DRUMPF exposed "a pre-existing rot" - brilliant essay by Rob GOODMAN (long read) [View all]

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ROB GOODMAN has worked as the speechwriter for House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Senator Chris Dodd. His work has appeared on the floors of both houses of Congress, national television and radio, and the op-ed pages of The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Rome's Last Citizen.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/what-trump-taught-us-about-american-democracy-214596
[font size=5]What the King of Hawaii Can Teach Us About Trump[/font]

A political fable from 1819.

By Rob Goodman

.... I can’t be the only one who has lost count of the democratic [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]norms—the unwritten, informal, but hugely important rules that help us govern ourselves—that now seem to be gone with as little consequence[/FONT] as the taboos in the story. If you’re running for president, you don’t even raise the possibility that the election won’t count if you don’t win. You don’t threaten to throw your opponent in jail if you do win. If you change your mind about throwing your opponent in jail, you don’t explain it as an act of mercy, because that’s not how the rule of law works. If you’re running for president, and especially if you get elected, you release your tax returns, so voters can know that you’re not financially compromised by foreign governments, or by corporations seeking to do business with the United States. You put your assets in a blind trust, so you never confuse your self-interest with the public interest. You don’t accuse millions of Americans of voter fraud without evidence. You don’t compromise civilian control of the armed forces. You don’t let your team threaten to lock up journalists who investigate you.

[FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]You don’t do those things, until, one day, you do.[/FONT] The only thing holding you back in most cases is the force of custom, and there are times and places—Hawaii in 1819, or America in 2016—[FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]when custom is so weak that it’s no force at all.[/FONT]

Of course, Donald Trump didn’t need to be a political genius to realize that norms like these were historically weak. He only needed to watch the news. In just the last eight years, [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]we’ve watched the unthinkable become the debatable and then the unexceptionable.[/FONT] We’ve seen President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee denied even a hearing for nearly a year, and we’ve seen his other nominees blockaded at an historic rate. We’ve seen real, live U.S. senators promise that no justice nominated by a Democratic president would ever be confirmed. We’ve seen credible threats to default on the national debt. We’ve seen the president’s budget director denied even the right to propose a budget to Congress. We’ve seen the president expand executive power in response to all of this, in a way that’s troubling even to some liberals. We’ve seen the Senate filibuster go from rare to routine—and watched Senate Democrats retaliate by partially nuking the filibuster. It was laughable when a member of Congress interrupted the State of the Union to call the president a liar—until a movement calling the president a liar about his birthplace launched his successor to power. ....

Instead, we have to come to terms with living in a time of [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]post-norm politics[/FONT]—by which I don’t mean that all of our political norms are suddenly defunct, but rather that [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]the continued rolling back of norms we’ve taken for granted has to stop surprising us[/FONT]. Rather than thinking [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]reactively[/FONT], and [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]feeding the Trump outrage cycle[/FONT], we ought to understand him as exposing a [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]pre-existing rot[/FONT]. We need to think about why norms fail in general, and how to act when we can’t rely on them. Only then will we stop underestimating the sheer difficulty of one day rebuilding them. ....

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