Tuesday, November 3, 2020

Regardless of who wins the election, Trump “has attacked the independent, nonpartisan nature of the modern bureaucratic state” and we’re in for a long struggle

Thomas Edsall has an excellent, and fairly long, opinion piece in the NYTimes today, Be Ready for a Lengthy, Vicious Struggle (Nov. 3, 2020). The deck: “The Trump-Biden matchup has ramifications far beyond those of an ordinary presidential election.” It is mostly a survey of what various experts, mostly journalists, academics, and think-tankers, have to say.

Here’s a sample:

I asked a number of experts the question, “What is at stake this year?”

Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow at Brookings, replied by email:

This is an election less about policy and more about the character of the candidates and the character of the country, with one being a reflection of the other. Should Trump win, it would be a signal that our cultural divisions have gone past the point of no return, that demographic and cultural change has come too fast for many people to handle, that a backlash has reached hurricane proportions.

Politics “is now close to a religion,” Sawhill continued:

In short, people are no longer voting based on economic self-interest or the policies they favor as much as on the basis of their cultural values, the kind of society in which they want to live, and the kind of person they believe they are.

Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, also expressed a sense that we are in an Armageddon-like battle: “Our democracy as we know it is at stake.” Trump, Enos argues, has

ruled in the exact way of leaders in other countries who dismantled democracies. In addition, he has attacked the independent, nonpartisan nature of the modern bureaucratic state — the kind of people who allow us to know if our water is clean, fairly administer our elections, and decide whether to prosecute criminals — in other words, the people who ensure stability and quality of life in a modern state.

Enos makes the case that the threat to democracy lies not only in Trump but in the willingness of the Republican Party to ratify his actions:

Trump has stoked partisan and racial animus, deepening divisions and raising tensions to a dangerous level. That a leader might do these things is not what puts our democracy at stake but that, once his party fell in line with him, the capacity of other leaders to check him through means like impeachment proved so futile.

It’s the attack on “the independent, nonpartisan nature of the modern bureaucratic state” that got my attention. For that is akin to making a strict distinction between ones personal preferences and obligations and one’s duty to an organization. I’ve commented on that distinction in a number of posts:

There’s much more in Edsall’s piece. His final paragraphs:

Over the next 24 to 36 hours, we will learn whether Trump goes beyond rhetoric to formally initiate an assault on election results, the infrastructure underpinning American democracy.

That would go beyond politics as normal, approaching electoral Armageddon. No one knows to what lengths Trump will go — we can only see that all the pieces are in place for a lengthy, vicious struggle.

The country has never before had a president in the Trump mold and the endgame scenarios are many, including the possibility that Trump would try to bargain a frictionless departure from the White House in return for a pass on state criminal liabilities, on the assumption that he takes care of any potential federal liability by pardoning himself, itself a questionable move. In the end, if Biden wins big, perhaps Trump’s evident fear of humiliation will play a role in the transition. After all, he won’t want to be frog-marched out of the White House.

Labels: , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)