Unimpeachable?

There's no use going over the legal aspects of whether the President illegally solicited assistance in his reelection from a foreign government in the form of incriminating information on his likely opponent. Donald Trump will never be convicted or removed from office by the U.S. Senate as currently constituted. If the Senate would not convict President Clinton when the opposition controlled the upper house, conviction is infinitely less likely when the President's own party controls it. It's hard to envision a vote to convict as anything other than political suicide for any GOP senator, as the Trump movement, under whatever name, will most likely survive the Trump presidency, whenever it ends. Convinced of pervasive corruption among career politicians and as incapable of objectivity as most Americans today, they are unlikely to be convinced by any revelations that may yet emerge that voting to remove Trump would not be treasonous, or at least treacherous. The Biden family's role in the Ukraine story can only exacerbate Trumpist suspicions. They'll focus on the purported original offense, Joe Biden's alleged interference in inquiries into his son's Ukrainian activities, as if it -- whatever it is -- entitled Trump to seek the truth by any means necessary. For them, Democratic corruption is always a more pressing issue than any irregularities on Trump's part. The presumption of Democratic corruption isn't merely Trumpian, after all, but fundamental to Republican thinking. From the GOP's beginnings, Republicans have argued that Democrats have systematically used politics for personal gain, both for themselves and for their constituents. Democratic corruption will always appear more serious to them than Republican excess -- and to be fair, the only fault in the Republican charge, historically speaking, is the hypocrisy of their own implicit claim to innocence.

If it's certain that Trump will survive impeachment, the real question is whether Democrats will suffer a backlash from voters in 2020. After Clinton's impeachment, in 1998, the Republicans didn't lose their majority in Congress, but did lose enough seats to compel Newt Gingrich, an impeachment cheerleader, to resign his Speakership. The current Democratic majority in the House is smaller than the majority the GOP enjoyed in 1998, and in 2020, of course, the Presidency is in play as well.  Many Democrats today, believing Trump illegitimate from the beginning, are determined to demand his removal regardless of consequences. They may not think anything else necessary, but they have some tough thinking to do right now about Joe Biden. The Biden allegations -- some call them a conspiracy theory -- are inextricably linked, like it or not, to Trump's Ukraine scandal. Contemporary zero-sum thinking inevitably will lead people to think that damaging Trump will benefit, and is meant to benefit, the Democratic front-runner. With a backlash against Biden a sure thing, it might be advisable, if not fair, for Democratic leaders to persuade him to withdraw from the presidential campaign. Getting him out would have to be carefully done, however, to discourage the belief that there is fire in Ukraine where there had only been smoke. Biden would need to explain that his withdraw is meant to keep the public's focus on Trump's offenses, but at the same time he would need to welcome more extensive inquiries into his son's activities and his own dealings with the Ukrainian government. Biden's withdrawal would create an additional problem, since no other candidate among the Democrats seems to unite as much of Barack Obama's coalition as his vice-president does. On the other hand, Biden's departure would create an opening for a younger moderate amid continued skepticism among some core constituencies about the leading radicals in the race. Whether the nation needs a moderate Democrat at the helm at this time is a separate question, but as things stand it seems like such a person is more likely to beat Trump next year than the perceived extremists are -- though they shouldn't be underrated, as each for different reasons may be a rhetorical trap for the loose-tongued President. Wherever Democratic deliberations lead, however, they should not delude themselves into thinking that they'll have Mike Pence to deal with a year from now -- unless, of course, Donald Trump should commit the political equivalent of filing for bankruptcy when things get too hot for him.

The Bolt(on) Cutter

I'd applaud the President's dismissal of National Security Advisor Bolton more enthusiastically if I weren't still questioning his hiring of the man in the first place. To be honest, I think I know what Trump was thinking. Having a notorious neocon hawk like Bolton on his team was no doubt meant to signal to hostile powers that neocon options like regime change were still on the table in the Trump administration. It should have been clear to Trump early, however, that Bolton was unlikely to see his preferred course of action merely as one option among many. The problem with Bolton was that he didn't represent simply one option for action but a worldview most likely radically different from Donald Trump's. While Trump seems to see competition among nations as inevitable, especially in the economic realm, he seems less inclined to see relations between the U.S. and any other country, with the possible exception of Iran, as inherently or existentially adversarial. The President most likely doesn't see regime change as the ideal goal in his dealings with any other nation. He's probably too convinced of his own ability to make deals with anyone to think it necessary to replace anyone. His acceptance of competition as the norm and his willingness to criticize allies close him off from the idealistic neocon vision of harmony (and free trade?) among democracies. Meanwhile, while he may have hoped that hiring Bolton might frighten hostile governments, Trump probably realizes by now that his counterparts around the world don't scare so easily. Bolton more likely inspires loathing rather than fear among foreign leaders and diplomats. If anyone in the White House inspires anything like fear abroad, it's most likely Trump himself on the Nixonian "madman" principle. And then the fear is not so much that he might change a country's government, but that he might destroy that country outright in a fit of pique. He probably inspires less fear by now than he thinks he does -- among foreign leaders, at least, -- but he's still more suited to the "bad cop" role in his own foreign policy than Bolton ever could have been.

