non-Christians etc. But this brings us to the main argument of the book which is that America’s much revered constitution, its famous system of “checks and balances”, and its powerful counter-majoritarian institutions (the Electoral Collage, the First Past the Post/”Winner Takes All” electoral system, the seriously malproportioned Senate, politically appointed Supreme Court justices with no mandatory term limits or retirement ages etc. etc.) – all established to protect minorities from the Tyranny of the Majority – are now making the country especially vulnerable to the Tyranny of Minority.
It has always been the case that the American electoral system gave disproportional representation to voters in rural areas. It has also always been a possibility that the candidate who lost the popular vote could non the less win the Electoral College vote. However, this didn’t lead to any obvious partisan bias as long as both parties were equally represented across the urban/rural divide. But times have changed, and Republicans are now vastly over-represented in rural areas, which means the electoral system itself now gives them a major advantage. As a result, rather than trying to appeal more broadly to win the popular vote, the GOP has increasingly decided to forget about the popular vote altogether and rather exploit the advantages granted them by the electoral system to tilt the playing field ever further in their favor so they can keep winning on a technicality (even while losing the popular vote) every time and ultimately cement in permanent minority rule. Again, this may not be technically “illegal”, but is surely incompatible with an honest commitment to democracy, and so the party as a whole had been growing increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic for quite a while, even before the election of Trump in 2016. As others have pointed out, this anti-democratic sentiment is now even openly admitted in one of the party’s favorite truisms “We’re not a democracy. We’re a republic”. And, perhaps most worryingly, far from counter-acting the GOP’s authoritarian tendencies, the Constitution and the institutions are to a significant degree enabling them. Of course, it doesn’t help that the U.S. has the hardest constitution to amend or reform of any established democracy. Still the authors argue that constitutional reform is vital to whether or not the U.S. will come out of the current crisis as the world’s first truly multi-racial democracy or no democracy at all. If you haven’t read the book yet, I highly recommend it.
And the media is failing their job by not pointing this out. Much of the media seems to be caught in the web of belief. If a MAGA Republican says they feel underrepresented, they present it as gospel and tell us we need to try to understand the white rural male voter. From time to time, I do see a media figure point out that their vote in the Senate (and in the Electoral College) actually gives them more power than the people from California or New York.
Funny how none of the media report that those on the left have some legitimate grievances and urge the opposition to try to understand us.
True
Ironically, Trump and his enablers were right to say that the last two presidential elections were rigged. If they weren’t rigged, he would never have won in 2016, and he would have lost by a much larger margin in 2020. So when Republicans complain about elections being rigged, what it really means is “not sufficiently rigged in our favor to make the popular vote entirely irrelevant. Yet.”