Abdication and Appeasement
On December 10, 1936, King Edward VIII, the king of “Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, King, Emperor of India” abdicated his throne in order to marry the divorcee Wallis Simpson. Less than two years later, on September 30th, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared “peace with honor…peace for our time” after signing the Munich Agreement that ceded nearly a quarter of Czechoslovakian territory to the Nazis. Chamberlain’s claim has become the quintessence of appeasement. In a way, abdication of duty and appeasement to power are two sides of the same coin – they both abandon their public responsibilities – one in the interest of their own personal, private satisfaction or well-being, and the other an ill-fated attempt to maintain a status quo for themselves and others that really no longer exists.
It is, perhaps, not a coincidence that the two most prototypical examples of abdication and appeasement occurred at a time of an ever-increasing threat from fascism. The parallels to today could not be more striking. We have seen both abdication and appeasement at all levels of our society, at all ranges of institutions, in our country over the last few years. For decades, Congress has been abdicating its responsibilities to the executive branch, its war powers being a primary example. Both parties do everything in their power to set up “fake” votes that allow vulnerable members to appease part of the electorate that oppose a particular policy and then cram everything plus the kitchen sink into must-pass reconciliation bills that protect those same vulnerable members from taking the tough vote.
The filibuster rule in the Senate performs a similar function. How many times have we seen a Senator vote against cloture and then vote for the bill, essentially taking both sides of the issue? Even more common is the member who votes against a particular bill and then celebrates all the benefits coming into the state/district because of its passage. The Senate is constitutionally required to provide “advice and consent”, and Republicans would have certainly been within their rights to vote against confirming Garland to the Supreme Court. But refusing to even give him a hearing, much less an up or down vote in committee or on the floor, was just an abdication of the body’s constitutional duty solely to prevent the liberals from having a majority on the Court. Similarly, Democrats decided not to even call witnesses in Trump’s second impeachment trial, with one Senator suggesting getting home for Valentine’s Day was more important.
The legal system has simply abandoned the idea of prosecuting white-collar crime, from the bankers who gave us the Great Financial Crisis and committed massive mortgage foreclosure fraud to the insurrectionists who planned and engaged in the 1/6 insurrection. We have somehow created a judicial system that has virtually abdicated its duty to provide justice, except for the poorest among us who always receive it swiftly. For well-heeled defendants, justice can always be delayed and often be denied. We need only look at Jeffrey Epstein, the Sacklers and their abettors of the opioid epidemic, or the entire life of Donald Trump to see that. Perhaps the most iconic illustration of this phenomenon is the case of Ecuador v Chevron, where, in 1993, indigenous tribes of Ecuador sued the company that became Chevron for its decades-long polluting of the Ecuadoran jungle in its quest for oil. After years of delay and venue changes orchestrated by Chevron, the tribes finally won an $18 billion judgement for remediation and reparations in 2011. Today, 15 years after that verdict, and 33 years after the initial suit, after multiple trials in multiple countries, Chevron has not only never paid a dime of that judgement but has managed to get the tribes’ lead attorney disbarred, and just this year won a judgement against the government of Ecuador for $180 million as part of the case.
These trends in the political and legal sphere have been building for decades, ever since Reagan, as a response to the rise of the administrative state and the attempt to rein in corporate power and political corruption in the 1970s. What’s happened under Trumpism, and especially now during his second term, is that abdication of duty and appeasement of power has seeped into so many of our other institutions. Today, administration lawyers routinely lie in court. The administration continually defies court orders and appeals any even temporary injunction that might restrict them to a higher court before the lower court can even build a real record or even make a binding decision. Yet judges continue to give the administration the benefit of the doubt when they appear and refuse to institute any real sanctions on the administration’s abuses. SCOTUS, like the Fifth Circuit, is the preferred venue for the administration and the conservative radicals as they can almost be guaranteed the result they are seeking.
