The thesis of this book is that the real lesson of 2016 is less about the Russians or even Trump but the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the Republican party as Ryan Cooper describes it:
“Even now the GOP is swatting down attempts from congressional Democrats to secure American electoral machinery from outside interference. In a domestic American context, the main story of Russiagate is that the Republican Party is so corrupt that they will sacrifice democracy to get tax cuts for the rich and reactionary union-busting judges.”
I define the ‘modern Republican party’ as the post New Deal GOP.
Trump is not the cause of the GOP’s bankruptcy he’s just its logical conclusion. Nor is the big story of 2016 the Russians. Indeed as the recent Kavanaugh hearings demonstrate the GOP most certainly did not need Russia-or Trump-to know how to hack and weaponize Democratic emails.
Putin’s Russia for its part comes into the picture because of it’s shared contempt for democracy, liberalism, and its racism against Muslims. After 2001, Putin realized that the conservative parties of the West were his natural allies, his spiritual bedfellows. But neither Putin or Trump taught the GOP how to oppose and defeat democracy and public opinion, how to enshrine minority rule.
Find Nance quotes…
As I argued in (Chapter A) one pretty useful way to view American political history is as a morality tale:
1. In 1800 the Federalists disintegrated as one of the two major political parties because they were on ‘the wrong side of history’-their tendencies towards monarchy and the the ancient aristocratic regime.
2. After that the Democrats dominated the country for the next 60 years, winning the White House 56 of 60 years, then came the Civil War. At that point the Democrats were on the wrong side of history due to their sympathies for the slaveholding, seceding South. For many years the Northern Democrats, while not necessarily liking slavery, had looked the other way, as they needed the South to win all those elections. In 1860, their bill came due as beginning with Lincoln’s win in 1860-without a single Southern state- they would hold the WH only 16 of the next 72 years. Indeed, the GOP would hold not just the WH but both Houses of Congress 42 of those 72 years.
So the Dems were effectively in the penalty box for close to three quarters of a century thanks to its being on the wrong side of history regarding to the slaveholding, seceding South, and considering its moral sins, that doesn’t seem like such an unfair judgment by American voters.
3. But then came the Great Depression and it was the GOP’s turn to be on the wrong side of history. The GOP”s laissez-faire, ‘supply side’ economic policies-to be sure they weren’t called supply side then-were blamed for the Depression. Then came FDR’s New Deal. For the Grand Ole Party, the New Deal was a ‘bridge too far.’ They opposed it vehemently.
The trouble was: most Americans supported it as the GOP itself acknowledged.
But that put them at an impasse: as they didn’t support the New Deal and the American people did, how could they hold onto power as this is a democracy? Well just so. and this remains a problem for them they can’t really answer to this day. Indeed, one answer would for them to have adjusted-in other countries-mostly in Europe, the conservative parties have accepted the modern welfare state and yet held onto power but for whatever reason, American conservatives found this unacceptable. Clearly laissez-faire for historical reasons has a deeper resonance in America than in the Western European liberal democracies.
By the time that Dewey beats Truman-oops!-the GOP must have been pretty worried. This was now 5 straight elections they were out in the cold. What could they do? Well one thing they could have done was adjust and accept the New Deal, but they refused to consider that-respecting the will of voters. Instead they:
A. First of all passed the no more FDRs Amendment that limited Presidents to two terms-something some of them regretted in the time of Reagan-though by then he had some real problems on Iran-Contra as we see in (Chapter B).
B. Then they nominated a WWII war hero with very wide trans-partisan appeal; indeed, the Democrats had reached out to Ike-I like Ike-about running. They didn’t realize that he was a confirmed conservative Republican with little love lost for the New Deal-he had smartly kept his cards do close to his breast all those years.
The GOP was very lucky Ike was a Republican as Eisenhower won a resounding landslide over Adlai Stevenson in 1952-and an even bigger landslide over poor old Adlai in 1956-Democrats to no avail tried to disprove the adage that it’s a pretty foolish to keep doing the same thing again and expecting a different result. But, in truth Stevenson was a pretty good guy, it’s just that no one could beat Ike-he took one for the team in 1956.
