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So far things are going according to plan-we needed a Dem Congress for the check on Trump:; check. Now we begin the process of #MakingAmericaLegitimateAgain

My own prediction is that the next two years will be very tough but that ultimately we will win the battle against Trumpism and there will be a Democratic government in 2021. We’ll talk again about this in two years.

My reasoning is straightforward: Trump’s popularity is at about 43% today. This was enough for the Dems to post a bigger win than the GOP in 2010 or 1994-on a percentage basis. If the Presidential election had been on November 6, it’s very possible Trump would have been defeated considering that the Democrats had big wins in three 2016 Trump states: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

The main reason Trump’s popularity is 43% rather than 23% is because the GOP has so assiduously protected him-if the Russia hearings had been public, his numbers would be much lower. In the next two years all the public hearings will rectify that and expect Trump to be much closer to 23% than 43% come election night, November 2020.

UPDATE: Eight months in there’s much less reason to be sanguine about this. While the Dems are now apparently-maybe, sorta kinda-doing an impeachment inquiry-on balance the party was not nearly aggressive enough in the first eight months in terms of oversight, MSM’s initial reaction to the Dem’s historical wave-but they have to be very careful not to over investigate..-now looks like a bad joke.

Chapter A for more.

But presuming everything goes according to plan what do the Dems do then? How do they recover all the lost norms that not just Trump but also McConnell-and the GOP House have pooped on for many years?

The answer for Krugman’s Very Serious People in the MSM-the Chuck Todds of the world-the Democrats should simply go back to governing with all the profaned norms. This reminds you of a misconception-that the Democrats alone without the help of the GOP can maintain certain political norms. Wrong-if only one party upholds norms the norms are still profaned but as Rob Goodman argues, the party still upholding the norms are: yup, suckers. 

That the MSM expects the Dems to continue to uphold norms that the GOP doesn’t observe is in line with the theory in (Chapter A) in American politics the ‘Democratic party is a girl’-just like girls behave better than boys but are punished more harshly when they do misbehave, so it is with the Dems-they behave much better but any hint of misbehavior is punished quite severely.

Rob Goodman:

“Hey Democrats, Fighting Fair Is for Suckers.”

Court-packing! Puerto Rican statehood! Votes for felons! Why—and how—the next Democratic majority should play dirty.

Interesting list-I made the case for court packing in (Chapter B) just after the GOP rammed Kavanaugh through and Florida-despite being run by Republicans the last 20 years-and apparently choosing GOP rule again with Ron DeSantis-voted with about 65% support for allowing felons-who have served their time, to vote.

Of course, I also support-as documented in (Chapter C) impeaching Kavanaugh-if that’s where the facts lead. Basically if the process by which he was nominated was rigged he shouldn’t get to keep this ill gotten privilege.

“If Democrats are wise, they will embrace President Donald Trump’s demonstration that there no longer are any unwritten rules in American politics. (I’ve come to think that the key text for understanding our era is the 1997 movie Air Bud: “There’s no rule that says a dog can’t play basketball.”) Democrats should be preparing to exercise power, beginning as early as 2020, with that lesson in mind.”

“As we all know, Trump and the Republican Party that enables him eat norms for breakfast. A norm is a tacit and mutual agreement that certain exercises of power, while lawful, also are unthinkable. As a result, a willingness to think the unthinkable is itself a source of power. With that willingness, you can deny a president a hearing on a Supreme Court nominee. You can threaten to jail your political opponents and call an election rigged if you don’t win. You can demand investigations of your enemies, you can fire the FBI director investigating you, and you can quite possibly pardon yourself for federal crimes.”

Trump and Republicans are not interested in self-restraint. We ought to be past surprise, for example, that the “let the people decide” standard invented by Mitch McConnell to block Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination no longer applies now that Trump can choose a successor for Anthony Kennedy. Those who care about the future of liberal democracy in this country ought to be beyond outrage and ready for something altogether colder and more disciplined.

Democrats should plan to treat political norms, when and if they’re in charge of a unified government, the way Trump and the Republicans do. They should be readying a program of systematic norm-breaking for partisan advantage—but only if they are willing and able to follow it through to its conclusion.

Exactly-even if Chuck Todd tsk tsks.

It tends to be forgotten just how many norms the GOP has transgressed-not only Trump, he was just the logical conclusion of years of GOP sociopathic norm breaking. Todd-and many like him, he’s just a helpful prototype to hold out-often bemoans the lack of bipartisanship and that ‘the parties won’t get out of their partisan corners and work together.’

But in framing it this way, he necessarily misdiagnoses the problem. It’s not that both Democrats and Republicans just got up one day and perversely decided not to work with each other. At every step of the way, it was the GOP who refused to work with Democrats, not the other way around.

Interestingly, while Todd’s colleague, Steve Kornacki, is very much a member of the MSM in good standing he correctly understands that the assault on norms has been completely asymmetric-it was the GOP leading the transgressions at every turn-he wrote an excellent book about it. Every time the GOP transgresses a norm the Dem leadership responds by again trying to tack to the Center imagining that they will somehow be rewarded by the contrast-this never happens.

Mitch McConnell just published an op-ed that does more than simply fail to pass the laugh test-it basically shatters it. I mean for Mitch McConnell to claim Republicans want to work with Democrats but these wascally Dems want to obstruct things is enough to kill irony. 

“Mitch McConnell wrote an op-ed calling for bipartisanship, and people are not having it.”

Well thank God for that because no one has done more to destroy the possibility of bipartisanship than Mitch McConnell.

The date was Oct. 23, 2010 — nearly two years into President Barack Obama’s first term and two weeks before the first midterm elections of his presidency. Speaking to the National Journal, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made a now-infamous statement: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Right-rather than, you know, deal with the worst recession since the Great Depression. Then in 2011 he called the debt ceiling ‘a hostage worth taking.’ Then there was Merrick Garland in 2016 and then as we saw in (Chapter D) McConnell’s refusal to even put out a bipartisan statement on Russian interference in October 2016-as did, to digress, James Comey.

In the most recent case of McConnell’s zero sum partisan treachery he ‘plowed through-his words-a credibly accused sexual predator, perjurer, and Trump hack chosen to protect the ‘President’ from the Mueller investigation to the Supreme Court.

So McConnell is literally the last person in America who can talk about ‘bipartisanship’ with a straight face.

I had thought that in the case of a Dem House maybe it’s possible McConnell and Pelosi could agree to do a deal on immigration-after all, McConnell’s Senate GOP had passed the Dream Act in 2014-only to see Boehner’s House leave it sitting on the shelf.

But after the election McConnell didn’t sound very interested and instead falsely blamed the Democrats for the failure to have a deal until now-when the fault clearly lays with the Boehner and then Paul Ryan GOP House.

Though, in a way, McConnell’s GOP Senate was the better functioning GOP Congressional House. If Chuck Todd and friends really want to get to the bottom of the death of bipartinsanship they ought to check the GOP House and the (in)famous Hastert Rule.

This self imposed ‘rule’ by House GOP Speakers-Hastert, Boehner, and Paul Ryan-means that bipartisanship is essentially ruled out of hand. Only legislation with the majority support of them majority party can even be brought to the floor. In, other words, the GOP House has been unwilling to pass anything with the help of Democrats-thereby making ‘bipartisanship’ impossible in principle.

For instance, there were always enough House votes to pass the Dream Act but Boehner and then Ryan steadfastly refused to bring it to the floor for a vote. At any time in the last 5 years the Dream Act would have passed with a minority of GOP votes and all the Democrats. But the GOP ruled such a major bipartisan achievement out of hand.

UPDATE: As McConnell now refuses to do in the Senate. This is the kind of point Todd and Friends never make-that we could have immigration reform today if McConnell simply put it to a vote-it passed in 2013 and would pass today. They’ll talk about the need for reform but in a handwringy way that implies both sides are equally to blame.

End of UPDATE.

This has been standard GOP operating procedure since Hastert with the exception of basic things like passing a budget or raising the debt ceiling where thanks to the incompetence and ignorance about basic governing  of Ryan’s own members he needed Nancy Pelosi and friends to bail him out.

Ok, so back to Rob Goodman-he argues against the idea that after Trump is defeated-I’m presuming-we can go back to the old profaned norms.

“That’s bound to sound inflammatory, especially because so much criticism of Trump has stressed the value of norms for keeping political conflict within manageable bounds. Even now, there’s a profoundly comforting appeal in the notion that we could one day soon cordon off the Trump years like a toxic Superfund site. The anti-Trump conservative David Frum recently endorsed that notion in an interview with Democracy. Democrats might “become an Eisenhower party of the broad center,” Frum said, as he called for the party to act as “a relatively conservative, unifying force in American life.” We could call it the Return to Normalcy program: Treat the Trump years as an ugly aberration and commit to rebuilding the consensus under which mutual self-restraint once again looks honorable rather than traitorous to partisans on either side.

For the opposite course, we could look to a left that is already building the case for court-packing, envisioning a Democratic president and Congress exercising their legal power to add two or more new justices to the Supreme Court. Or we could watch an activist base that is pushing the Democratic Caucus in Congress, however haltingly, toward procedural confrontations over immigration and court nominations. But the most detailed case against the Return to Normalcy—let’s call it the Normal Is Over side of the debate—is advanced by the political scientist David Faris in his new book, It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics.

“Faris’ response to the Normalcy program is that there is no value in conserving a burning house. The endangered state of American liberal democracy, he argues, calls for emergency steps from Democrats and the left. They should take advantage of legal and constitutional silences to “transform American politics in a lasting progressive direction,” Faris writes. “Doing so will require party leaders to pursue policy changes that will be ridiculed by their opponents as outrageous affronts to democratic decency and received by their own voters with puzzlement or even shock. They need to do it anyway.”

The list of those changes is dizzying. Grant statehood to D.C. and Puerto Rico, and break California in seven, with the goal of adding 16 new Democrats to the Senate. Expand the Supreme Court and the federal courts, packing them with liberal judges. Move to multi-member House districts to roll back the effects of partisan gerrymandering. Pass a new Voting Rights Act, including nationwide automatic voter registration, felon enfranchisement and an end to voter ID laws. Grant citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants, creating a host of new Democratic-leaning voters: “Republicans have always feared that immigration would change the character of American society. Democrats should reward them with their very worst nightmare.”

What Goodman-and Faris-really have in mind is nothing less than a political realignment. There has been a good amount of commentary-even a widely read book-that compares are current tense, Trumpian age to the period in American history to the 1850s-just prior to the Civil War…

Certainly it’s fair to believe/hope we won’t have actual war much less on that scale again. But the point is well taken as the  character of the divisions in today’s America does recall the Civil War period in significant respects.

Both the tenor of the divisions but also the content. In many ways this is just the latest fight between the Dixie South and liberals and progressives in other parts of the country. The reason Goodman argues Democrats-if they take up the gauntlet of norm breaking-need to take it all the way to its logical conclusion or not try it at all is because only taking it all the way can they achieve what he believes needs to be achieved-an honest to goodness political realignment.

One criticism of the idea of the Dems getting out of the business of somehow trying to singlehandedly protect norms is that with both sides in an arms race to break norms you end up in an ever greater ‘spiral of conflict.’

It’s easy to caricature Democratic willingness to match these tactics as simply a case of playground logic: “Turnabout is fair play.” The law professor Orin Kerr expressed that sentiment last month. “Few things are more corrosive in politics,” he wrote, “than the conviction that you have been wronged so much that you’re justified in breaking all the rules to get even.” But norms are only norms when they are mutual; fairness is only fair when it’s shared. Democrats aren’t justified in breaking norms because they’ve been “wronged.” They are justified because the current system has ceased to function.

“So if there is a problem with the Democrats initiating a counter-program of partisan norm-breaking, it doesn’t lie in an abstract idea of fair play. It lies in the logic of escalation. Republicans, too, can create senators out of thin air, can pack courts, can strip citizenship from immigrants Democrats have enfranchised.”

True unless you conceive history as linear ‘if bent’ as Obama puts it. We saw after 70 votes to repeal Obamacare the GOP wasn’t able to do it for real once it took over and was even forced to lie in 2018 and pretend it supported the ACA’s protection of preexisting conditions. Talk about full circle-in 2010, most Democratic candidates pretended to never have heard of ACA.

Many of the ideas of Farris and Goodman are just basic progressive ideas-the most controversial is court packing

FN: Ok, probably breaking CA into 7 is the most controversial-though totally logical-CA voters are absurdly underrepresented as they get the same number of Senators as Wyoming and Idaho.

But of course, the GOP has been ruthlessly shaping the courts for years: the Dems until now just haven’t appreciated its central importance-it’s no accident that the liberals have not had a majority on the Supreme Court since Nixon’s brutal blackmail forced Abe Fortas to step down.

When you look at the dirty pool played by McConnell and friends with Merrick Garland and then with the ram through of Kavanaugh you can certainly argue court packing is just self defense at this point. But Goodman argues the issue of escalation can only be solved if Democrats successfully achieve a realignment-like the Radical Republicans were able to do after the Civil War.

