Parallel Universes
It has been clear for a long time that the Republican base lives in this parallel universe largely created for them by Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, and talk radio. This is the world that believed Obama was a secret Muslim who was working for ISIS and now believes the entire Russia investigation is a deep state attempted coup to topple Donald Trump. It is, and will be for the next eighteen months, the place where Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Ilhan Omar are the real leaders of the Democratic party that want to implement both Venezuelan “socialism” and sharia law in this country at the same time.
We have all had to deal with that right wing parallel universe since well before the New Deal and, in its current incarnation, for over two decades. But it appears that two new parallel universes, separate but also importantly grounded in reality, are developing within the Democratic party now as well. One believes that Donald Trump, with the willing complicity of the Republican party, is an existential threat to our democracy who can not be properly dealt with through the traditional political channels and, simply for the sake of our future freedom, must be opposed and exposed at every conceivable opportunity with force and unanimity by Democrats. The other Democratic world believes that the best way to ensure Trump’s demise is a laser-like focus on the 2020 election, which means avoiding getting bogged down in combating Trump’s daily, and often hourly, atrocities. These two worlds, however, are not necessarily mutually exclusive and many Democrats can and do easily move between the two without necessarily recognizing their contradictions.
In a tweetstorm that went viral, David Rothkopf wrote, “Something broke in America this week. We have been spiraling downward since Trump’s election, but this week, we crossed a line. The President and his men began asserting that they were above the law–and effectively no one in our system did anything to stop them”.
The litany of lawbreaking and democratic destruction has reached an astounding level. The refusal of the Attorney General to release the full Mueller report and his active efforts to ensure that we will never see it; Barr’s adoption of the right-wing fantasy that the intelligence community was spying on Trump; the President’s attacks on the actions of his investigators as being “treasonous”; the refusal to obey the law in providing Trump’s tax returns to Congress and the interference from the White House in that refusal; the purging of DHS because its leadership was only willing to break some laws but not follow some of the other illegal orders from the President; the offers to provide a preemptive pardon to those DHS officials who would carry out those illegal orders; the plan of using asylum seekers as pawns in Trump’s political battle by dumping them in sanctuary cities, denied by White House officials and then promptly contradicted by the President; the nominations of inherently unqualified candidates to the Federal Reserve and the consideration of Ivanka Trump as the head of the World Bank; a cabinet becoming increasingly staffed by those never confirmed by the Senate; changing Senate rules again to push through more unqualified and partisan judges at a faster rate; and, most importantly, a Republican Senate which not only refuses to perform its constitutional duty to provide a check on the President but actively abets his ongoing lawbreaking. In light of all of this, Rothkopf sums up, saying, “It is not a time for equivocation. It is not a time for patience. It is time for those who seek to protect the rule of law to step up to protect it or the chance may not soon again return”.
Rothkopf’s words neatly summarized the view of many Democrats that the existential threat to our democracy must be confronted immediately and forcefully. The methodical nature of Democrats in Congress, however, has left the impression that they either don’t fully understand that threat or are unwilling to confront it.
Since Democrats regained control of the House, there has only been one public hearing that shed any light on the Russia investigation and that involved Michael Cohen. Those hearings opened up two new significant lines of inquiry involving insurance and tax fraud related to how Trump values his property. Cohen suggested Trump knew in advance about both Don Jr.’s Trump Tower meeting and the Wikileaks dump. It exposed his campaign as a mere branding exercise. And it also prepared the country for the real possibility that Trump would not leave quietly if he lost re-election in 2020. Despite this, no other significant Russia investigation figure has been called to testify publicly.
It took weeks for Chairman Neal to prepare the legislative groundwork to create a request for Trump’s tax returns that had a strong legal backing. Yet, even after the administration’s brazen refusal to respond to the legal request, Neal has given them another ten days to comply. Chairman Nadler has not yet subpoenaed the full Mueller report, while constantly threatening to do so. Chairman Cummings has not yet subpoenaed records from Trump’s accountants. There has been little action regarding Trump’s violations of the Emoluments Clause.
All this delay creates an impression of acquiesence. John Flannery highlighted this in an interview with Ari Melber when he spoke specifically about the Democrats’ response to the fact that Barr has not released the full Mueller reprt, saying, “The House is making a mistake not passing a resolution, not going forward with a subpoena, not asking a judge to release the [grand jury] material and waiting. I think – you can’t win an argument you don’t make and we’re not making that argument…we wring our hands, then we don’t do the things we should do when we believe what we’re doing and what we’re saying is calling out wrong actions…Anytime that you leave in doubt or are silent, you seem to acquiesce”.
Many Democrats see the House Democratic leadership as engaging in such acquiesence. They believe the old adage that sunshine is the best disinfectant and a continued public airing of Trump’s crimes against our democracy will inform and engage the American people. So they are angered when Nancy Pelosi says that “I don’t think we should go down that path [of impeachment], because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it”. It is hard to square the belief that Trump represents an existential threat to democracy, where every day he is not confronted is a day that he consolidates more unchecked power, and yet still declare that trying to remove him is “just not worth it”.
Similarly, this feeling of acquiescence carries over into similar issues involving defending those attacked by Trump and the Republicans as part of their appeal to the violent and racist parts of their base. The criticism that many have of some Democratic leaders not providing a forceful enough defense of Ilhan Omar is that it only encourages more racist and violent rhetoric that is likely to end in tragedy.
Pelosi is the lodestar of the other universe of Democrats, those who believe they need to deal with what they see as political reality. Pelosi is not blind to the danger of Trump and his Republican accomplices. In the same interview rejecting impeachment, Pelosi also stated, “[T]he times have found us now. We have a very serious challenge to the Constitution of the United States in the president’s unconstitutional assault on the Constitution, on the first branch of government, the legislative branch. … This is very serious for our country. Forgetting politics, forgetting partisanship, just talk about patriotism”.
Her belief, along with many others, is that impeachment would never result in conviction in the current Senate and would only serve to fire up Trump’s base, making the effort to unseat him in 2020 even more difficult. I think it’s hard to understate the reaction of Democrats in Congress to the way Trump’s base rallied to support the Kavanaugh nomination when it was being challenged. They still fear that backlash. They believe that impeachment will create exactly such a backlash and it appears from Trump’s increasingly lawless attitude that he believes that as well and is actively trying to “force” the Democrats to go there. In a prior piece I wrote, “When the chief executive has or creates the perverse incentive to violate or even dictate the law is one of the ways democracies die”. It is, perversely, the way Trump believes he can be re-elected, by daring the Democrats to impeach him.
In addition, impeachment would distract from the policy and legislative goals that Democrats are trying to craft for that 2020 election. As Pelosi also stated, “You know, it’s not about him [Trump]. It’s about what we can do for the people to lower health-care costs, bigger paychecks, cleaner government”. Impeachment would suck all the time and energy from passing legislation offering lower health-care costs, bigger paychecks, and some action on climate change that will set the Democratic agenda in 2020. In the same way, getting bogged down in Trump’s attacks on Omar, for instance, provides a similar “distraction” that the realists believe takes their eye of the ball of 2020.
In a similar vein, at least for the moment, the whole roster of Democratic presidential candidates are similarly focused on their own agenda and far less on Trump. Their stump speeches as well as the questions from voters in town halls rarely focus on Trump’s assaults on our democracy. Instead, they are hashing out the details of implementing universal health care, addressing climate change and income inequality, solving the problems of immigration, underemployment, and opioid addiction, and other critical problems that Americans have to confront every single day.
The lack of focus on Trump is also partly explained by the belief that most of the country has already made up its mind about him. Rehashing what went on in 2016 will not convert anyone’s vote. People have already made up their mind whether the President’s campaign was colluding with the Russians and whether Trump was obstructing justice, regardless of what Mueller or Barr says. And that is especially true of the Democratic voters these candidates will need to convince in order to become the nominee.
Similarly, talking about these issues now and having legislation passed by the House to back them up as we head into 2020 will probably be far more effective in winning back Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and perhaps putting other Midwest states into play, than simply highlighting how Trump has failed the region, the country, and our democracy.
As noted above, these two worlds, the one of existential crisis and the one of political pragmatism, are not mutually exclusive. And they are far more nuanced than the NY Times ridiculous assertions about the liberal tendencies of Democratic social media activists. Most committed activists push whatever party they are in toward the extreme and, today, that is far truer of the Republican party which is morphing into a white nationalist party than the Democratic party composed of a multitude of interest groups. And even a mainstream journalist like Howard Fineman is willing to ask “What makes anyone think @realDonaldTrump would voluntarily relinquish the office of president on Jan. 20, 2021 if he loses the election?”
Like myself, it is possible to exist in both worlds, happy to see the Democrats moving forward with critical agenda items like HR1 and getting into the details of how to implement progressive policies while still being frustrated at the apparent unwillingness of the House Democrats to forcefully confront Trump’s existential threat.
Similarly, there will be plenty of time for these to worlds to easily merge, rather than collide. There is still plenty of time before the 2020 election for Democratic oversight to become far more invasive and intolerant of delays. There will be plenty of time the for the Democratic nominee to harp on how Trump has abused the Constitution and used his office to enrich himself and his family, while still highlighting how his policies on his two signature issues, trade and immigration, have utterly failed.
Believe me, this is not a “Democrats in disarray” piece. There is nary a single Democrat who believes Trump is an existential threat to our democracy who will sit out the election no matter who the nominee becomes. Anyone who has a “pox on both their houses” attitude like the ridiculous Howard Schultz is simply actively trying to get Trump re-elected. And none of the political realists will not vote for the Democratic nominee because the party has focused time and energy on exposing Trump’s crime and corruption.
Trump is one thing that totally unites all Democrats and it is clear that he can only win by running a base election. And regardless of these two world views that many Democrats currently have, the one world they absolutely do not want to live in is Trump’s.