So if in 1950 the GOP was wondering if it’s possible for the party to win a Presidential election in the post FDR New Deal era, the answer was yes. This was great but it didn’t necessarily offer them much going forward in terms of how to proceed as the very popular Ike really wasn’t a repeatable event. There weren’t that many WWII war heroes of transpartian appeal though actually personally were partisan Republicans.
C. Ironically then it was Eisenhower’s Vice President who would provide the GOP blueprint for how to win elections in the post New Deal era: basically lie, cheat, suppress the vote, indeed, use any dirty trick, any means necessary to win elections-right up to, as it turned out colluding with a hostile foreign power. It’s certainly clear that the modern GOP isn’t the party of Ike but the party of his VP, aka Tricky Dick.
Nixon won his first election against California Congressman Jerry Voorhis by the dirty tricks he’d become (in)famous for. He accused Voorhis of being a Communist. This was slander and Nixon knew it.
”Of course I knew Jerry Voorhis wasn’t a Communist,” Mr. Nixon later replied to accusations that he had lied during the campaign. ”But . . . I had to win. . . . The important thing is to win.”
The important thing is to win. This sums up the entire modern Republican attitude-pure, rank Machiavelianism. The important thing is to win BY ANAY MEANS NECESSARY.
That would be their solution to how to win in the post New Deal era. As recovering Republican David Frum puts it: given a choice between conservatism and democracy conservatives will choose conservatism.
(Find tweet Mike).
Nixon’s Senate campaign against Hellen Gahagan Douglas who he slurred as the Pink Lady was even nastier. It had all the elements of GOP dirty tricks over the last 66 years-ad hominem claims of left wing radicalism, paid protesters-who threw fruit at Douglas, an attempt to assassinate their public reputations.
Indeed, it’s rather uncanny that for some reason in 2014 two of Nixon’s best students in Tricky Dick tactics, Roger Stone and Patrick Buchanan wrote books about their beloved corrupt, foreign country colluding boss. It was almost as if they were clairvoyant that soon, someone even more corrupt and illegitimate would be coming. And, of course, Roger Stone did know that as he and Trump had been planning 2016 since Obama’s takedown of Trump at the WH Correspondence’s dinner.
Stone has since updated his 2014 book-linked to in the paragraph above, and Buchanan wrote a followup in 2017 with an arresting title:
Buchanan, of course, knows a lot about these battles as he was there. It’s always quite amazing to hear him rail against affirmative action., when, of course, the Philadelphia Plan was his baby. He construed it as a way to divide ‘the Democrats in labor with their black friends.’
Indeed, both Buchanan and Stone are Watergate Alum-they both worked on CREEP. Buchanan crafted the strategy, while Stone delivered the Canucks letter than knocked Muskie out-who was the one Democratic challenger Nixon feared. What is not appreciated is that, yes, Nixon stole the election of 1968 by colluding with South Vietnam to scuttle LBJ’s peace talks-more on that in the next chapter. This fact has been acknowledged the last few years with the appearance of Halderman’s diary.
UPDATE: Will it take almost 50 years to get to the truth of what Trump did in 2016?
Not if the Dems stand their ground and insist on seeing the full Mueller Report-not just the ‘unembarassing parts’ as Bill Barr and this fake ‘President’ would have it.
But what’s not appreciated sufficiently, is that the 1972 election was also stolen.
But to see this you have to construe ‘Watergate’ as more than merely the actual, physical break in to the Watergate Hotel in June, 1972.
In Buchanan’s very interesting Watergate testimony he declared he didn’t know Segretti, G. Gordon Liddy, etc, but, of course, this proves nothing.
“For the record, Mr. Chair Man, let me state the following: I did not recommend or authorize, nor was I aware of, any on‐going campaign of political sabotage against Senator Muskie, or any other Democratic candidate.
“I did not recommend, either verbally or in memoranda, that the Re‐election Committee infiltrate the campaigns of our opposition, I have never met nor spoken with, nor can I recall ever having heard the names of, Messrs. Hunt. Liddy, Mc Cord, Ulasewicz, Ragan, Barker or Segretti until those names appeared in the public press.”
