As the political process, and make no mistake about it, impeachment is a political process, seems to be finally grinding exceedingly fine against a man who really did not want to govern in the first place, Americans need to consider what lies ahead.
While the president thinks that the “phony emoluments clause,” is not what Alexander Hamilton and James Madison had in mind for pretenders to despotism, it is exactly what they had in mind. Both Hamilton and Madison feared an “unfit usurper with despotic tendencies” by writing into the constitution Article II impeachment provisions, and In the Federalist papers, expressing deep concern about “unfit magistrates,” drawing upon sanguinary English history for the definitions of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
The argument that Trump is simply a blaggard rings exponentially truer. His thinning congressional apologists fear that his candidacy in 2020 will potentially bring them down in a cascade of voter outrage.
Even immoderate Republicans sense the danger, worrying what will come next. Will they all lose their jobs? Will the Democrats get carte blanche to correct the continuous train wreck of impulsive ineptitude? Or, is Trumpian politics the new normal?
I think not. The debates among Democrats so far has been civil; we suppose that a conscious decision has been made to follow Ronald Regan’s directive of not speaking badly of one’s fellow party members, even opponents aggressively vying for a win.
The damage done so far to American foreign policy, betrayal of our allies, ignorance of governance, the skeleton staff at the White House, and uncertainty of world leaders should abate once the president is ignominiously shuttled to jail or to his golden tower, perhaps sporting a GPS ankle bracelet, railing how the system victimized him. His twitter followers and congressional enablers will have to wait until the next opportunity. But Trump will probably fade away, a small man, made smaller by his vindictiveness, vulgarity, and “victimhood,” his ignorance, hubris and mendacity.
One of the key aspects of a democracy is forbearance and respect for other’s perspectives. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard argue in “How Democracies Die,” illustrate how democratically elected leaders, become intolerant of their opponents by attacking them and a free press. This tactic will ultimately fail in America. It did not fail in Weimar Germany, but we are not Teutonic militarists, emerging from a great depression.
Profound ideals of freedom are expounded in our constitution by the founding fathers, a brilliant constellation of leaders who emerged at just the right time. Flawed though it was (slavery) our constitution has provided a framework for both the left and for the right, for conservative and progressive, a document for the ages.
It is that document that now threatens the authoritarian demagoguery of Donald J. Trump. The perversion of the presidency will not last, nor should it. We will get through this aberration, this assault on American values.
America, granted, is under challenge from technological displacement, by the rise of illiberalism, by Russian revanchism.
by stagnant wages, by inequality, by climate change.
Americans have a great opportunity now to cleave together, as we did in World War II, as we would have if Abraham Lincoln had not been assassinated, and racist Andrew Johnson allowed the confederacy to win the peace after 700,000 Americans lay dead at Antietam, Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, the Wilderness, Chickamauga, Vicksburg, and Fredericksburg to preserve the Union and free the slaves. After Marian Anderson sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt who resigned her place in the Daughters of the American Revolution when racism did not allow the great soprano to sing. And After Dr. King marched on Washington awakening our Republic from its sleepwalking through segregation, lynching and racial injustice.
At the same time, the Constitution provides an escape from the road to totalitarianism. From the would-be intolerance and autocrat-admiring Donald Trump. It is the lynchpin of freedom in America, not because it is hermetically sealed in the national archives, but because the people of this county believe in it. It is in that belief, in that faith in the American ideal, that weathers the storm of malign Trumpism. It is the belief in the “better angels of our nature,” that America will regain its bearings, like a sailing ship as expressed in the verse of Longfellow. “Sail on, oh ship of state, sail on, oh Union strong and great; humanity with all its fears, with all its hopes of future years, is hanging breathless on thy fate.”