Top legal firms have caved to the extortionate demands of this President, offering millions of dollars in “free” representation to the government, withdrawing from certain legal cases that upset the administration, and abandoning existing employment pledges. Some of those firms continue to employ lawyers who participated in the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election while essentially firing individual lawyers the administration has targeted. Hospitals refuse to adhere to the Hippocratic Oath, instead appeasing the demands of the government to refrain from providing specific types of heath care, even when the situation is life-threatening for the patient. They too have given in to the extortionate demands of the administration, paying “settlements” for providing recommended health services that the current administration objects to.
Business leaders constantly whine that Democrats’ efforts to raise taxes amount to “socialism” and then are entirely mute when Trump partially nationalizes major US companies. They are equally silent, often enthusiastic, when credibility of the rule of law collapses in the wake of the administration’s assaults and states engage in a race to the bottom to weaken corporate oversight and shield corporate executives. Combined with the administration’s xenophobia, these business leaders seem oblivious to the deepening erosion of the factors that served to make the US a safe place for investors for decades. Media moguls, when they are not selling out to propagandists or becoming one themselves, allow the administration to suppress their outlet’s stories via threats and lawsuits. Reporters sane-wash insane ramblings and refuse to stand up for the peers when attacked by the administration, all in the pursuit of useless access to inveterate liars. Both-sides journalism obscures truth in a futile effort to appease right-wing critics.
Similarly, school boards and administrators abdicated their defense of intellectual freedom in an attempt to appease the right’s fraudulent attacks, eliminating whole areas of study, banning books, and refusing to defend their own professors from bogus charges of plagiarism and bias. Instead, they allow political actors to determine their own school’s curriculum. In the name of freedom of speech, they shut down and even tried to criminalize the right to protest. Universities have also allowed themselves to be extorted for millions by the government.
As noted earlier, the Democratic establishment has abdicated its responsibility to provide accountability when it has had power and abandons their principles and allies in the hopes of capturing an ever-elusive “middle” when it does not. The Democratic leadership seems locked in a Clintonian time warp of triangulating against the party’s left that continues to allow the Overton window to move farther toward an ever-increasing fascist threat. The Senate Minority Leader refuses to even put out a statement concerning the lawless targeting of Ilhan Omar by the administration just days before an election. They do not know how to be an opposition party but apparently continue to think that being considered the “adults in the room” will help them politically, even as we clearly descend into a lawless country where people here legally are kidnapped off the streets and disappeared into a worldwide gulag by a lawless paramilitary force. Colorado Senator Hickenlooper belatedly owned up to this kind of cowardice, claiming that he voted for Trump’s cabinet because he feared other nominees would be far worse. That is always the core excuse for every appeaser.
Of course, the institution that has totally collapsed is the Republican party. Senior members have sworn they would never support Trump and then caved quickly under minimal pressure. Like addicts, many have gone through the process more than a handful of times, from the Access Hollywood tape to the 1/6 insurrection to multiple votes on nominees and policies. Today, the party is essentially a white nationalist cult that is forced to ignore the lunatic ravings of its leader while pretending everything is kumbaya, while being almost exclusively propped up by a drug-addled oligarch and his grifter friends who wait for the leader’s passing to completely take the party over. It has no policies other than grievance for the masses and the looting of the commons for the one percent.
Back when Trump was first elected, Masha Gessen wrote that institutions will not save us. There were many pundits who proclaimed that our institutions had actually shown their resilience after Trump’s first term. That argument appears to be over now. Our institutions are failing us, failing our democracy. If there is a single thread that runs through such a wide-ranging collapse, it is the emergence of an American oligarchy that now has more money and power than the government that allowed them to be created in the first place. That oligarchy built the courts that are supposed to dispense justice; owns the media that is supposed to inform us; funds the institutions of learning that are supposed to educate us; and fills the coffers of the parties and their elected members that are supposed to represent us. Trump was a titanic failure as a businessman, but, on TV and in real life, he is an incredibly successful oligarch. And every step of the way, Trump and his criminal oligarchic mates have been abetted by the abdicators and the appeasers.