“Nor have I ever heard, until the terms were made public, the code names of Ruby 1, Ruby 2, Crystal, Sedanchair 1 and Sedan chair 2, or Fat Jack. Even today, I could not testify with certitude to whom these terms refer.”
Of course, he doesn’t have to know them: those who craft military strategy often don’t know the faces and names of the foot soldiers who execute their battle plan. It’s usually preferable that those who plan the attack don’t know anything about the foot soldiers-for plausible deniability first and foremost.
And this has been the GOP’s modus operandi going back to Nixon’s Senate win in 1950, indeed, going back to his House win in 1946. Already in 1946 the basic GOP strategy was set. The GOP had neither the facts, nor the law on its side-even less public opinion on policy-so it would have to pound the table-and much more besides.
But what about the idea that American politics is a morality tale? There’s no question that this view has taken something of a beating. In the immediate aftermath of the Great Depression, the Democrats won the next 5 Presidential elections-FDR won it 4 times, of course, To be sure, there were eventuating circumstances-first with the Great Depression and the many years it took to recover and then the worldwide threat of Hitler’s Nazism and fascism and WWII-the Pearl Harbor attack, etc.
It’s not shocking that Americans weren’t eager to change horses in the middle of all that. But in the immediate aftermath of the Great Depression, the Democrats held the WH for 20 years until 1952, and, indeed, the GOP hadn’t even held Congress again until 1946. Indeed, beginning with the 1932 elections, the Democrats would hold onto Congress for the next 60 of 64 years-until the rise of Newt in 1994. In a sense you can call the period between 1994 and 2018 the Newt Gingrich era. There is reason to hope that 2018 marked the sharp end of Newt’s era.
There’s no doubt that the more the numbers come in, the breadth and magnitude of the Democrats’ election victories is all the more startling.
There’s simply no longer any doubt that this was a Democratic wave that was in absolute size actually bigger than both Newt’s 1994 House win and the Tea Party wave of 2010. Of course, the Democrats actual gain in seats is less than 1994 and 2010 but this is thanks to GOP gerrymandering and redistricting-something the Dems smartly now have in their sights.
So it was the #BlueWave we all hoped for-what remains to be seen, but there’s reason for optimism, is that it was also a major realignment, the end of the Newt era. Time will tell,
Maybe the GOP will now finally get its comeuppance. But it must be admitted that at least prior to November, 6, 2018, they clearly had escaped it. Yes, the Democrats held onto Congress 58 of 62 years, and the Senate 52 of 62 years. And the Democrats also dominated the Presidency between 1932 and 1968 holding the WH 28 of 36 years-with Ike being the exception. And let’s fact it, that wasn’t a mandate for GOP ideology but simply that he was one of the rarest things in American politics-a genuinely transpartisan phenomenon. Obama wanted to be transpartisan but only Ike succeeded.
However, Nixon’s win inaugurated a period where the GOP won 5 of 6 Presidential elections-or should I say ‘won’ them as Nixon cheated in both 1968 and 1972, and as we will see in (Chapter C) Reagan and friends may well have cheated in 1980. More than merely cheat but commited treason. But more on that in the next few chapters.
Speaking of Nixon, Ellsberg documented what he said about ‘free and fair elections’ while in Vietnam:
Getting right to business, Lansdale said, “Mr. Vice President, we want to help General Thang make this the most honest election that’s ever been held in Vietnam.” “Oh, sure, honest, yes, honest, that’s right”—Nixon was seating himself in an armchair next to Lansdale—“so long as you win!” With the last words he did three things in quick succession: winked, drove his elbow hard into Lansdale’s arm, and, in a return motion, slapped his own knee. My colleagues turned to stone.”
But the GOP would hold the WH 20 of the next 24 years. Then Newt and friends would come in 1994 and hold the House 20 of the next 24 years, while holding the Senate 16 of 24. All told, then, since Ike’s win in 1952, the GOP has held the Presidency 38 of 66 years, Congress 20 of the last 24 years and in some ways most importantly: the Supreme Court the last 50 years and counting-since Nixon bullied Abe Fortas into retiring.
