[Orig to FB]
I’ve been sketching out an essay, unusual for me, arguing that the fundamental question non-fascists will need to address is whether they view Trump’s presidencies in terms of continuity or discontinuity. The question will be answered one way or the other. Hopefully that process will be explicit and deliberate, because, if it remains implicit and is only addressed in a de facto way, the answer will be the wrong one.
Mainstream Dems saw Trump’s first term as an aberration, so Biden understood his challenge in terms of a restoration of institutions and processes. He did much of that well, but his presidency was overshadowed by his declining mental state — most of all by the coterie around him bent on hiding it from the public, which intensified the withdrawn quality of his last few years — and by his zombie commitment to Israel. One could say that aside from those two things he was one the best presidents we’ve seen in many decades, but those two failures were so catastrophic that his successes were written on the wind.
Trump’s current term is a different matter entirely. In just over a year, he and his minions have laid waste to much of the order laboriously built in the decades following WW2. They have nearly three more years to go, and even if the Dems sweep the midterm elections it’s far from clear how they would deal with Trump. It would take a hundred Congresses many years to investigate the chaos and corruption he’s already achieved, and then what? Strongly worded criminal referrals to a DoJ that’s been gutted and subverted, to be brought to a judiciary awash in brazenly biased judges, with the clear understanding that the next Republican president may well overturn every sentence and persecute everyone involved in producing them?
Yet it’s entirely possible — and I think likely — that a Democratic president elected in 2028 would argue that the country needs to “move on” and “look forward,” meaning that we should try to pretend away the (so far) bloodless civil war underfoot. If they do, their achievements — relying on a corrupt and politicized civil service, and paid for by a treasury that’s elevated bankruptcy to new orders of magnitude — will be even more ephemeral than Biden’s.
The only solution, I think, is for an incoming Democratic administration to thoroughly embrace the autocratic powers granted to and seized by Trump, and to turn them around. How? By not just purging the civil service but clawing back pay and benefits (with the argument that they were the product of fraud). By putting the entire Supreme Court, and possibly many other upper federal courts, on paid administrative leave until they produce comprehensive financial records — and firing for cause all who refuse. By seizing the assets of Trump, his cabinet, and their associates until they can demonstrate they were obtained legally — and using the proceedings to make whole the many civil servants who were unjustly fired. And that’s just for starters.
Measures so extreme (as if that were novel) would be met with a tsunami of criticisms, but criticisms of criticisms rarely look forward and never build anything new. Instead, they rely on all kinds of conventional frameworks and normative assumptions that are no longer operant. So, in essence, the force of those criticisms would be to say “you can’t do these things, we have to go back to the old way.” But what old way would that be? Huge swaths of the federal government no longer exist, and the stolid reputation that attracted so many professionals has gone up in smoke. The US’s international reputation is dead, never to return; and with it key sources of US power and prestige — the petrodollar, military supremacy, one of the world’s finest research edifices — will be gone too. There is no “back” to go back to, just wisps of nostalgia and the ghosts of delusion.
When the Democrats win again (and they will), they will have no choice to to answer these questions. But it’s far from clear they’ll have the political will and steely resolve needed to ask them.
