Everyone I know is depressed about politics. Maybe it is because we are in mid-winter, and so caught up in Shakespeare ‘s “A Winter’s Tale”, where people cannot help but engage in sin for no reason at all and so, one can surmise, are cursed with original sin. Maybe it is because we are almost up to the Iowa caucuses and no Democratic candidate has caught fire, Democrats, as the axiom has it, wanting to fall in love with a candidate while Republicans only care about who is next in line. The Democratic primary candidates all seem unsuited for the role of someone who offers a new day. Warren and Sanders are too Left; Biden is too old; Buttigieg is too young; and Amy Klobuchar seems to be everybody’s idea of a perfect vice-presidential candidate: charming, left of center, a good ticket balancer-- even if Blacks may demand that place on the ticket-- but too narrow a vision in that winning every county in Minnesota is not exactly what you want to go on a bumper sticker.
Another reason for being depressed about politics is that Trump may get away with his crimes and feel free to commit others because the GOP is so compromised as a party by the fear of its people in Congress that they will be primaried that they have abandoned all principle, no longer the party of fiscal responsibility or small government but of whatever gets them reelected and so they are in the hands of a President they despise, none of them having anything admiring to say about him, constantly invoking the sentiment that they would not talk the way he does but that he has his own way of expressing himself, and so having no need to condemn what he says every day out of his mouth, which is to diminish people as well as not respond to facts or to contest arguments with arguments rather than offer up some empty adjectives, because that is all his lack of verbal agility can encompass. The Republican Party has, in effect, sold its soul for a bowl of porridge, which means Supreme Court and Federal Court appointments. This is a President that they would feel well rid of but they cannot stop themselves from supporting him. It must be difficult these days to be a Republican. Even Chris Christie, who now that he is a television commentator, and who says he still communicates with the President, will say no more in the President’s defense than that this is the man Trump is, not given to strategy but merely to expressing himself. He is what he is-- which makes Chris Christie also just what he is.
The general disgruntlement may be the cause of the article about Joe Biden that appeared in “The New York Review of Books” this past month. It portrays Biden as a striver after the Irish American legacy of the Kennedys, someone obsessed with grief, which in his case is well earned, but of no moment other than that, having been only a johnny come lately to the Civil Rights Movement. But that is to substitute image and personae for substance. It is true enough that Biden has no great legislative record. He did support civil rights in the Senate and he did put forward the Violence Against Women Act when that was still a marginal issue in American politics and s it is to his centrist credit that he finds things about which people can agree, and he did support a harsh criminal justice bill when everyone else, including the Black Caucus, were also supporting it. Biden also presided over both the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee during his years in the Senate, most notably when he faced off against Robert Bork in confirmation hearings that led to the permanent distrust between the two parties about Supreme Court nominations. He also presided at the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing where he had the unenviable job, put to him by George Mitchell, the Majority Leader at the time, of conducting some kind of hearing so that women could be appeased without making the hearings into a full scale trial of the charges against Thomas, as if those could have been adjudicated in a Senate hearing. That his Senatorial record is not stellar and that it is quickly replaced in his vita by his eight years as Vice President, when he carried with him real responsibilities in foreign policy and in moving forward gay rights, is not surprising in that very few Senators who rise to the Presidency do have a distinguished record, Lyndon Johnson the exception. But it is a sign of our time to reduce the life of a public servant to his image, as if he were only a character out of literature.
Another cause for gloom is that the populace has no way of knowing what Trump will do if he is reelected. I had expected him to try to deport eleven million illegals and all he did was separate a few thousand children from their parents, horrendous enough, but not what it might have been. And it turns out that he is loathe to go to war because even he realizes that he does not have the steel in his spine to be a wartime commander. So Trump’s inadequacies, his stupidity and ignorance, keep him from acting out his malice, and I suppose that is a good thing, but it does not lead to wanting him to remain as President to cook up something else under his orange brow. It is no wonder that I and many others have to work hard to stop talking about him, his ability to garner attention to himself his most distinguishing trait. He is not charismatic, like Hitler or Stalin, and so no one loves him, though many people are taken or engaged with him, and so it is liberating to think of other things, like baseball or Jane Austen, those much more edifying examples of the human spirit.