So it’d be nice to say that the GOP has learned that crime doesn’t pay but the truth is quite different. Until now at least crime has paid pretty handsomely. Is the GOP’s luck now going to run out-have they finally gone too far?
Stay tuned…
UPDATE 2.0: I wrote this on November 23, 2018 and today is April 3, 2019. That the GOP will finally face its comeppance remains very much in doubt. The last two years my focus along with my friends in #TheResistance was a Democratic Congress. Now that we have that Democratic Congress it still remains ambiguous that the Dems really have it in them to do what is necessary in what promises to be a very nasty fight.
While Jerrold Nadler to his credit is holding to his red line for Barr to release the Mueller Report and speak before Congress-the real argument is less the timing-though by doing this the Dems are making it clear this is urgent, which will at least make Barr think twice of blowing through his own deadline of ‘by the middle of April’-than if Barr is simply going to redact everything remotely embarrassing for ‘the President’ before we see it. Nadler and the Dems are rightly demanding to see the whole uredacted report-therefore making themselves responsible for redactions.
The worry is that Barr created a whole new class of material he will redact-stuff he in his own opinion thinks is embarrassing for ‘peripheral’ individuals. This is a new unprecedented class of material subject to being hidden. Ben Wittes’ piece sanctimoniously declaring I trust William Barr is rather disingenuous-or we give him a lot more credit than he deserves.
Here’s a radical idea: For the next two weeks, let’s give Attorney General William Barr the benefit of the doubt.”
I don’t think it’s at all a radical idea just a very bad one-an almost criminal gullibility at this point after all we’ve already seen from Barr-going back to pardoning Casper Weinberger and Friends in the middle of Bush Sr’s reelect. Then you have the 18 page letter he wrote to ‘the President’ that got him the job where he called the Mueller investigation fatally misconceived. But according to the Ben Witteses of the world this can be totally glossed over. Even though he totally opposes the investigation he will oversee it fairly. What conflict of interest? Why do we even have rules and precedents against it-no one would ever abuse their own power to achieve their own political preferences!
“I understand why so many people are suspicious of Barr and are lining up to denounce him—and there may well come a day, and it might come soon, when I will get in line and join them.”
Oh goody. After the cows have verifiably left the barn Ben Wittes will be there to say ‘Yes they have most certainly left the barn. You were right to worry.’
That’s what we need a legal expert like him to tell us.
“Yet I am still inclined to give Barr the benefit of the doubt on the release of the Mueller report, if only in a kind of “trust but verify” sort of way. The reason, in short, is that Barr has promised numerous times to show his work. He has promised to do so in the short term. The equities he has insisted on protecting are, in my view, reasonable ones. And he has taken in his most recent letter an appropriate, even gutsy, stand on executive privilege with respect to the White House. He has, in short, described a reasonable process by which Congress and the public should shortly get access to Mueller’s findings. I am inclined to assume him serious about this until he fails to deliver on what he has promised. There will be plenty of time to criticize his failures if and when they materialize.”
Basically, Wittes is the anti Rachel Maddow-he discounts what the Trump Deplorables do and focuses on what they say. Forget what Barr has done just believe his pretty words-why? Well Wittes and Barr, you see, belong to the same elite lawyers club-so Wittes presumes no one from his own class of the Best Men would ever do something gauche.
And Wittes totally misreads so-called ‘gutsy move’ regarding executive privilege.
Let’s unpack this a bit.
Barr has said since his confirmation hearings that he is committed to maximum public access to Mueller’s findings consistent with the law.
He said it but he hasn’t done it. Even at the confirmation he contradicted this promise by failing to assure the Senate he’d release the entire report-as Archibald Cox had done at his own Senate confirmation in 1973.
Since Mueller delivered his report, he has stood by this and said he means to expeditiously review a 400-page document and release as much as he can. His time frame has clarified over the past week, from soon to “weeks not months” to “mid-April, if not sooner.” Congressional Democrats are demanding the report by Tuesday. This difference is not material. If the Justice Department releases Mueller’s report in a capacious and reasonable fashion in mid-April, that is a perfectly fine outcome.
This is rather obtuse of Wittes-the real point of contention is less the timing than what will actually be in the report-though the deadline will make it harder for Barr to blow through his own deadline in mid April.
