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Monday, July 20, 2020 3:18:09 PM
Donald Trump Is the Culmination of an Irresistible Conservative Chaos Theory
The great modern conservative project, launched by the Goldwater campaign in 1964, has finally reached its inevitable end-point in the kind of president* that project made inevitable.
By Charles P. Pierce
Jul 20, 2020
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a33366097/donald-trump-2020-election-republican-politics-history-goldwater/?source=nl&utm_source=nl_esq&utm_medium=email&date=072020&utm_campaign=nl20639514
washington, dc july 14 us president donald trump steps into the rose garden before speaking to the media at the white house on july 14, 2020 in washington, dc president trump spoke on several topics including relations with china as the coronavirus continues to spread in the us, with nearly 34 million confirmed cases photo by drew angerergetty images
Drew Angerer / Getty Images
Back at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, a week after El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago had Riefenstahl-ed his way to the nomination of a Republican Party that had been setting the table for someone like him since at least 1976, journalist Margaret Doris brought the country a warning in this very shebeen. The warning came from Jesse Jackson and John Lewis, who knew from sad and bloody experience what damage an empowered reactionary government can do. As Shakespeare’s Beatrice says, they could see a church by daylight.
The mass of ugly was not given a name, but everybody seemed to know where it was coming from. "They're trying to take us back to another period, trying to make it harder and more difficult for people to participate in the democratic process, and we must not allow it," agreed Lewis, a former president of ADA. "We've got to win this election.
We've got to win, I'm telling you.” He continued, "The vote is precious… It's almost sacred. We have to be headlights, and not taillights. A firecracker just burns up, shoots off. We have to be pilot lights, and burn and burn and burn.”
Not enough people listened. Not enough people heard. And now, the day they warned us about is here. The great modern conservative project, launched by the Goldwater campaign in 1964, and perverting itself and the Republic by tiny degrees ever since, has finally reached its inevitable end-point in the kind of president* that project had, by those same tiny degrees, made inevitable.
This is the moment transcendent, this is the moment revealed. The great modern conservative project turned itself, by those same tiny degrees, into an authoritarian opposition to a democratic republic and all its institutions. Steadily, it abandoned decency, civility, science, reason, and simple humanity. And here we are, at the day Jackson and Lewis warned us about because they had learned clairvoyance under fire when that project began.
A crippled nation, literally a sick nation, watching Pinochet tactics in the streets, watching a feckless (or worse) administration* taking actions that actively make the public health situation worse, watching a brutal (or worse) administration* brutalize mothers in Portland and promising to bring those tactics to a number of American cities in advance of a national election, with all that implies and entails.
And doing so by relying on policies drafted and implemented by a previous Republican administration—and its employees—back in the days when this president* merely was a guy presiding over a televised freak show, and not creating one out of the country he was elected to lead. It took long, hard, relentless work by hundreds of conservative politicians, judges, journalists, consultants, billionaires, think-tanks, and foundations to bring the country to this miserable pass. It is the wonder of their private world.
It no longer seems adequate to respond every day to every new outrage. First of all, it’s become almost impossible to distinguish between this administration*’s actual policies and its attempts to distract the country’s attention from the catastrophic failures of those same policies, both of which serve the same dark purposes.
Uncertainty and incoherence are the dictator’s friend. Second, to respond to these outrages piecemeal has a forest-for-the-trees problem. You can lose sight of the irresistible momentum of the chaos theory that brought us to this moment. Goldwater was the butterfly, gently fluttering its wings in China. This president* is the hurricane in the Atlantic. Axios has a nice scoop that illustrates this very process.
washington, dc june 26 former department of justice official john yoo testifies before the house judiciary committee during a hearing on the administrations interrogation policy on june 26, 2008 in washington, dc yoo has cited attorney client privilege in avoiding answering specific questions about his involvement in drafting the controversial 2002 memo on interrogation techniques photo by melissa goldengetty images
John Yoo.
Melissa Golden / Getty Images
Yoo detailed the theory in a National Review article, spotted atop Trump’s desk in the Oval Office, which argues that the Supreme Court's 5-4 DACA ruling last month "makes it easy for presidents to violate the law. The president has brought up the article with key advisers, two Trump administration officials tell Axios. Yoo writes that the ruling, and actions by President Obama, pave the way for Trump to implement policies that Congress won’t. Some could remain in force for years even if he loses re-election. Yoo — who next week will be out with a new book, "Defender in Chief," on Trump's use of presidential power — tells Axios that he has met virtually with White House officials about the implications of the ruling. What's next: The first test could come imminently. Trump has said he is about to unveil a "very major" immigration policy via executive order, which he says the Supreme Court gave him the power to do.
John Yoo made his bones in the previous Republican worst presidency in history. He was the legal architect of the system by which this country became a country that tortured people. But this did not begin with Yoo. There are people expressing horror at what Attorney General William Barr is doing with the Department of Justice. Many of these people reassured the country that Barr somehow would temper this administration*’s excesses.
That required them to ignore the grand favors Barr already had done for embattled Republican presidents back to George H.W. Bush, to whom Barr recommended pardons for any figures in the Iran-Contra scandal that might have damaging testimony regarding Bush’s own involvement in that exercise in illegitimate unilateral presidential action.
The now infamous “unitary executive” theory of presidential power, beloved by the likes of Barr and Yoo, and the rationale for almost all of this administration*’s major offenses against self-government, was born in its modern form in the mind of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. In his dissent in the 1988 case of Morrison v. Olson, Scalia wrote:
To repeat, Article II, 1, cl. 1, of the Constitution provides: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States.” As I described at the outset of this opinion, this does not mean some of the executive power, but all of the executive power. It seems to me, therefore, that the decision of the Court of Appeals invalidating the present statute must be upheld on fundamental separation-of-powers principles if the following two questions are answered affirmatively:
(1) Is the conduct of a criminal prosecution (and of an investigation to decide whether to prosecute) the exercise of purely executive power? (2) Does the statute deprive the President of the United States of exclusive control over the exercise of that power? Surprising to say, the Court appears to concede an affirmative answer to both questions, but seeks to avoid the inevitable conclusion that since the statute vests some purely executive power in a person who is not the President of the United States it is void.
Scalia didn’t need this president* to come to that conclusion. Barr and Yoo didn’t need this president*, either. They had Scalia, and a lushly funded network of conservative organizations to finance the scholarship that brought Scalia’s opinion to political life. (This scholarship, of course, requires that these same folks howled like scalded cats when Barack Obama flirted with the same thinking in response to an intransigent Republican Congress that was determined not to allow him to govern like a president.) What we see today is, in the words of the old Hollywood hypemasters, a production years in the making!
So we are brought to this pass. It is a huge historical moment; the loud, grinding noise of history pivoting drowns out rational dialogue. It fragments rational thought by fracturing concentration. And it’s only Monday.
The great modern conservative project, launched by the Goldwater campaign in 1964, has finally reached its inevitable end-point in the kind of president* that project made inevitable.
By Charles P. Pierce
Jul 20, 2020
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a33366097/donald-trump-2020-election-republican-politics-history-goldwater/?source=nl&utm_source=nl_esq&utm_medium=email&date=072020&utm_campaign=nl20639514
washington, dc july 14 us president donald trump steps into the rose garden before speaking to the media at the white house on july 14, 2020 in washington, dc president trump spoke on several topics including relations with china as the coronavirus continues to spread in the us, with nearly 34 million confirmed cases photo by drew angerergetty images
Drew Angerer / Getty Images
Back at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, a week after El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago had Riefenstahl-ed his way to the nomination of a Republican Party that had been setting the table for someone like him since at least 1976, journalist Margaret Doris brought the country a warning in this very shebeen. The warning came from Jesse Jackson and John Lewis, who knew from sad and bloody experience what damage an empowered reactionary government can do. As Shakespeare’s Beatrice says, they could see a church by daylight.
The mass of ugly was not given a name, but everybody seemed to know where it was coming from. "They're trying to take us back to another period, trying to make it harder and more difficult for people to participate in the democratic process, and we must not allow it," agreed Lewis, a former president of ADA. "We've got to win this election.
We've got to win, I'm telling you.” He continued, "The vote is precious… It's almost sacred. We have to be headlights, and not taillights. A firecracker just burns up, shoots off. We have to be pilot lights, and burn and burn and burn.”
Not enough people listened. Not enough people heard. And now, the day they warned us about is here. The great modern conservative project, launched by the Goldwater campaign in 1964, and perverting itself and the Republic by tiny degrees ever since, has finally reached its inevitable end-point in the kind of president* that project had, by those same tiny degrees, made inevitable.
This is the moment transcendent, this is the moment revealed. The great modern conservative project turned itself, by those same tiny degrees, into an authoritarian opposition to a democratic republic and all its institutions. Steadily, it abandoned decency, civility, science, reason, and simple humanity. And here we are, at the day Jackson and Lewis warned us about because they had learned clairvoyance under fire when that project began.
A crippled nation, literally a sick nation, watching Pinochet tactics in the streets, watching a feckless (or worse) administration* taking actions that actively make the public health situation worse, watching a brutal (or worse) administration* brutalize mothers in Portland and promising to bring those tactics to a number of American cities in advance of a national election, with all that implies and entails.
And doing so by relying on policies drafted and implemented by a previous Republican administration—and its employees—back in the days when this president* merely was a guy presiding over a televised freak show, and not creating one out of the country he was elected to lead. It took long, hard, relentless work by hundreds of conservative politicians, judges, journalists, consultants, billionaires, think-tanks, and foundations to bring the country to this miserable pass. It is the wonder of their private world.
It no longer seems adequate to respond every day to every new outrage. First of all, it’s become almost impossible to distinguish between this administration*’s actual policies and its attempts to distract the country’s attention from the catastrophic failures of those same policies, both of which serve the same dark purposes.
Uncertainty and incoherence are the dictator’s friend. Second, to respond to these outrages piecemeal has a forest-for-the-trees problem. You can lose sight of the irresistible momentum of the chaos theory that brought us to this moment. Goldwater was the butterfly, gently fluttering its wings in China. This president* is the hurricane in the Atlantic. Axios has a nice scoop that illustrates this very process.
washington, dc june 26 former department of justice official john yoo testifies before the house judiciary committee during a hearing on the administrations interrogation policy on june 26, 2008 in washington, dc yoo has cited attorney client privilege in avoiding answering specific questions about his involvement in drafting the controversial 2002 memo on interrogation techniques photo by melissa goldengetty images
John Yoo.
Melissa Golden / Getty Images
Yoo detailed the theory in a National Review article, spotted atop Trump’s desk in the Oval Office, which argues that the Supreme Court's 5-4 DACA ruling last month "makes it easy for presidents to violate the law. The president has brought up the article with key advisers, two Trump administration officials tell Axios. Yoo writes that the ruling, and actions by President Obama, pave the way for Trump to implement policies that Congress won’t. Some could remain in force for years even if he loses re-election. Yoo — who next week will be out with a new book, "Defender in Chief," on Trump's use of presidential power — tells Axios that he has met virtually with White House officials about the implications of the ruling. What's next: The first test could come imminently. Trump has said he is about to unveil a "very major" immigration policy via executive order, which he says the Supreme Court gave him the power to do.
John Yoo made his bones in the previous Republican worst presidency in history. He was the legal architect of the system by which this country became a country that tortured people. But this did not begin with Yoo. There are people expressing horror at what Attorney General William Barr is doing with the Department of Justice. Many of these people reassured the country that Barr somehow would temper this administration*’s excesses.
That required them to ignore the grand favors Barr already had done for embattled Republican presidents back to George H.W. Bush, to whom Barr recommended pardons for any figures in the Iran-Contra scandal that might have damaging testimony regarding Bush’s own involvement in that exercise in illegitimate unilateral presidential action.
The now infamous “unitary executive” theory of presidential power, beloved by the likes of Barr and Yoo, and the rationale for almost all of this administration*’s major offenses against self-government, was born in its modern form in the mind of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. In his dissent in the 1988 case of Morrison v. Olson, Scalia wrote:
To repeat, Article II, 1, cl. 1, of the Constitution provides: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States.” As I described at the outset of this opinion, this does not mean some of the executive power, but all of the executive power. It seems to me, therefore, that the decision of the Court of Appeals invalidating the present statute must be upheld on fundamental separation-of-powers principles if the following two questions are answered affirmatively:
(1) Is the conduct of a criminal prosecution (and of an investigation to decide whether to prosecute) the exercise of purely executive power? (2) Does the statute deprive the President of the United States of exclusive control over the exercise of that power? Surprising to say, the Court appears to concede an affirmative answer to both questions, but seeks to avoid the inevitable conclusion that since the statute vests some purely executive power in a person who is not the President of the United States it is void.
Scalia didn’t need this president* to come to that conclusion. Barr and Yoo didn’t need this president*, either. They had Scalia, and a lushly funded network of conservative organizations to finance the scholarship that brought Scalia’s opinion to political life. (This scholarship, of course, requires that these same folks howled like scalded cats when Barack Obama flirted with the same thinking in response to an intransigent Republican Congress that was determined not to allow him to govern like a president.) What we see today is, in the words of the old Hollywood hypemasters, a production years in the making!
So we are brought to this pass. It is a huge historical moment; the loud, grinding noise of history pivoting drowns out rational dialogue. It fragments rational thought by fracturing concentration. And it’s only Monday.
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