Something to see here, move on anyway

Harry Langdon in Soldier Man (1926), via Fritzi.

David Brooks may have seen the House vote for impeachment as the death of civility in the United States, and a signal to move to the bargaining stage of grief ("Impeach Trump. Then Move On.")

The evidence against Trump is overwhelming. This Ukraine quid pro quo wasn’t just a single reckless phone call. It was a multiprong several-month campaign to use the levers of American power to destroy a political rival.... But there is little chance [Democrats] will come close to ousting the president. So I hope they set a Thanksgiving deadline. Play the impeachment card through November, have the House vote and then move on to other things.

OK, just the tip, if you have to, but then let's move on, or back, to the real problem, which is "elite negligence" in the face of "national decline", which cuts both ways among voters, he thinks,

Many Trump voters take it as a matter of course that for the rest of their lives things are going to get worse for them — economically, spiritually, politically and culturally. They are not the only voters who think this way. Many young voters in their OK Boomer T-shirts feel exactly the same, except about climate change, employment prospects and debt.

I don't know that anybody blames these things on negligence exactly. We're Americans, after all, heirs of the "paranoid style", and we're more likely to blame our problems on an actively hostile enemy, which is not necessarily an "elite" for the Trump voter, who feels assaulted by African Americans and immigrants, gay people, uppity women, college graduates, and people who think they're cool—people he feels have maybe not more status than him, but more status than they deserve compared to him—or just access to mysterious stuff whether it's cash welfare or college admissions. The young Brooks is talking about would presumably have a more focused sense of being persecuted by the elite of wealth: rapacious corporations destroying the planet, keeping the majority in chains of low wages and indebtedness, and dominating government to widen inequality.

Oh, Republicans.


There's a connection, you see, from that point of view, between Trump and the sense of decline: the wealthy elite who will do anything for a tax law that increases their relative wealth are the ones who installed Trump, because they hold our democratic institutions in such contempt that they don't care what kind of monster is in charge. And his absurd greed (I'll never forget the detail of his two scoops of ice cream when his guests only get one), his hatred of nature, his explicit preference for the real wealth elite (he's the only politician I've ever heard using the word to boast about himself: "They always call the other side ‘the elite’. Why are they elite? I have a much better apartment than they do") epitomize the normally secret emotions of the fat cat better than any editorial cartoon.

Which is why earnest conservatives like Brooks or Kristol hate him so much: because he rips the mask off their earnestness. And why, obviously, Brooks would rather stop talking about him and "move on".

Reason no. 5 why we should not expect the Republican Senate to convict Trump is pretty offensive:

Progressives, let me ask you a question: If Trump-style Republicans were trying to impeach a President Biden, Warren or Sanders, and there was evidence of guilt, would you vote to convict? Answer honestly.

If there was evidence like the evidence we have in hand on Trump, certainly I would. Not that I regard it as possible, of course, which makes it easier (and there'd be a vice president I could live with). Biden, Warren, and Sanders haven't spent their lives in the company of real estate magnates, beauty contestants and hookers, mobsters and their lawyers, and casino and television executives, haven't been lying about their income and its sources for decades, aren't being sued for tens of millions of dollars earned by defrauding poor people and veterans during the campaign, and it just doesn't seem likely. Somebody like Trump couldn't get the Democratic nomination, because the party just doesn't roll that way and mostly hasn't done so (with some backsteps in Louisiana and Illinois, I guess, and of course George Norcross's half of the New Jersey party, a member of which was a lonely vote against impeachment yesterday) for a very long time. The fact that Republicans nominated and campaigned Trump during the Trump University pretrial publicity shows that they really don't care.

But the sloppiness with which he puts the question shows that he's not even trying to think clearly anyway: it would depend on the quality of the evidence and the height of the crimes and misdemeanors alleged—I wouldn't vote to convict Bill Clinton, like all the Republican senators who didn't, five on the perjury charge and ten on the obstruction charge, because the prosecution didn't make its case, and if I were a senator-juror I hope I wouldn't make up my mind finally until I'd heard the case. Brooks doesn't seem to know that the quality of the case and actual guilt of the accused makes a difference, and this causes him to misread some polling:

Democrats have not won over the most important voters — moderates in swing states. A New York Times/Siena College survey of voters in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin found that just 43 percent want to impeach and remove Trump from office, while 53 percent do not. Pushing impeachment makes Democrats vulnerable in precisely the states they cannot afford to lose in 2020.

That leaves out the voters who want to find out whether or not he's guilty before they decide to remove, but a majority in the six states favors the inquiry 50% to 45%, independents pretty decisively:

Democrats have long feared that impeachment would alienate moderate voters. But in the pivotal states of Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Arizona, a majority of voters support the inquiry. Self-described independents back the inquiry, 51 percent to 43 percent.

Support for the impeachment inquiry is largely consistent with recent national surveys, which show registered voters backing the inquiry by an average of nine points over the last three weeks, or a margin four points higher than the one in the Times/Siena poll. In 2016, the six battleground states were about four points more favorable to Mr. Trump than the rest of the country was, a pattern that persisted in the 2018 midterm election.

If you wanted to wait until the evidence was presented, Brooks counted you as against. (And a new WaPo/ABC poll gives impeachment-and-removal a majority anyway.)

Another very weird thing, from a social science perspective, is this observation:

I’ve been traveling pretty constantly since this impeachment thing got going. I’ve been to a bunch of blue states and a bunch of red states (including Kansas, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah). In coastal blue states, impeachment comes up in conversation all the time. In red states, it never comes up; ask people in red states if they’ve been talking about it with their friends, they shrug and reply no, not really.

Really? Zero? So how come they tell pollsters they have an opinion? My guess is that to the extent this is a real thing at all it reflects doubts in the red-state environment as to whether it's a safe subject for conversation; when I visit upstate New York nobody in mixed blue-red company ever talks about Trump, but you can see from their Facebook posts that they're thinking about it all the time, on both sides; and we gossip about them when we're alone together and I'm sure they gossip about us. I think Republicans are more sensitive about that, because they know they're in the wrong.

As does Brooks, in the end. The man who has so often inveighed against the moral coarsening of our culture can't think it's good to sweep the president's acknowledged crimes under the rug and go back to having a conversation about civility while those activities normalize themselves. As to those "moderate swing voters" who can't decide whether it's worse to have a criminal president or one who thinks billionaires should pay higher taxes and everybody needs health care, I don't know, maybe they'll figure it out. Whether he's removed from office or not, the news about Trump isn't going to get any better over the next 12 months, as Brooks understands, and as he may not understand the end of the impeachment case won't end that as other matters whether from Russia or Palm Beach keep re-emerging (particularly looking forward to the House Oversight Committee getting its hands on Trump's financial and tax reports, too late, alas, for its late chairman Elijah Cummings, but not too late to affect the election), and it won't be very nice for the Republican party. The only thing that would be nice for the Republican Party is for 20 senators to side with the truth now rather than later.

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