Barr has also laid out what material he believes he must redact from the document. On some of these matters, he is simply correct. For example, Barr says he means to remove grand-jury material; it is actually unlawful, criminal even, to disclose grand-jury material without the authorization of the court. In the short term, there is no way to give this material to Congress, let alone make it public; it would require substantial litigation to do so.
I simply don’t know what you can say about this except that Wittes is being disingenuous-there’s no question he knows better.
The precedent clearly is if Barr-or Congress-asks the judge there’s a good chance they will receive it. Again, why is Wittes pretending not to know this-the guy who educated us on the Watergate Road Map?
Moreover, Barr says he means to redact “material the intelligence community identifies as potentially compromising sensitive sources and methods.” Note that he is not saying he will redact all classified material. But it is quite irresponsible to demand that the attorney general dump in the public domain sensitive intelligence matters in a fashion that could burn collection capabilities or human sources. There is no way the attorney general is going to release a 400-page document summarizing a counterintelligence investigation without a careful review for national-security information. And going through a lengthy document with a lot of information from different sources in a review for both national-security and grand-jury material takes time—legitimately. Getting it done in a few short weeks would require having a team working on it around the clock.
This is if anything even more disingenuous-Wittes is totally attacking a straw man here as no one is saying you don’t redact sources and methods. Now where there is a point of contention is who gets to make the redactions? Nadler’s argument is that Barr should show Congress what he’s redacting. There’s no argument about redacting sources and methods just who gets to make that determination-as Nadler says Congress is more than capable of doing this.
Barr also says he will redact “material that could affect other ongoing matters, including those that the Special Counsel has referred to other Department offices.” This strikes me as reasonable as well. Mueller has kicked a variety of matters back to the Justice Department. Do we really want Barr to screw up those investigations by prematurely releasing the department’s analysis of them? We didn’t want Mueller to do this. I don’t want Barr to, either. This category of redaction is potentially subject to abuse, but I am not going to assume preemptively that it will be abused.
Again totally attacking a strawman here.
Finally, Barr says he will redact “information that would unduly infringe on the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties.” Depending on how one reads the words unduly and peripheral, this could either be a reasonable effort to protect drive-by reputational harm to people quite removed from the core public interest in this matter or it could be a loophole big enough to drive a truck through that could protect, say, the president’s kids. So again, could this be a mechanism to black out large segments of the report? Yes. But I see no reason to assume that this is what Barr wants to do, given his more general public commitments to maximum transparency in this matter.
Again-ignore his past actions and focus only his what he says. Makes sense to me.
And this notion protecting reputations of ‘peripheral third parties’ is brand new. It’s not in the regs nor is there any precedent for it. That Wittes fails to acknowledge that is also entirely disingenuous. He’s more interested in protecting his fellow elite law club members than the public interest.
Having said all this it remains to be seen if the Democrats themselves are really up to this. They seem to be tying their own hands again and again.
I covered in Chapter A the astonishing and risible fact that Neal is now saying we might not even see Trump’s tax returns before the 2020 election-if that’s the case it might be the first time this life long Democrat sits out a national election.
As for the Mueller Report the Dems assure us they will get us the full report. But then we hear they won’t be too nasty about it-like the GOP would be.
House Democrats say they’ll do anything it takes to force the public release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report — except for the single-most hardball tactic deployed by Republicans only one year ago.
Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee last year mounted an unprecedented campaign to force the public release of classified intelligence. Democrats called the effort reckless and misleading, and the FBI said it presented “grave concerns” for national security. But Trump blessed the maneuver and ultimately declassified the material Republicans revealed in the so-called “Nunes Memo.”
They’ll ‘do anything’-except what is guaranteed to actually work.
But the Democrats who now lead the House Intelligence Committee say they won’t pursue a similar strategy, even in service of making Mueller’s explosive findings public.
They’d rather let Trump and Barr hide the full report for the next 50 years than ‘sink to the GOP’s level.’ LBJ did the same thing as did Obama. At some point even I will run out of reasons why we all got to get on Team Democrat.
