Our Democratic Institutions Are Not Holding
It’s quite amazing to see how many pundits continually hold to this notion that our democratic institutions are holding and that Trump has been largely curtailed in his autocratic tendencies. I’ll just take Ross Douthat because he is always such an easy target. In his latest discussion with David Frum, Douthat points to what he describes as a standard Republican foreign policy under Trump, especially in regard to a more aggressive stance on North Korea and Syria and the continuation of the status quo elsewhere, as in indication that the only danger Trump really presents is incompetence. This leads Douthat to say “Which is why despite our agreement about Trump’s character and competence, my general level of alarm has lowered somewhat since his inauguration.”
You hear this thinking all the time, particularly on the right, namely that Trump is just pursuing orthodox Republican policies in a chaotic, unorthodox, and often incompetent manner. And the fact that Trump has not declared martial law and the Mueller investigation is continuing apace indicate that our democracy is holding. Frum, to his credit, provides an effective response to all of Douthat’s points. Incredibly, Douthat goes even further off the deep end, postulating that the country perhaps needs an authoritarian leader to be effective in our present legislative dysfunction. He says, “some authoritarianism-skirting leader, might in fact be a necessary figure for our polarized and increasingly dysfunctional politics.”
But the idea that our democratic institutions are holding when the President has fired the FBI Director in order to protect himself from investigation; when the President and the Attorney General are directing political purges of individual FBI and DOJ employees; when the President is continually and openly profiting by using the perks of his office; when the President and his administration do absolutely nothing to prevent a foreign power from interfering in our domestic elections and politics; when Russian bots continue to flood social media with propaganda for the President; when the President’s top advisers lie to the FBI and Congress; when the President’s chief foreign policy adviser still can not get a security clearance and, like the President, is accused of attempting to profit from his position; when the primary institution that could restrain virtually all of this activity, the US Congress, is instead complicit in it; when even those who acknowledge the inappropriateness of the President’s conduct refuse to also acknowledge the dangerous precedents being set; when all that is happening I find it hard to see how our democratic institutions are holding.