Are all fanatics the same?

Inspired by Dostoevsky, David Brooks imagines in his latest column that extremists on the American "alt-right" and their equivalents on the far left are fundamentally, or at least temperamentally, the same. Both are -- or both see themselves as -- "sick," "spiteful" and "unattractive." Their "rage is intertwined with psychological fragility" and their "anger at real wrongs is corrupted [by narcissistic] existential panic." Those "who fill the air with hate" were alike "raised without coherent moral frameworks" and "in that coddling way that protects you from every risk except real life." Always uncertain of their place in the world or the social order, yet assured that "you can be anything you want to be," they yearn for order based on "blunt simplicities" and "Manichean binaries." Inevitably drawn to politics, they "make everything political." The column goes on and on in the first person, aping the narration of Dostoevsky's underground man. Brooks's own narrative is centrist and shallow. It's also a conservative temperament of an old type, distrustful of all other "isms" and inclined to see "fanaticism" as a type unto itself that defines fanatics of all kinds more than their individual beliefs. It's also distrustful of "the political" or the tendency to politicize things presumably outside the realm of elections or legislation. From a perspective self-consciously distant from that politicizing tendency -- even though declaring anything outside politics is arguably an ultimate political act -- political fanaticism tends to blur into a spectral singularity, especially when you're trapped in a bipolarchy in which both major parties seem increasingly controlled by fanatics. From a different perspective, neither partisan nor centrist, the two factions Brooks abhors don't look so alike. You needn't believe that one is better than the other to recognize differences that remain arguably more important than the traits shared by "fanatics." Without underestimating anger on the alt-right, it still seems to me that those people are less angry than their counterparts in antifa or elsewhere on the far left. That may be for the simple reason that alt-right types now feel secure in a group identity while leftists as individuals remain in relative existential crisis. Whether that's so or not, I still work under the assumption that the 21st century American right takes a more amusedly fatalistic attitude toward life (i.e. "everything's a joke") than the perpetually-outraged part of the left. Maybe I simply see more trollishness than pure rage on the right based on what I look at, but whatever a rightist's mood there most likely remains a definitive difference in expectations between right and left grounded in the proverbial assumption, on the right, that the world doesn't owe you a living, and the left's insistence that a civilized (or "just") world actually does.  The right-wing opinions I encounter seem less driven by fear of the Other then by contempt for certain personality types regardless of ethnic or cultural origin. I don't want to suggest that there's no fear on the right -- economic and social insecurity fuels extremism across the board -- but I do think that fear is stronger, for whatever reason, on the left. There probably are ways to test these hypotheses, but my main point here is to suggest that it remains more useful to probe the differences between right and left, or between the  "alt" versions of each, than to dismiss them as a single psychological type, as Brooks does. Such thinking could lead people to think that both extremes can be purged from American life more easily than is probably the case.

The end of the democratic mission?

David Brooks lamented in a column last week that Americans seemed uninterested in the Hong Kong protest movement. Neither major political party "any longer sees America as a vanguard nation whose mission is to advance universal democracy and human dignity," he writes, though he hopes that the Hong Kong protesters will "rekindle the sense of democratic mission that used to burn so forcefully in American hearts." Brooks has an explanation for the apparent indifference of the American left; their unforgiving emphasis on "slavery and oppression" keeps them from seeing the U.S. as "a beacon or an example." He offers not even that brief an explanation for why "the American right no longer believes in spreading democracy to foreigners." If pressed, his explanation most likely would have something to do with Donald Trump, but it's more likely that whatever explains the attitude of the right, if Brooks perceives it correctly, also explains Trump. The right's objections to pro-democracy interventionism are more likely cynical than ideological. American adventurism in the Middle East since the turn of the century probably has disabused many of Trump's constituents of the idea that the mere existence of dictators is an existential threat to the American homeland. The "Arab Spring" in particular put into question whether greater democratization in some places was beneficial to the U.S. Taking a wider view, to the extent that the democratization narrative was tied to narratives of globalization and economic liberalization, it shouldn't surprise us to see Americans grow different to foreign struggles for democracy. 21st century Trumpian nationalism is more concerned with economic than ideological threats to the nation. These nationalists see Hong Kong's Chinese overlords as antagonists, but they don't necessarily believe that unfair Chinese trade practices follow necessarily from China's form of government. Dictators don't threaten us in our pocketbooks, where many Americans feel threatened today. The Chinese threat would seem little different to many Americans, probably, were China a de facto democracy like Japan. If anything, if Americans remember the neoliberal/neoconservative argument that economic liberalization would lead to greater democracy and a stronger economy for former tyrannies, they might well welcome any relapse into tyrannical practices by a major economic competitor like China. Whether Trumpets or others are right to see China primarily if not exclusively as an economic threat is a debate for another time, but while they see China that way what happens in Hong Kong won't make much difference to them -- unless they see it as an opportunity to hurt China's economy with sanctions. If that happens Brooks may see things that look like a rekindling of the old democratic mission, but he shouldn't be fooled by them -- though he probably will be.