The U.S. is in a Crisis
The lies are the problem
I am going to suggest that the 2024 Presidential election is worse than a choice between two questionable candidates. We are in a crisis.
My last post on The Current Thing produced a wave of unsubscribes. But I don’t care if the rest of the 7000 of you unsubscribe. I’m here to speak my mind, even if I’m wrong and/or you disagree.
I favor using impeachment powers to remove Biden now or Trump later. I get it that doing so would violate Constitutional norms. But as Richard Posner once wrote, “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”
The framers, who set up an electoral college rather than direct democracy, apparently expected that the President often would be chosen by the House of Representatives. I cannot imagine that they would have preferred our current system of partisan primaries.
Would the framers have wanted to see Congress remove a President by deciding that he is unfit to continue in office? Well, would they have rather left that decision to the President’s wife?
No, it’s all fine
Let me try to steelman the argument for why this is not a crisis. The country has done well the past eight years. Obviously, whatever flaws Donald Trump and Joe Biden may have, the results have been just fine.
Moreover, the normal political process has been followed. There has not been a coup. The voters have spoken in primaries. The level of political violence is low.
And who is to say what qualifies someone to be President? I can complain that I see Donald Trump as having Dark Triad traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy), but those traits are also evident in Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Obama brought to the Oval Office roughly the same outlook and level of managerial experience as any mediocre humanities professor, and yet people look back on his Presidency and have few complaints.
Josh Barro makes the case for Don't Worry, Be Happy with Biden.
My view is that, even if he’s only reliably in good form between 10am and 4pm, Biden is performing adequately as president because he has an adequate team around him and they are helping him make good decisions.
The way I see it, Barro is being really naive about how institutions work. From an organizational behavior standpoint, Biden’s feebleness is catastrophic. Inside the White House and the Executive Office Buildings, one can only imagine the infighting and chaos.
There is a vacuum at the top, which I presume is being filled by ambitious, arrogant, overconfident aides asserting the authority he is unable to exercise. They are stepping on each others’ toes and squabbling with one another. They will be unable to provide a consistent direction when it is needed. If you are being polite, you could call it a shambles. I can think of a more colorful expression.
Live Not By Lies
My counter-argument to “it’s all been fine” is “Don’t press your luck.” Obama set the Middle East on fire, and it is still burning. Israel faces its most dangerous conflict since its war for independence. In Ukraine, we are watching—and participating in—the largest European war since 1945. Here at home, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden ran up huge deficits, setting us up for strife whenever we are forced to put the budget on a sustainable path. The pandemic was mishandled. Who knows what challenges lie ahead, for a President who is not even up to the challenge of making coherent statements grounded in reality? (Just to be clear: I mean that criticism to apply to both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden.)
But the biggest crisis is not the flaws in Biden and Trump themselves. It is the lies that have to be told by everyone around them to cover up those flaws.
The NeverTrumpers may be wrong. They may be out of touch. I don’t march under their banner.1 But they are not lying. They do not privately believe something totally different from what they say in public.
How many Republicans in Congress really think that Mr. Trump is capable of handling the Presidency? I would bet that at least some of them would tell you in private that he makes them worried and uncomfortable.
If anything, the lying is worse on the Democratic side. They have insisted on trying to convince us to believe the opposite of what people could see with their own eyes during the debate.
Mr. Biden is unfit for office today. Yet no leading Democrat is calling on him to resign. And if he insists on staying on the ticket, it is likely that the Democrats will rally around him. And they will rally around his Vice President as well, even though in their hearts they cannot believe that she is the right choice for the country.
Recently, Niall Ferguson tossed a rock into the lake in the form of an essay on America being as decrepit as the late Soviet Union. That rock produced many ripples. He was criticized, probably correctly, for focusing on similarities but ignoring differences. For example, Jonah Goldberg wrote,
the Soviet Union built a wall to keep its subjects trapped inside their evil empire. Many Americans understandably believe we need a wall to keep millions of people desperate to live here out.
On the other hand, in his sympathetic take on Ferguson’s essay, Rod Dreher writes,
Imagine it’s 1998, and news breaks that a senior member of the administration had quietly been lobbying medical policymakers to change their rules, so that they would prescribe no bottom age limit to changing the sex of children. What if documents showed that this person, the transgendered assistant Secretary of Health, told the policymakers that it was important to make this adjustment not for scientific reasons, but for political ones.
It would have been front-page news that shocked the nation. People would have been staggered that the government was so morally corrupt. The president would have had to fire this person.
What worries Dreher and me is not just that the elites have become accustomed to lying, but that the public is becoming accustomed to being lied to. Right there is the case for making the analogy with the late Soviet regime.
I believe that this country desperately needs an end to the mass lying. For politicians and journalists, there has to be much higher correlation between what they say in public and what they believe to be true. As long as we are being fed lies so assiduously, I will be inclined to say that we are in a crisis.
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The diehard NeverTrumpers say that they would vote for Biden instead of Trump. I make the call the other way, but I do not want to make that the focus of his essay. Consider that question beside the point here. To articulate my mood, let me outsource to Rod Dreher.
But: if you really believe that returning Trump to the White House is going to fix all this, you are dreaming. Again, the crisis facing the US is so deep that I don’t believe conservatives have the choice of making the ideal the enemy of the good enough for now (“Vote For The Crook: It’s Important”). Yet a vote for Trump is, as I see it, not a vote for making America great again, but merely a vote to try to avoid the elites driving the country off a cliff.
I’m not convinced that the amount of lying happening today is different in amount from that of previous administrations.
After a competent, if imperfect four years in office, the burden of proving Trump unfit is quite high.