FN: As documented in Chapter A, Obama did better than LBJ-who simply buried what he knew of Nixon’s treachery picked up in signit.
Obama did something but not until after the election-and it’s not true he did nothing before it but he just didn’t go far enough. He wasn’t willing to be ruthless and put out a statement on what Russia was doing without GOP buy-in. So some progress made but the next 19 months until the 2020 election are not a dress rehearsal. If the House Democrats fail this time it’s leaving a very public, ugly mark.
Exactly but what needs to be done is not just prospective but retrospective. To curb the imperial Presidency start with the most imperial fake President of them all.
So the Democrats are going to do whatever it takes-accept do what they know will get the information out there. Jim HImes’ ‘strategy’ is the Ben Wittes strategy-simply hope and trust Barr will do the right thing because he says he will though his actions clearly show the opposite.
Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), another House Intelligence Democrat, said he doesn’t think taking such a draconian step is necessary because he’s confident the Justice Department is working in good faith to release Mueller’s report.
“I think we’re getting there but one step at a time,” he said.
Will we go through these steps before the 2020 election?
On the other hand, the Freshman Dems give you some hope.
Not all Intelligence Committee Democrats were quick to say Democrats should refuse to consider their own version of the Nunes Memo. One of the committee’s newest members, Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), said Democrats have to look at any and all precedents that Republicans set when deciding how to proceed.
“I think it’s just a shame that we have to look at other alternatives because the attorney general has chosen really not to cooperate,” said Demings. “What I do believe is that when precedent has been established — whether it’s previous special counsel investigations or the Nunes Memo — precedent has already been established.”
Asked if that meant she considered the Nunes Memo among the many options available to Democrats, Demings said, “Everything has to be.”
Congresswoman Demings is already smarter than a career politician like Jim Himes.
And here’s the latest newsflash:
This just confirms something I suspect the GOP suspects-the Dems aren’t up to this kind of a nasty fight.
Nadler mismanaged the Whittaker subpoena too:
It’s amazing but when Steve Mnuchin-the guy the Dems have to ask to release Trump’s tax returns testified before Ways and Means, Mnuchin asked Chairman Richard Neal if he was asking for Trump’s tax returns and Neal was like ‘Of course not I love you Steve and we got to work together on the AMT.’
In another chapter I looked at the analysis of Michelle Goldberg that the parties are gendered-the Democrats, both male and female are held to more stringent rules and standards than their nasty GOP brothers. There’s a lot of truth in it. Personally I’ve always seen the Republican party as the party for abusive Fathers.
The Democrats are the Mommy party-who, alas, seems to think that love conquers all. Not if you’ve watched our politics since Ike it doesn’t. In that chapter I argued that the MSM’s divergent treatment of the Dems and GOP-the latest example is the hyperfocus on Biden’s touching while silent about Trump.
But after reporting on Alva Johnson’s story for one day the MSM mysteriously and uniformly dropped it.
Basically the reality of our partisan politics is: generally speaking boys misbehave much more often than girls but when girls do misbehave they are punished more harshly; you can substitute boys for GOPers and girls for the Dems and have this statement be just as accurate. One thing you hear a lot from women’s advocates is that women are queasy-to use Comey’s word-about utilizing power.
In this vein Ryan Cooper had a great and important piece yesterday on the Dems failure to secure Trump’s tax returns-I know Richard Neal is ‘working on it’ and maybe we’ll see it after the 2020 election. That’s helpful.
Cooper points out that many of the Dems are just very timid about using their own power-that we the people gave them.
“Democrats like Neal appear to believe that the way to be “responsible” is to be timid about wielding power. But when faced with corruption like Trump’s, the actually responsible thing to do is to fight hard. Constitutional principles don’t defend themselves. It’s time for Neal and company to step up and assert themselves.”
This is a great saying: Constitutional principles don’t defend themselves and it sums up not just the fight for the tax returns but the fight for the Mueller Report and against Trump’s assault on democracy itself. This is why simply winning in 2020 isn’t enough-it’s important but it’s not enough.
If even the Democratic opposition fails to hold Trump accountable and uphold the Rule of Law then we can conclusively say the system has failed.
UPDATE: