I do not often agree with Dreher. We (apparently) live in the same city but on opposite poles of the US political spectrum (to say nothing of various Christian theological spectra).
I disagreed with him this morning, when his piece in The American Conservative aligned with Erick Erickson's in The Resurgent: "I Support the President." Supporting Trump isn't easy, Erickson writes, but he's better than the alternative, and besides Democrats and a crooked media have landed us in this bad place. Basically: both sides, but their side is worse. Dreher has been less reticent than Erickson to declare Trump's transcript worthy of impeachment inquiry.
More interesting was Dreher's reference to Daniel McCarthy's essay in The Spectator. There McCarthy makes an anti-impeachment argument from the right that--while I don't agree with it--I can at least see some sense to. Impeachment in 2019 or 2020, he argues, won't work for anyone. The necessary transpartisan consensus needed to keep things going through and past a Presidential impeachment just isn't there like it was for Nixon or Clinton. Impeachment, he argues, is an elite maneuver, not a democratic one. The consequences of impeachment now--a move that almost no one expects will succeed in removing Trump--are dire:
The old saying is that if you strike at a king, be sure to kill him. In this case, the regime is striking not a king but at the very idea that an elected official can challenge the establishment. This risks revealing just how weak the country’s ruling class really is: if 40 percent of the country remains with Trump through the ordeal of impeachment, that will show that 40 percent is anti-regime — revolutions are made with less. And that 40 percent would be a floor, not a ceiling; a starting point for a future anti-regime movement.Dreher glosses this with the metaphor of a stress test. Impeachment would be a stress test for a system that can't take it. Its results will convince no one, because no one is authentically investing in its premise or process. Nothing could dissuade pro-impeachment Democrats that Trump is guilty; nothing could persuade elected Republican officials to support Trump's impeachment.
McCarthy argues--and Dreher, at least this morning, seems to agree--that the best thing to do would be to declare the 2020 election a referendum on Trump, an impeachment by the people. To clarify, then: Dreher is (cautiously, reluctantly) convinced that Trump has committed impeachable offenses. But, he argues, impeachment would be the wrong course to take because it'd harm the country.
That line of thinking, however, neatly steps over the question of how Trump himself, Trump in power, is right now a harsh stress test for the country. And he's only warming up, apparently. I was working up a whole spate of rebuttals to deploy against McCarthy's case (which, for the record, is light years more engage-able than the Hunter Biden/Crowdstrike conspiracy theorizing that seems to be fueling Trump's actions).
And then, later, Trump openly, live, cameras on him, suggested that China investigate the Bidens. This is, as Dreher notes in his piece this afternoon, explicitly illegal, philosophically immoral, and politically irrational. He is, as Dreher notes, "daring the Democrats to impeach him." No fan of the Bidens, Dreher says there needs to at least be an impeachment inquiry. He does not endorse impeachment conviction. "But [Trump] has to be reined in. This kind of conduct is disgusting. . . . What does this guy have to do to earn even a rebuke from Republican senators? If he shot Hunter Biden in prime time on Fifth Avenue, would that do it? At this point, I don’t think it would."
Can I say that it's a relief to hear such exasperation from someone who is in most ways, on most days, my political enemy?
Can I say that it's depressing to hear from him the same yawning hopelessness about the outcome of this affair that I feel?
JF
No comments:
Post a Comment