“This is the logic of escalation, the fearful calculation by which cycles of conflict become permanent. Do it to them before they do it to us. The especially frightening thing about these cycles is they can spiral upward even when all involved are behaving rationally. It is correct that they are planning to do it to us; it is also correct that our having preemptively done it to them becomes their reason to do us one worse at the next opportunity. Each reprisal is self-defense, which justifies the next reprisal.”

Granted, there’s at least a plausible case to be made that a “spiral of conflict” is a bad model to describe the state we’re in, because Republicans do not look to Democrats for permission or precedent before breaking norms. There was no precedent for the theft of the Supreme Court seat now occupied by Gorsuch; there was no provocation for purging voter rolls or suppressing turnout. Given this asymmetry, isn’t the idea that Democrats are responsible for stopping an escalating spiral the worst kind of both-sides-ism?”

I don’t think so. If the Normal Is Over caucus can imagine a unified, genuinely radical Democratic government in the next four or eight years, they’re also responsible for imagining an enraged opposition, strong in the conviction that the Democratic government is illegitimate. We saw exactly that the last time there was a Democratic government. And we can fully expect next time to be worse, because the culture of self-restraint is weakened with each iteration of the cycle.

FN: Not sure I agree with Goodman here-the fact that the GOP saw legitimate Presidents like Clinton and Obama as illegitimate just underscores the fact that they are going to assault the norms no matter what the Dems do. If you know a bully is going to bully you no matter what then the rational move is to strike back at him anyway you can.

But I agree with him the long term goal should be long lasting political realignment-which only happens via violating and transgressing the previously held norms.

“This means that a strategy of Democratic norm-breaking is justifiable only if it can be reasonably expected to result in a lasting political realignment—to break the cycle rather than escalate it. It must so thoroughly disempower the other side that it forestalls serious reprisals. Put simply, the strategy that Faris and others on the left are proposing had better work—because the tit-for-tat conflict that would result from a halfhearted or incomplete attempt would be even worse than the status quo.”

Faris himself grasps this point. The goal, he writes, “is to control the levels of power long enough to permanently alter the political trajectory of the country.” But stating the goal is not enough. The question Democrats should be asking is not, “Is American democracy in an emergency?” The right question is, “Do the risks of staying put in this emergency exceed the risks of trying to end it, and failing?”

Along with that assessment of risk must come some humility about past Democratic attempts to tame the far right, such as President Obama’s incorrect prediction that his reelection would “break this fever,” or the assurances that an “emerging Democratic majority” would force Republicans to come to terms with a demographically changing America. If Democrats are resolved to fight dirty, they should be studying cases of successful and failed realignments, fleshing out the ideological framework to explain themselves, and building the internal consensus it will take to follow through. They should be assessing their leaders with the goal of realignment in mind, rejecting those whose mental models still have a place for concepts like “meaningful bipartisanship.”

FN: 13 months after I first wrote this chapter in July, 2018 the shibboleth of “meaningful bipartisanship” would seem to be believed in by both Biden and most of the Dem leadership-both House and Senate.

Basically the older Dem leadership is mostly peopled by the Normalcy Caucus.

“Realignments are nothing short of revolutionary events. Democrats should begin a norm-breaking program only if they are willing to complete it. And they can complete it only if they are willing to tune out the very civil, very serious, and very wrong voices that will demand half-measures at every step.”

Actually Obama’s big picture goal was to achieve a realignment in modern politics-he hoped to be the Democratic Reagan, and that his Presidency would be transformational. It’s arguable that it did begin such a transformation as Jonathan Chait has argued.

Why President Obama's legacy was broader and deeper than you think, and why it will endure https://t.co/HJdOAmXIEx

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) December 24, 2016

If the Dems are successful in bringing down Trump and achieving real power in 2021-by running all of Washington again, Chait may well prove true. It’s certainly notable as mentioned above that the GOP utterly failed to end Obamacare-though they did gut the mandate. Still, they argued to voters they’d more or less done the opposite shows that Obamacare has ‘a good conscience’ as Nietzsche would put it.

FN: OTOH even if Trump is a one term ‘President’ he has moved the Courts to the Far Right for the next 30 years-it’s going to be very difficult to roll that back-hence the basis for seriously considering court packing.

The best way to build that willingness is by referring the specifics of the Normal Is Over program back to a couple of broad, animating questions. First, when evaluating a part of the program, Democrats should ask, “Does it weaken a structural barrier to democracy?” Second, “Does it make it easier to enact policy that expands the governing coalition?” Obamacare, for instance, not only expanded access to health insurance, but also encouraged more Americans to become politically active to protect that access. Faris’ proposals generally pass these tests.

“But even if Democrats quibble with the details, they should work to match his program’s coherence, of interlocking actions that are driven by realignment rather than resentment. If Democrats can’t fully commit to that course, then they should pursue something like the Normalcy program as a distant second best. The worst course of action would be an unfocused, impulsive, spasmodic program of norm-breaking, one that begins without a sense of where it is supposed to end. In that case, the logic of escalation will supply an ending.

FN: It’s hard to make the case that permanent GOP minority Rule is the 2nd best option to anything.

Of course, there are no permanent endings in politics. But chapters can end. And this one will end—or rather, the next one will begin—with the consolidation of a new set of norms, a new set of rules to channel and restrain political conflict. Just as in the old saying about treason, there’s no such thing as successfully fighting dirty—because successfully fighting dirty leaves behind a new set of acceptable political behaviors in its wake.

In the fight against slavery many old norms had to be transgressed just as during the long road to the New Deal-the Progressives had fought for 50 years to get America to the point of ratifying the New Deal.

In a realignment old norms are transgressed while new ones are created.

The idea of political realignment was also the central idea of Kevin Phillips groundbreaking 1968 book The Emerging Republican Majority and he identified the same basic realignments-1860 with defeat of the South and the Dixie Democrats, the failed realignment of Jennings in 1896 which ushered in more conservative Republican rule, the rise of the New Deal Democrats in the 1930s. When he wrote this memorable book, he was predicting a new GOP majority after 36 years of Dem dominance.

Interestingly by 1980 he was already having misgivings and by 1988 was sounding very much like a liberal in his concern for concentrated wealth and privilege.

In many ways the GOP majority did emerge though it was less about party than ideology-conservative ideology has dominated in recent years, especially beginning with Reagan in 1980. After Reagan, even when Democrats won they talked the language of conservatism-prioritizing balanced budgets over New Deals.

In the last 50 years the GOP has held the WH 30 years-ie 60% of the time; while the Dems would have a lock on Congress for many years after, since 1994, the GOP had controlled Congress 20 out of 24 years-until the recent Blue Wave and the election of the #AccountabilityCongress-in that same period the GOP has run the Senate 16 out of 24 years. But then factor in that there hasn’t been a liberal court in 50 years…

Clearly a realignment is an idea whose time has come.

“After 1828, Jacksonian Democrats normalized the “spoils system” of patronage appointments. After 1896, William McKinley and Mark Hanna normalized corporate contributions to political campaigns. After 1980, Reagan Republicans normalized supply-side economics, bringing the doctrine from the fringes to the mainstream. Real political success can change, and has changed, our notions of the thinkable and the unthinkable. Democrats should aim for nothing less.”

Indeed.

UPDATE:

Looking back one reason why the the GOP  co-conspirators-cheaters, traitors-historically considered, are so successful is that while Pelosi and Friends always worry about ‘tacking to the Center’ the GOP gets that the ‘Center’ is fluid and negotiable. The key to dominating in politics is not to find the Center but to define the Center.

Every day Mitch McConnell defines and redefines it as the Dems struggle to find it-McConnell is willing to break any norm as ultimately his intention is to define the norm. Just this morning Harry Reid has come out for ending the filibuster. 

Awesome but isn’t this always the way? Now that he’s gone he’s advocating something he never would have considered while he ran the Senate. And his successor, Chuck Schumer-has never been one to rankle feathers like Reid does.

All these painstaking policy debates between the Dem candidates are irrelevant if they don’t:

1.Win the Senate.

2. End the Filibuster

But can you imagine Schumer doing that? It’s too aggressive and too mean-hope I’m wrong but I can’t see him doing it anymore than Pelosi is up to taking the fight to Trump the way it needs to be.

And it’s hard to have too much faith in the Dems being willing to go all the way in a fight for realignment as Farris urges them to seeing how tentative the Dems have been in providing oversight and accountability to Trump-Richard Neal won’t take NY’s kind offer of Trump’s state tax returns but he also hasn’t even gone to court to get the federal returns yet; he says taking the NY returns could harm their ability to get the federal but at the pace he’s going how likely are they to see them before the election? If it’s not too likely though should take the NY returns-better than nothing.

It’s hard to imagine a Democratic party who fails to impeach the most impeachable ‘President’ in history and who fails to even publicly release his tax returns before the 2020 election ending the filibuster and advocating court packing after it.

If there’s any reason for hope whatever it’s that many of the freshman Dems-certainly the female woman of color- AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Ihan Omar-seem to get it.