And so we are going to have to go even more deeply into winter before spring arrives. The most desulatory aspect of the season is the present state of the impending trial of Trump in the Senate. An impeachment and a trial are meant to be solemn moments when factions rise to the occasion of carrying out their obligations under the Constitution to step in and right a democracy that has gone awry because a President has become tyrannical. It is a way of saying that the country endures, is more important than any of its leaders. That is the way the Constitution envisioned it because the Constitution required each Senator to take a special oath that went beyond the oath of office that they had already taken to uphold the Constitution. The Senators must now swear to be unbiased jurors rather than just members of factions. Majority Leader MCConnell is already in violation of that oath in that he has said he will coordinate all his actions with the White House. That is not being impartial. He says a trial is political, but that clearly is violative of the Constitution which stipulates that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is to preside, the Chief Justice presumably there to lend the occasion with not just the semblance of legality but also to keep the proceedings fair, even if the general rules of the trial are settled by the voting members of the Senate. So when Trump is found not guilty, which does not mean exonerated, the nation will not feel that this was an ordeal successfully survived and having a grandeur all its own. The Founding Fathers understood the necessity of ceremony, as Mitch McConnell clearly does not. So everybody will be let down, Trumpists for having been put through this ordeal at all and anti-Trumpists for it being a rigged process. That may turn out the real Trump legacy: damage to the impeachment process.
And, then, assuming that acquital quickly follows the trial, possible obstructing events, such as new witnesses or new attempts to undermine the 2020 election, not taking place, we will return to the Presidential race. It is to be remembered that JFK did not emerge as the fair haired boy until the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles in 1960. Gore Vidal had that convention in mind when he wrote “The Best Man”, a play about a political convention where the front runners neutralize one another and the nomination goes to a dark horse whom the insiders think will rise to the office, as certainly they must if they have any sense at all of the gravity of the office. The despair of our times is that we no longer have that confidence.
Compare what is happening here with what happened in Great Britain which is struggling with the survival of its national identity as a result of the Brexit crisis. It is quite possible that Scotland will leave Great Britain and indeed turn London into Singapore on the Thames. But that would happen, now, as the result of a legitimate constitutional process. Rather than relying on the original Brexit referendum where the vote was very close and some voters claimed they had meant only to protest the government rather than to leave the EU, a problem in interpretation that holds for all referendums, or relying instead on a second referendum, in that there have been three years of unfolding developments for British voters to consider, there was an election for Parliament, the third general election of the year, and it resulted in a decisive vote which gave Boris Johnson the votes he needs to push through any kind of plan he wants for separating from Europe. Whatever happens as a result of Brexit, even if it is the dissolution of Great Britain, it is the result of the British will, the usual mechanisms of politics, which includes the fact that Jeremy Corbyn was a very weak figure around which to gather anti-Brexit sentiment. That is what politics does: make the invisible will of a people visible.
Compare the democratically resolved Brexit debate to the Impeachment process which had worked with Nixon, hounding him out of office and giving everyone the satisfaction that the country had come together to do this nasty business of hounding Nixon out of office. And large parts of the nation felt that justice was done in the Clinton trial because the silly basis for impeachment, sexual indiscretion, did not deserve the weighty punishment of removal from office, and so his acquittal in the Senate, however partisan, vindicated the system as a good way to establish accountability for only the most serious of crimes. But this time will leave everyone with a bad taste in their mouths, the Republicans because, as I have said, they have sold their souls, and the Democrats because there will be no fair adjudication of their charges, even as more and more evidence emerges that needs investigation. There will be no majesty in these trial proceedings unless something changes very much, and majesty is just what such an occasion offers and requires.