As Ezra Klein
laid out, there is enough on the record now to make it at the very least highly probable that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, meant to affect the outcome of the election.
... What happens if nothing happens?
Mainstream scholars do not think that Trump will be able to get away with simply ignoring Mueller’s findings or pardoning everyone involved. As Andy Wright, a law professor at Savannah Law School, put it, “with each abnormal, unbecoming, or dishonorable act, President Trump makes it harder for his appointees to defend him, harder for traditional Republicans to maintain their uneasy power alliance with him, and easier for Democrats to take the moral high ground and secure political advantage."
But if there’s one thing non-experts like me have learned over the last few decades of watching US politics, it’s that experts are frequently caught flat-footed by the growing intensity of partisanship and the destruction of norms it has wrought.
They are operating based on certain assumptions that it simply doesn’t occur to them that a politician can ignore. But politicians can. Mitch McConnell can simply refuse to hold a vote on a Supreme Court nominee. There’s no explicit rule or law that says he can’t, so he can, and he did.
That one shocked and flabbergasted experts too, but just like all the other perverse steps down this road to illiberal lawlessness, they eventually took it on board and normalized it.
Now they’re sure Donald Trump can’t simply brazen his way out of an indictment. What if they’re wrong about that?
Say he pardons everyone. People will argue on cable TV about whether he should have. One side will say up, the other will say down. Trump may have done this, but what about when Obama did that? What about Hillary’s emails? Whatabout this, whatabout that, whatabout whatabout whatabout?
There is no longer any settling such arguments. The only way to settle any argument is for both sides to be committed, at least to some degree, to shared standards of evidence and accuracy, and to place a measure of shared trust in institutions meant to vouchsafe evidence and accuracy. Without that basic agreement, without common arbiters, there can be no end to dispute.
If one side rejects the epistemic authority of society’s core institutions and practices, there’s just nothing left to be done. Truth cannot speak for itself, like the voice of God from above. It can only speak through human institutions and practices.
The subject of climate change offers a crystalline example here. If climate science does its thing, checks and rechecks its work, and then the Republican Party simply refuses to accept it ... what then?
That’s what US elites are truly afraid to confront: What if facts and persuasion just don’t matter anymore?
As long as conservatives can do something — steal an election, gerrymander crazy districts to maximize GOP advantage, use the filibuster as a routine tool of opposition, launch congressional investigations as political attacks, hold the debt ceiling hostage, repress voting among minorities, withhold a confirmation vote on a Supreme Court nominee, defend a known fraud and sexual predator who has likely colluded with a foreign government to gain the presidency — they will do it, knowing they’ll be backed by a relentlessly on-message media apparatus.
And if that’s true, if the very preconditions of science and journalism as commonly understood have been eroded, then all that’s left is a raw contest of power.
Donald Trump has the power to hold on to the presidency, as long as elected Republicans, cowed by the conservative base, support him. That is true almost regardless of what he’s done or what’s proven by Mueller. As long as he has that power, he will exercise it. That’s what recent history seems to show.
Democrats do not currently have the numbers to stop him. They can’t do it without some help from Republicans. And Republicans seem incapable, not only of acting on what Mueller knows, but of even coming to know it.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe US institutions have more life in them than I think. But at this point, it’s just very difficult to imagine anything that could bridge the epistemic gulf between America’s tribes. We are split in two, living in different worlds, with different stories and facts shaping our lives. We no longer learn or know things together, as a country, so we can no longer act together, as a country.
So we may just have to live with a president indicted for collusion with a foreign power.
Help
Winstonm, on 2017-November-03, 21:30, said: