Another Turn Of The Screw

                     If our Democrats can be relied on for one thing anymore, it's for overplaying their cards. In Poker, overplaying a bad hand can sometimes be smart because you have nothing much to lose and the bluff might work. For a good hand, though, overplaying is always foolish because it can minimize the gain from a sure win.

                    The Democrats have been holding lousy cards now for the past four years and overplaying them like a gang of drunken sailors. Their abortive first impeachment campaign and their wildly overwrought opposition to Brett Kavanaugh's supreme court nomination, for example, came a cropper but in the end probably cost the Dems little that wasn't already gone for them. However, now Trump's behavior leading up to the appalling spectacle that occurred in Washington on January 6 has handed the Democrats a dream hand to play. Yet they're going about it as though nothing has changed. They continue to overplay even when simply laying out their cards would be enough to secure the winnings.

                     They've actually impeached Trump a second time just as he was on his way out the door.

                    At a time when the nation should be focusing on the familiar American ritual of an optimistic transfer of power, our Democrats have chosen the time to hurl down another gauntlet. They've bogged the country down in a squabble over the constitutionality and even the simple logic of impeaching a president who's already out of office.

                    So is this crazy, or what?

Why Are The Democrats Behaving This Way?

                    Well, maybe it's not really as crazy as it appears. For one thing, should they actually convict him this time, it would be like a silver stake in his heart forestalling any ghoulish resurrection in 2024. He would be constitutionally precluded from running. However, the Dems know that once again he's unlikely to be convicted, and there seems to be something more strategic underway here. They surely realize that they've become dependent on Trump, and that anti-Trump frenzy has become their Party's unifying force

                    With their 4-year dream now fulfilled and him actually gone, they must be feeling the first pangs of the dangerous identity crisis that looms before them. Keeping Trump in the picture for a while longer is necessary for them to perform the illusionist's trick of locking the audience's attention to one spot while the real action is happening elsewhere. The American public will keep fighting about Trump both during the Senate trial and private court battles that will follow his probable exoneration. The media will dwell exhaustively on all this, and Steven Colbert will continue telling jokes about it. In the meantime, the Dems can start testing the levers of power and figuring out which elements of their now-openly socialist agenda they might actually start putting into place.

                    They still need to be careful about this because they know their grip on power remains tenuous and that disastrous mistakes will come easily if they accelerate too abruptly. They also have a problem with Joe Biden, who is a placeholder for them but who can quickly become a liability should he start fumbling his lines too routinely or interacting directly with the public. His inaugural speech was good, but only because he rehearsed it exhaustively. He can't think on his feet anymore. The Democrats need immediately to begin laying groundwork for the next transition once he is out of the picture. This is likely to occur fairly soon.

                                         On the Other Side Of Chaos

                   My God though, what about the Republicans? Having suffered their own identity crisis four year ago, they thought they had resolved it by stepping into lockstep behind Donald Trump. Now look where they are.

                   I don't know who it was who laid the trap that was sprung in Washington on January 6, but Trump leapt happily into it and took down with him into the chasm much of what remains of the old GOP. If the Republicans were thinking strategically right now, their senators would vote en masse to convict Trump in the Senate. He's already made clear his intention to beat impeachment and return in 2024. This implies a possible third-party run that would knock the Republican base asunder. If they could muster any semblance of political competence, the Democrats would then have a clear field upon which to consolidate power.

                    The Republicans are demoralized and bereft of leadership right now. Like the Dems, they have no real political platform anymore.

                    The entire political class has learned from their respective voters that few people have the attention span today to care much about policy issues or even ideology. We're in the Internet Age, and the power of hyper-linking has turned us all into thrill-seeking click addicts. Our thoughts have begun to mimic our computer screens in the sense that nothing achieves much in the way of coherence before a new headline or picture steals away our focus. All that seems to matter is fast theater and vicarious political blood sport. Trump was good at both, which explains his rise to power, as are certain of the leading Democrats and many of the secondary players on both sides.

                    But Trump is gone and the Republicans have no one out front now around whom to rally. Mike Pence is the closest thing to a viable leader the party has, but VPs rarely sustain political careers after leaving office. Pence, despite his admirable display of backbone on January 6, excites no one,  and his association with Trump will pull him under the political waters like a hundred pounds of iron hanging around his neck. 

A Nostalgic Throwback

                    With both parties thus in disarray, it's hard to see stability in our future. People all along the political spectrum have regarded the past four years as a kind of surrealistic circus in which any horror can come screaming down out of the ceiling at any time. Everyone is on edge and seeking to blame the other side for everything that's wrong. If only the other side could just be made to go away, everything would be fine again and America could get on with the business of nurturing prosperity and happiness.

                    However, both sides can't go away. And one side alone can't dictate the peace.

