#(hopefully my last time using that euphemistic tag)

[liskantope]

A few tired thoughts on impeachment and Trump

So, impeachment. Or, to back up a bit, Georgia solidifying its new identity as blue-leaning background state, immediately juxtaposed with a violent insurrection, a public falling-out between the president and vice president (for the first time I think since 1832, and now extreme MAGA people want the VP’s head on a stick, final proof that they are truly part of a cult rather than just passionate about policy), calls to invoke the 25th amendment, and an impeachment, in barely more than a week.

I already wanted to write a post like a week ago putting some scattered thoughts into words, but more and more kept happening, and I got sort of burned out thinking about it all, and I’m actually quite tired now so I think this will come out fairly short (edit: as usual, it didn’t really).

I’ve had a lot of mixed feelings on impeachment and what the impeachment process is really about. Managed to express some of them on Facebook and have a helpful and enlightening dialog, amazingly enough. I’m still sticking with my resolution to mostly quit social media and certain YouTube channels once immediate political situations died down (which I had thought would be after the run-off elections but clearly the day-by-day developments are continuing until Inauguration Day), but at least that kind of exchange has been a decent enough note to go out on.

I think one of the main potential traps in this whole thing is assuming that what happened last Wednesday was a direct result of the speech Trump had immediately just made (although this Twitter thread I just saw makes some very good arguments that it was, so the epistemic status of this point is not very high-confidence). The case for impeachment was largely being framed as “speech on January 6th was a direct incitement of breaking into the Capitol building and threatening the lives of congresspersons and the VP -- look, he even used words like ‘fight’!”, and the NYT for instance put phrases like “Trump speech incites riot” in its headlines and news articles. This seems like a fairly easy argument for the other side to knock down. Trump never told anyone to be violent; he even used the phrase “peacefully and patriotically” at one point (though not the part everyone quotes); and phrases like “we fight like hell” are used with a non-physical meaning by politicians all the time (and particularly often by The Young Turks, who highlighted the phrase as “proof” of incitement!).

And at the same time, Trump was absolutely, devastatingly responsible for the travesty that happened, just not through the particular speech immediately preceding the event, but through weeks and months and years of meticulously (inasmuch as he does anything “meticulously”) grooming a cult following and weaving an alternate-reality narrative with an anti-democratic twist to it regarding the election, fanning flames and riling up the hardest inner core of his supporters to such an extent that now in retrospect it seems like something like Wednesday’s event was bound to happen. The post-election tantrum has actually disgusted me to my core in a rawer way than almost anything else he’s ever done (I know things like kids ripped from their parents and kept in detention camps is worse on a direct level, and this all speaks to my privilege, but I have a Thing about the meta-level sin of trying to mess with our self-correction and bring the presidency closer to a dictatorship), and as far as I’m concerned, a second impeachment is well deserved.

But to actually argue this requires invoking psychology and “social sense” or social intuition, and that catch with Trump -- one of the most fundamental themes of his behavior as a campaigner and president, in fact -- is that to effectively argue that anything he says is reprehensible requires analyzing these more subtle psychological effects and connections, while both sides tend to stick to interpreting his literal words which almost always can be interpreted on their face as meaning something much more innocuous. In these case there’s often a nudge-nudge-wink-wink or dog-whistling layer to what he says which both sides often refuse to actually investigate in arguments: anti-Trump people just insist that it’s sitting out there so starkly that no justification of its existence is needed, while Trump defenders entirely refuse to engage by saying to just look at the words he said in the most literal way possible. This has played out again and again and again for over five years; the incitement issue even just feels like the climactic final culmination of it. I’d like to see just for once a national debate over Trump’s recklessness where the two sides weren’t just talking past each other in this way.

But maybe I shouldn’t be thinking at all about what a substantive debate would look like, or seeing Trump punished on a basis of rhetoric that fully exposes how exquisitely and subtly profound his negligence as a leader and human being has been rather than arguing back and forth about a particular speech: as my friends have reminded me, impeachment proceedings are a purely political endeavor. For whatever reasons (tradition and propriety?) the congresspersons stand at podiums and give arguments but they aren’t particularly meant or expected to persuade. (Okay a lot of it is about the people watching and each of their political futures, I guess.) Maybe it doesn’t matter if none of the arguments are particularly strong ones. I’m biased against the idea of the proceedings being entirely political because it disgusts me and seems to betray the ideal vision of how Congress is supposed to work, but I imagine it’s reality (and certainly not the most disgusting or distressing aspect of reality right now).

I didn’t get a chance to catch much of the House debate this time around but I did listen to a lot of it during Impeachment Take 1 in December 2019. At the time I wanted to write a lengthy post detailing how pointless it all ways but it coincided with a sudden rush to grade my students’ exams in time for the holidays and so the post never happened. But it was really striking how almost interchangeable the Democrats’ speeches and the Republicans’ speeches were (it was almost perfectly divided along party lines as I recall), how often the same particular handfuls of phrases came out of almost every single congressperson in each sides’ arguments (I can’t remember the phrases now). It was almost as if each politician had cobbled together their speech by copying off the same model and rearranging a few paragraphs and orders of phrases. The little I saw of the speeches for Impeachment Take 2 in the House suggests that they were a little less uniform, but I doubt they were much more substantive.

Anyway, at this point all that really matters to me is for the Senate to vote to convict. I’m not too optimistic that this will happen and hope that the House politicians put enough emphasis on analyzing the likelihood of this when deciding to impeach, because the first impeachment didn’t actually seem to do much good and a second one might do more harm than good without actual concrete punishments coming Trump’s way as a result. But if they do, it will be as satisfying as possible a postscript to the whole humiliating debacle of the past four years as I can really ask for, outside of non-government actions like arrest and imprisonment.

#Our Current president #(hopefully my last time using that euphemistic tag) #maga cult #kids in cages #american government #impeachment 2019 #impeachment 2021 #young turks