Vibe shift
Heather Cox Richardson yesterday:
There seems to be a change in the air.
Three days ago, on April 14, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times wrote that the vibe is shifting against the right. Yesterday, former neocon and now fervent Trump critic and editor of The Bulwark Bill Kristol posted a photo of plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Officers kidnapping Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, and commented: “Where does the ‘Abolish ICE’ movement go to get its apology.”
Today, in the New York Times, conservative David Brooks called for all those resisting what he called “a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men” to work together. He called for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” that would first stop Trump and then create “a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism—one that offers a positive vision.”
Brooks is hardly the first to suggest that “this is what America needs right now.” But a conservative like Brooks not only arguing that “Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life,” but then quoting Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto to call for resistance to those shackles—“We have nothing to lose but our chains”—signals that a shift is underway.
That shift has apparently swept in New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who is generally a good barometer of the way today’s non-MAGA Republicans are thinking. In an interview today, he said: “[M]y feelings about not only Trump, but the administration, are falling like a boulder going into the Mariana Trench. So the memory of things that this administration has done, of which I approve, is drowning in the number of things that are, in my view, reckless, stupid, awful, un-American, hateful and bad—not just for the country, but also for the conservative movement.”
Stephens identified Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s bullying of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office as the event that turned him away from Trump. “America should never treat an ally that way, certainly not one who is bravely fighting a common enemy,” he said. Stephens also noted the meeting had “delighted” Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, who is now “emboldened…to press the war harder.”
We have been in a similar moment of shifting coalitions before.
In the 1850s, elite southern enslavers organized to take over the government and create an oligarchy that would make enslavement national. Northerners hadn’t been paying a great deal of attention to southern leaders’ slow accumulation of power and were shocked when Congress bowed to them and in 1854 passed a law that overturned the Missouri Compromise that had kept slavery out of the West. The establishment of slavery in the West would mean new slave states there would work with the southern slave states to outvote the North in Congress, and it would only be a question of time until they made slavery national. Soon, the Slave Power would own the country.
The law was the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Northerners of all parties who disagreed with each other over issues of immigration, finance, and internal improvements—and even over the institution of slavery—came together to stand against the end of American democracy.
Four years later, in 1858, Democrat Stephen Douglas complained that those coming together to oppose the Democrats were a ragtag coalition whose members didn’t agree on much at all. Abraham Lincoln, who by then was speaking for the new party coalescing around that coalition, replied that Douglas “should remember that he took us by surprise—astounded us—by this measure. We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver. We struck in the direction of the sound; and we are rapidly closing in upon him. He must not think to divert us from our purpose, by showing us that our drill, our dress, and our weapons, are not entirely perfect and uniform. When the storm shall be past, he shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”
I think I’ll go for the cleaver.
Well I hope it doesn’t result in a terrible civil war, like the last time.
And perhaps when this civil war is over you might think of a Parliamentary system where there would be a Leader of the Opposition taking the Mad President to task at Question Time, and a bunch of MPs plotting to oust an unpopular leader who is going to lose them their seats at the next election. Conservative MPs even managed to stab Thatcher in the back.
And as 70 million or so Americans seem to want a king, why not a constitutional one who will be the titular head of state and do the ceremonial bits so you don’t have a horrible dictator standing with his hand over his heart as he screws you all up. The UK has a spare – Prince Harry – he’s not a bad guy, he’s good at charity work, and he has a pretty American wife. He’s a direct descendant of that George III, that you rashly ditched back in the past, but we can forget that.
I do have to apologise for the above comment, which has a snarky tone. If you are living in a country where frightening things are happening, you don’t appreciate foreigners taking the piss. Outwith the USA people are nervous and scared. Trump drowns out all our own news – I don’t usually listen to political podcasts (I prefer history to current events) but find myself following the likes of Ezra Klein and David Frum as I watch aghast at what is happening. I don’t want to have to understand the powers of Congress (unused) and the US Supreme Court – it’s not my country – but it’s impossible to look away. You do ardently hope that the same kind of people in eg the Civil Rights movement of the 60s as well as the ardent spirits of the Civil War will rise up in one way or another and that this will be a blip, a bad historical moment in the USA. But oh, the damage done.
KB,
Snark is fine, even–nay, especially–from Brits. There are times when I think this whole independence thing was a terrible mistake, and we should go back to being loyal subjects.
Of course, if we did that and you gave us representation this time around, we’d end up running things anyway, and we don’t seem so good at that.
A little late for that now. The problem with using your vote to elect a dictator is that there’s probably not going to be a “next time”.
I happen to believe that the majority of the military is still loyal to the Constitution… But I understand why they’re keeping their powder dry.
