Jennifer Rubin, "Here's how

AmericanDreamer — Thu, 05 Jul 2018 20:25:04 +0000

In reply to Donald Trump, the resistance, and the limits of normcore politics

Jennifer Rubin, "Here's how we'll recover from Trump", today's Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2018/07/05/heres-how-...

The non-partisan organization Protect Democracy, appropriate to Independence Day, on Wednesday put out an ambitious proposal entitled, Roadmap for Renewal: A Legislative Blueprint for Protecting our Democracy. It might as well have been titled “What We Do to Fix Trump’s Mess,” for it posits that the grave damage President Trump has done to our democratic norms and institutions won’t be solved by his departure or by voting out the Republican majorities that have enabled him.

“The rise of a U.S. president who fashions himself a strongman in the model of autocrats around the world has been a wakeup call that the guardrails of our democracy may not be as strong as we’d assumed,” Protect Democracy’s executive director Ian Bassin tells me. “America has never had a perfect democracy, but our story has been an ongoing process of perfecting it, and if we want that to continue we’re going to have to learn lessons from this moment and reinforce the guardrails to ensure our republic remains healthy for the next generation.”

The introduction to the blueprint explains:

This document proposes a package of legislative measures to restore and shore up the fundamental structures, institutions, and norms of our constitutional democracy. We propose twenty-one reforms in five categories. The first three categories focus on the branches of government: (i) strengthening Congress’s capacity to fulfill its constitutional role; (ii) constraining abuses of executive power; and (iii) protecting the courts as a check on the other branches in order to uphold the constitution.

The other two categories focus on the most important part of our democracy: we the people. The fourth category – protecting inclusive and fact-based democratic dissent, debate, and participation – addresses how to make sure the public is accurately informed about our government and able to fully and inclusively participate in the public sphere without fear of threat or intimidation. The final category – modernizing our campaigns and election system to protect and enhance participation and accurately reflect the views of voters – focuses on how to ensure that our elections reflect the democratic choices of the country.

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Some grafs that struck me

AmericanDreamer — Thu, 05 Jul 2018 20:22:05 +0000

In reply to Donald Trump, the resistance, and the limits of normcore politics

Some grafs that struck me from "Hey Democrats, Fighting Fair is for Suckers", Rob Goodman in Politico magazine, yesterday: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/07/04/democrats-majority-ru...

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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.

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.”

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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.

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Missing from this proposal was substance on what sort of policy agenda the author thinks is needed for the country. It was all about the goal as permanently disabling the political opposition.

And he says that D's must strike so as to "so thoroughly disempower the other side that it forestalls serious reprisals." And what would that entail, and look like, if and when it could be pulled off?

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Jennifer Rubin, "Here's how

Some grafs that struck me