Why We Left the US According to Nic - Part 2

REMINDER OF OUR PREVIOUS INTRO:

It has been on Nic's radar for months that I was coming after him for this blog.  He finally felt ready and we forced a few hours to ourselves over the weekend to talk - yes, I said hours.  My transcription of our conversation is almost word for word, so it's quite lengthy and I'm going to break it down into his specific points.

Alex:  So why did we leave the United States?

Nic:  Right… so, you have asked me to give kind of my take on the the political and systemic issues in the United States that made me not optimistic. I haven’t quite prepared this out, but I think it broke down into a few different issues.  First, you’ve got the breakdown of norms that underpin our system, and that is something I started noticing as far back as 2011 and really crystallized in maybe 2014 to 2016. Second, we have the systemic level imbalances in our political system that are on a trajectory to only worsen towards greater minority rule.  Third – and, to a large extent this stems from and it feeds back into both of those two problems – is we have the increasing antagonism within American society.  

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Alex:  Before you move on to your second point, can you elaborate more for those who, on the left, would fit under your description of wanting an authoritarian government without them realizing it?  What does that mean, what does that look like, and why is that your conclusion? 

PART 2:

Nic:  So, let me go back to the first point now, which is the deterioration of norms.  This was another of those moments that crystallized my lack of optimism.  I had a conversation with a friend at one point about the extent of the cheating in elections that the Republicans were doing.  Just, like, just blatant cheating, right, sending out robo calls to Latino voters and telling them the wrong date for Election Day, paying someone to run as a Green Party candidate (even though they're actually Republican) in order to split the vote.  And since we have a “first past the post, winner take all” system, that has an almost fully determinative spoiler effect.  You can spoil almost any election by doing this.  We've seen instances in Tacoma politics where someone will drop out of the election after the deadline to file, handing the seat to someone who they want to get it instead of actually being up for election.  My friend’s point is that the other side is cheating and it is a disservice to everything that we stand for – our candidates, our causes, the vision we have for a more fair and just country – it is a disservice to those values if we don't also cheat… within the law, because of course the problem here is that almost all of these things that are just blatantly cheating are also legal, and again this gets at the issue of norms. I remember having conversation with that friend, like, if you had a choice between continuing to struggle in a supposed democracy where the other side is cheating and taking advantage of the system (and likely continuing to win power), or to just make Joe Biden dictator, which would you choose?  I think I'm representing the conversation accurately that they said “No, like, it's broken and they're cheating so, yeah, we'll probably just give them power.”  

 

I think you see that in so many ways that are a lot more subtle.  I’m not sure I can think of any good examples right now, but… I remember having a conversation with a conservative friend of mine back in the Bush administration and he said “I understand that you want such and such, but I believe in a weak federal government and greater state power.  Do you really want federal government to have the authority to do this kind of stuff?  Because what are all the bad things the federal government can do with that authority that you don't agree with?”  I think my friend is wrong in the actual argument he’s making, but nevertheless – the idea that I had back in 2000 (and 2006-2010) that we need a bigger and more effective federal government with a stronger presidency so that we can pass these things, where the constitutional limits on executive power were less important than the outcome of the policy…  after the Republicans took the house in 2010, Barak Obama passed a huge number of things by executive action, just bypassing Congress, at the time I was like “yeah, absolutely, Congress is just stonewalling it and not treating him fairly”.  But then as soon as Donald Trump won election, he totally bypassed Congress too and passed a whole huge number of things by executive action, like locking up babies at the border without their parents.  That was an executive action, these incredibly inhumane, disgusting, horrible things… ultimately, he was following a precedent, a legal precedent, that the Democrats had set in the prior administration, doing these things without congressional approval.  I think you see this on the left as well, around healthcare and student debt relief, for example.  I think what Biden did probably wasn't constitutional, the courts seem to be really against him on that.  I think it's great, but ultimately this kind of policy Congress should pass.  

 

People on the left are frustrated that more is not getting done on progressive issues, even though we have, let's say, a progressive president, and the reason that it’s not getting done is because of the checks and balances in our system that are meant to stop stuff without broad support from the public and different branches of government.  A lot of people on both sides of the aisle are saying “damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead”.  That is an example of increasing authoritarianism on the left, two different examples.  And it's different, I don't want to make a false equivalency here - Republicans want an actual dictator who rounds up and kills people who don't look like them, that is very fundamentally different from saying we should give everyone healthcare.

 

Alex:  Do you find a problem with how inflammatory that statement was, though, considering your previous indication that people are viewing the other side as enemies rather than just adversaries?  That sounded very much beyond the adversarial…

 

Nic:  … but they are our enemies, I wasn’t saying this was wrong!  They actually want to kill you, not me, but you.  There’s a huge swath of Americans who say they want you dead.

 

Alex:  Yes.  I’m not sure they would say they want me dead, but they would love to silence me and put me in a dress.

 

Nic:  Look at that representative from Montana [state Rep Kerri Seekins-Crowe, story here:  https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/montana-state-lawmakers-remarks-draws-backlash-rcna81983].  Like, these people are our enemies, yes.  It is a problem that we have come to this level of antagonism, that does not mean that it is wrong.  Those are separate issues.

 

So, ok, we can chat about norms directly, in and of itself.  I didn't realize until a number of things built up for me… one, my interest in studying history.  Particularly the history of the Roman Republic.  There's a great book by Mike Duncan, the author of the History of Rome podcast, called “The Storm Before the Storm”.  It’s a book that is set in the late era of the Roman Republic before the empire, but I really don't feel like it is about that.  It is very much a case study in how systems that are underpinned by norms breakdown when people stop following those norms.  I highly recommend that book to everyone.  

 

That, coupled with the Supreme Court seat, Marrick Garland’s Supreme Court seat that Mitch McConnell stole from Barack Obama… it’s, of course, so cracked because McConnell said “you know, I don't think that we should vote to nominate a Supreme Court Justice during a presidential campaign, I think that should be left to the next president”.  Then after Trump won against Hillary Clinton, not only did they fill that seat but then there was another Supreme Court seat that opened up later and a reporter asked “Do you feel like this this standard should be applied here?” and McConnell just laughed “Of course not”.  And “What's the difference?” “Well, the difference is we have power now”.

 

Alex:  So, there was no point in even pretending that we were following some kind of order?

 

Nic:  No!  He didn't even pretend anymore.  Fast forward a couple of years to when that became crystal clear, but it was really obvious at the time that there was no intention of setting a new norm to be followed.  It wasn't an adaptation of the norms, it was a breakdown.  It was “I don't need to follow this because there is no law, there is no law that says that the Senate has to take up the president's nominees”.  I mean, you could argue this, the constitution actually says “shall provide advice and consent”.  I really wanted Barack Obama to press that case in, I think this was, 2016 and appoint Merrick Garland, to just give him the job, let the Republicans sue, and then make the case to the Supreme Court that the constitution, in fact, does say you have to provide advice and consent, you can't simply not take this up.  But he didn't do that.  He thought that he would lose the case, whatever it was, he didn't want to press that so far.  But the idea that the president gets to choose the Supreme Court justices and that it’s a negotiative process to find someone who is at least somewhat acceptable to the Senate has been the way that that that Supreme Court has been filled for all of all of American history until Mitch McConnell decided it didn't need to happen that way.  In McConnell 's case, he would cite Harriet Miers who George W Bush tried to appoint that the Democrats voted against and blocked… There have been a number of different tits for tats over the years where each side escalates the obstructionist behavior against the other, and in all of those things you can never really point and say “this side started it”.  Because most of what is done with deteriorating norms is acceptable, to some extent at least, at the time that it's done and it's only afterwards that it becomes escalatory and is no longer acceptable.

 

Here we’re talking about the Supreme Court, but it’s absolutely everything.  We were just talking with some neighbors about Rep. Zooey Zephyr in Montana, or the Tennessee 3 – there’s no law, in fact quite the contrary.  The laws say that the state houses or Congress have the ability to set and enforce standards for their members, and that is ultimately majoritarian.  Whichever party has the political power can set those rules.  It's been the norm that the majority political party doesn't use that power to silence voices from the minority, but there's absolutely nothing in the law that says that has to be the case.  The fact that we have committees which have members of both parties, one of the most fundamental functionings of government, that doesn't have to be the case.  That's just a norm.  Any day, the majority party in control of either chamber can wake up and say “Hey, I actually don't wanna deal with the other side on my committee” and they can just not seat any of them and there's nothing that will stop it because it's just a norm.  We haven't escalated yet to break that norm – we’ve broken a great many others – and that is just one of the many that are yet to be broken, in my mind, because the problem is (and really what I think The Storm Before the Storm drove home) that when one side starts breaking the norms that underpin the system, the other side feels aggrieved and their only way to air their grievances is through further deteriorating the norms when they are in charge.

 

Alex:  It becomes a matter of desperation.  When you're not given the power that you need to do your job, you start feeling helpless and more desperate so you act more irrationally.

 

Nic:  Yeah, which is the perfect time to actually move on the next point...