                    President Biden's inaugural ceremony was an attempted throwback to the days when Americans knew how to put aside their differences briefly and welcome in a new era. His speech was good and mostly conciliatory. The unspoken message was that with the Grinch now gone, good people on both sides can join hands again. Country singer Garth Brooks had been invited to perform in a nod to the gentler side of Trump's redneck base. Republican John Roberts administered the Oath of Office, and Trump's VP Mike Pence sat nearby as a respectful onlooker. This all seemed safe and good.

                    Yet there was a hollowness to the event. Part of the problem was the specter of Covid hanging in the air. Masses of flags stood in place of all the people who should have been thronging the National Mall. Masks and social distancing drove the event's optics. The deeper discomfort, however, stemmed from the fact that all of this was occurring at the very site where exactly two weeks earlier rioters had broken into the Capital building and forced our nation's lawmakers into hiding. Pence himself had been rhetorically threatened with "hanging" because he refused to block certification of Biden's win.

                    Thus was Inauguration Day teeming with all the troubling currents of the present moment. The question we have to ask is why is everything in such a hash right now? What's really going on? The economy is in surprisingly good shape, making allowance for the pandemic, and the state of international relations seems to be offering up no more hobgoblins than what's normal.

What's Really Going On Here?

                    On the watershed date of November 9, 2016, the morning after Trump's unexpected victory in that year's election, I wrote the following:

"There's no telling where all this goes now, although foreshadows of the likely future could be seen already in the early morning hours in the radical fever swamps of Berkeley and Oakland, where gangs of protestors emerged as though on the search for riot police with whom to engage. The ranks of these people are likely to grow in the months ahead, and it seems only a matter of time before some of the nastier elements among Trump's supporters, themselves also now newly energized, choose to come out of hiding to offer battle." (American Counterpoint 11/9/16)

                    I remember the eerie feeling of that morning. I was happy enough to realize that Hillary Clinton was not going to be our president for the next four years, but I hadn't voted for Trump either. Instead, I had cast a wistful vote for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, about whom I knew little and who obviously had zero chance of winning. It was a protest vote. What disturbed me that morning was the foreboding of what might be in store for us now. Leftwing zealots already in the streets looked like a bad sign.

                    And so it was.

                    What soon commenced was a seemingly endless series of violent incidents in cities all over the country - New York, Ferguson, Cleveland, Charleston, Chicago, Baton Rouge, Sacramento, Louisville, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and many, many others, in which police shootings or arrests of black men, whether justified nor not, triggered mass protests often followed by looting and rampage. It was though a time machine had taken us all back to 1968. The "Black Lives Matter" movement emerged from this, and an organization was founded by three women - Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi - who have described themselves as "trained Marxists", even though they try not to draw attention to their ideological background. The prefer to be seen as "protest leaders".

                    Peaceful and pretty Portland Oregon, of all places, became an epicenter for violence because it served as headquarters for the leftwing Antifa group. These are the guys who started showing up around town decked out in black clothes and black masks well before the pandemic made such attire fashionable. With astonishing speed, what had started out as a seemingly ragtag bunch of "protesters" suddenly had a nationwide network that was dispatching operatives as far away as the New York City subways. They specialized in smashing windows, blocking traffic, threatening outdoor diners, chanting vulgarities, and beating up anybody who tried to take pictures or talk back to them. They could often be seen in the streets "battling fascism" side-by-side with their BLM brethren.

                    I had for some time been wondering what could have happened to the supposedly formidable right-wing militia and street-fighter types who one might have thought would be coming out in force to counter these folks, as I had predicted in my 2016 article. Inexplicably, for the time being the Left seemed have a near-monopoly on political violence.

                    Well, that surely did change this month. The people in the red caps were suddenly front-and-center in Washington. The media had given no more than desultory coverage to the leftist violence that had been convulsing our cities for so long, but now they had evidence for a more conducive narrative. This was not protesting or even just rioting. This was rightwing insurrection, and the media was all over it with superlatives. This was the story they had been waiting for.

                    The Washington spectacle, of course, indeed did go a big step beyond anything else happening previously. The January 6 crowd wasn't there just to smash windows, but rather to short-circuit the constitutionally-mandated certification of a lawful election. This is a key democratic process, and the Democrats and the media were, up to a point, right to highlight its sanctity and the foul nature of any attempt to interrupt it.

                    But at the same time, there was something off about the whole thing, something that didn't quite add up.

                    The main problem is that it's not at all clear how it was allowed to happen. Tens of thousands of angry people were expected to be in Washington for Trump's "march", and Trump himself had announced it was going to be "wild". Something was surely getting ready to happen. Yet for some bizarre reason, capital security on the day was minimal. When questioned about this anomaly, the head of the Capital police force said that they weren't expecting trouble because past Trump rallies, while boisterous, had always been peaceful. While true enough, this answer was risibly thin. The gang that actually penetrated the capital building was a small group splintering off from the much larger demonstration. Attacking the very heart of American democracy as they were, they never should have been able to make it through. And yet they did.

                    Why?

(To be continued soon in another posting)