The impeachment process is the primary method the United States Congress may use to hold a sitting president accountable for misconduct. However, because the current Congress is split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans, and because we are operating in a hyper-partisan environment, it is difficult to imagine two-thirds of the U.S. Senate convicting a president through the impeachment process. Too many Senators would need to take action against the de facto leader of their own party. Removal of a U.S. president via impeachment and conviction has never occurred, and it is unlikely to happen anytime soon. For this reason, in our current political environment a president would likely only face accountability for criminal acts after leaving office. If the president self-pardoned at the conclusion of his time in office, a post-presidential prosecution of the crimes he committed during his administration’s tenure could be blocked. The plausibility of this scenario is why a constitutional amendment limiting the president’s pardon power is needed to deter executive misconduct.
Category: US History
Why We Shouldn’t Turn Our Politics Into a Costume Drama
Far too often, modern American politics has come to resemble a form of “cosplay,” in which activists of various stripes cast themselves in the role of virtuous freedom-fighters standing up against an all-powerful, malevolent enemy force. This tendency has exacerbated as our pop culture has shifted toward comic book films and science-fiction movies as our key narratives, while politics have simultaneously moved online into radicalizing ideological echo-chambers. As a result, many Americans perceive political narratives along the lines of Manichean or apocalyptic fantasy tales, and cast themselves as heroic combatants in this storyline of existential struggle. One thought-provoking essay recently argued that in comic book films, “Fear is omnipresent, public institutions are not to be trusted, and the best we can hope for is benevolent vigilantes to take everything out of our hands.” The popularity of these movies likely reflect the growing civic distrust in the United States, and may shed light on a disturbing impulse within the American electorate to favor figures willing to defy institutional and legal norms.
Many Americans now are chafing at the limits of what can be quickly accomplished under an increasingly gridlocked U.S. political system. In their frustration, they are also losing sight of the humanity of their opponents. This is not an entirely new phenomenon. In the 1990s, militia members portrayed themselves as modern-day minutemen, casting Clinton Administration federal agencies such as the ATF as tyrannical. This red-state narrative conveniently & hypocritically disappeared when a right-wing president, George W. Bush, again took office. Recently, American political cosplay has revived, expanded, and taken on a more continental flavor, with Antifa wielding the black and red flags of leftist Spanish civil warriors, and with Alt-Right supporters cosplaying as Nazis, Confederates, and other extreme-right factions.
When groups are engaged in politics as cosplay, the use of uniforms clearly mark insiders from outsiders, forming a ritualistic display of group unity, rather than a coalition of like-minded people willing to have a conversation with outsiders. Contrast the civil rights marches and antiwar demonstrations of the 1960s and 1970s, or even the more ideologically sketchy Million Man March and Glen Beck’s “Restoring Honor rally,” whose participants generally did not wear uniforms, with the global rallies and marches of Klansmen and neo-fascist blackshirts and Marxist guerillas, whose participants did. In the aforementioned costumeless marches, at least someone could slip into the crowd unidentified, and one could not tell at a glance whether that person was a curious observer or an enthusiastic participant. The adoption of a uniform makes the group’s demonstration more implicitly militaristic, and makes it seem more plausible that violence may occur between group members and hostile non-members.
Continue reading Why We Shouldn’t Turn Our Politics Into a Costume Drama
What the Reforms of the Industrial Age Can Teach Us About the Challenges of the Digital Age
In an interview published in Real Clear Future, Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) compared the digital revolution to the industrial revolution. This thought experiment caught my attention, because I have given considerable thought to that exact same comparison. I disagree with Senator Sasse on many political matters, but this son of rural Nebraska who earned a U.S. history Ph.D. from Yale certainly has one of the keenest minds and one of the most unique perspectives of any current American politician.
Sasse views the current digital revolution as one of the four fundamental stages in human societal evolution throughout history: “You have hunter-gatherers, you have the rise of agriculture, and then you had the rise of the big tool economy: industrialization, urbanization, mass immigration both across the seas and most fundamentally from the American countryside to cities, as you go from about 86 percent of the public working on the farm at the end of the Civil War to almost 60 percent of the public working in big cities by World War II. And then now this new thing, the digital economy, the mobile economy, the knowledge economy, the service economy—the post-industrial economy, fundamentally.” He argues that “Industrialization is the only real analog for this moment.”
How does the trajectory of the digital revolution resemble the industrial revolution? Well, like the Erie Canal and the transcontinental railroads (which received government funding), the Internet started with public subsidization (the government-funded ARPANET project), but later became a chaotic private economic competition that was sometimes bad for workers and consumers, and then veered toward monopolies that carried their own problems and risks. The resulting centralization of power and money allowed the corporate winners of this competition to become a class of “robber-barons” who spent their money to influence the American political system. We may be seeing similar developments today, as tech companies try to avoid regulation and attempt to influence the boundaries of public debate in their own self-interest.