Funny how the tawdry, Trump-Vance tag-team, intended to belittle and humiliate Zelensky, redounded on them so completely. I think that this performance, for many people, was the public debut on the world stage of America Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of the Trump Organization. This new America is little more than a protection racket and shakedown outfit run by a second-rate, wannabe mob kingpin, with help from his eager stooge, second banana, and aspiring successor. Instead of acheiving the goal taking Zelensky down a peg or two, it degraded America in the eyes of the world, inflicting more damage on the country’s reputation in the short span of that press event than America’s enemies could ever have dreamed. Subsequent actions have only further demonstrated the truth that Trump is now to be numbered among those enemies.
To quote kbplayer Trump drowns out all our own news downunder as well. We are 2 weeks out from a federal election.
Our major right wing party (Liberal Party) was all in on Trump, echoing Trumpian statements, promising our very own DOGE, and some even weaing MAGA caps. That hasn’t worked out well for them, and they are pivoting away as fast as they can, but only from the worst Trumpian excesses, they’re still all in on thee bits that harm the general populace as long as tey reward the rich.
We have our very own Musk, Clive Palmer, spreading his wealth trying top have cnadidates elected under his own party banner, with a new party named Trumpet of Patriots. Last time Clive spent a billion dollars and manged the election of a single Senator out of 40 vacancies.
But back to America. As an outsider I am sure I miss any things about Amwerican life, society, and politics, but it seems clear to me that the American Right, those descendants of Ford, Lindbergh, Wallace, Nixon, Reagn, et al never went away, they continued to work, plot, and scheme to disenfranchise as many voters as possible. America has a system where those with the power of government get to set the rules about voting eligibility and the distribution of electorates. A system designed to be corrupted.
And now, as a result, the USA has the most racist government in its history, yes even worse than those that preceded the Civil War or those of the Reconstruction.
And it’s all perfectly legal.
KBPlayer, the problem is, there is a ton of money needed to support royalty, and I for one happen to think the money could be better spent on domestic issues and foreign affairs, not on padding the wallet of some barely competent hereditary monarch who contributes little or nothing to society other than celebrity news. Monarchs in my experience tend to be badly behaved, sometimes out and out predators, and demanding. Too much like a god, IMHO.
Rev:
I have to agree. Every time Dems have won an election we hear all sorts of celebratory news about how the right is dead, we won’t see them again, people have figured them out, etc etc etc. They sneak around using their money and whatever power they retain (which is always substantial, because the red states stay red, and the government is – or used to be – about more than the president). The media, stuck in an infernal trap of ‘fairness’ and ‘non-bias’ chooses to treat all sides as if they are equal, even while fact checking one side to see they are lying every time they open their mouths. They are equally complicit, because they like to be king-makers, and also they like to destroy those they built up yesterday. The citizens eat it all up, believe whatever they like the sound of, often that which lets them blame anything wrong with their life on someone else, and those who decide to vote may know little to nothing about the constitution, the laws of the country, or the candidate they are voting for. It was interesting during the 2004 election to see the exit interviews that showed a lot of Bush voters believed he stood for the exact opposite of what he actually stood for. They make up their minds based on things that have little to nothing to do with political competence and intellect, and then retrofit their views into their candidate.
And they will never hear the other side, because they get all their news from the internet, where it is easy to subscribe only to the news you believe is true.
KBPlayer, snark aside, I’m having a hard time seeing how the US can get out of this mess without moving to a Second Republic, one where no mad king would ever have the power Trump is now wielding. Of course the US constitution is a sacred document unsullied, and not to be changed, by any human hand but as those who claim to revere it are very the ones now ripping it to shreds and pissing on the remains, I suppose, anything’s possible.
Second Republic would’ve been around the 13-15th amendments… maybe we could go for a Third?
Fantasy world version of this is that #48 uses these bullshit unconstitutional powers to punish all the assholes then Congress removes them from office via impeachment and ushers in President #49 to restore the Republic.
@Francis Boyle – well I suppose France is on its Fifth Republic now. Mind you, some of them were upended with war, both internal and external.
The Romans had one Republic and when they lost it they lost it for good.
On the historical analogy with the 1850s I think the essence is reasonable, but in detail it is important to note that it is the constellation of measures which galvanises opposition: not just the Kansas Nebraska Act alone, but its conjunction with the over-reaching Dred Scott decision. That is what enabled Lincoln to credibly claim that slave power adherents were working to a common design. That is why many eyes will be on Gorsuch and Roberts in the forthcoming months.
re. the Constitution being a sacred, unchanging document; Thomas Jefferson didn’t think it ought to work that way. Writing to James Madison from Paris just after the French Revolution had broken out, he said
https://oll.libertyfund.org/quotes/thomas-jefferson-on-whether-the-american-constitution-is-binding-on-those-who-were-not-born-at-the-time-it-was-signed-and-agreed-to-1789