IT IS WHAT IT IS

I cringe when people say that to me. It signals resignation, surrender, defeatism. And yet, after the deplorable Republican display at the House of Representatives last week, the inescapable conclusion I arrive at when it comes to the immediate future of the American political scene is: It is what it is. As if this isn’t bad enough, the even more scary part is that it portends to be getting much worse before we get a shot at repairing the damage and safeguarding a functioning democracy. The next election is not until November of 2024 and until then, ‘We The People’ are powerless to hold our politicians accountable.

Thanks to C-SPAN and the absence of rules governing the live TV reporting of the proceedings in the House of Representatives (these rules renew with each Congress and cannot be established until a speaker of the House has been chosen) we got a good view of the ugliness of the power struggle within the Republican caucus, the deep and prolonged humiliation Kevin McCarthy was willing to accept in order to ultimately attain the coveted speakership, but also the disciplined and dignified behavior of the House Chaplain, the Clerk of the House, and a very unified Democratic caucus. What was hidden from view was the detail of the concessions Kevin McCarthy had to make to get a hold of the gavel. What is clear though is that, whatever conservative agenda McCarthy was already planning to bring forward under his speakership will now be pushed further to the extreme right, where it will be confronted with resistance from the Democratic controlled Senate and the Presidential veto power. This means that in terms of legislative work, the main job of a legislature, the 118^th Congress will not accomplish anything.

In the battle for the speakership, Kevin McCarthy had a choice to either seek the support of the 20 MAGA fanatics who would not accept his leadership without holding it hostage to their extremist demands, in effect gutting the speakership of any authority, or seek the support of moderates on either side of the aisle who remain committed to good public governance and the tenets of democracy. Knowing that he would be ostracized by his party if he would resist the challenge from his right flank, he fatally made the wrong choice. He put party before country and that is what we will have to live with for the next two years, until we get back to the voting booth. Until then, It is what it is.

The outcome of the speakership contest has made clear what we can expect to come out of the House of Representatives during the 118^th Congress: A slate of messaging bills to assuage the MAGA constituency (which will not go anywhere in the Democratic controlled Senate), and a tidal wave of investigations into perceived misdeeds of the Biden administration, the FBI, the IRS, the CDC, Dr. Fauci and, of course and with renewed fervor, Hunter Biden. We can fully expect several impeachments, of President Biden and/or members of his administration, to result from these investigations, if for nothing else, as a tit for tat counter of the two Trump impeachments coming out of the Pelosi led 117^th Congress. All annoying and a distraction from the job of addressing the ills that plague the nation, inequality, immigration chaos, inflation, deficits, cyber insecurity, and threats to our national security from a number of foreign sources. But the real menace of the devilish alliance between Kevin McCarthy and his 20 opponents comes from the need, sometime in 2023, for Congress to raise the debt-ceiling as necessary for the US government to meet its financial obligations. Without it, the USA will default on its debt with unimaginable consequences for the credit rating of the country, the value of the dollar, the financial markets, and the national and global economy. Yet, apparently, the speaker of the House has pledged to his opponents in the GOP caucus that he will not introduce a bill to raise the debt-ceiling without extracting large spending cuts in the already approved budget for 2023, possibly including cuts in entitlement programs, military spending, and aid to Ukraine. This will set up a clash between the House Republicans and the White House and the question is who will blink first? Will Kevin McCarthy get all of his caucus to follow him to the rim of the fiscal cliff or over it, or will President Biden cave in to the demands of the speaker for the sake of sparing the country the ultimate test of creditworthiness? Will Kevin McCarthy still be speaker at decision time and will the composition of the Congress still be the same as it is today? The margins of control are so narrow that a number of deaths, resignations, or expulsions of members of Congress could quickly change the balance of power.

Bottomline is, ‘We The People’ are bystanders to what will unfold in the Beltway over the next two years. It is out of our hands, because, other than for an odd special election or primaries for the 2024 national election, we will not have a chance to turn to the voting booth to let our elected representatives know where we want them to lead us. It is what it is.

The date to focus on is Tuesday, November 5, 2024. The next national election day. Regardless of who will be the contenders in that election, it is shaping up as a contest between 1) those of us who believe that a democratically constituted government should play an active role in shaping the future of the nation and in creating a fair playing field for all of its constituents, 2) those who believe that government is the problem standing in the way of free people to express themselves and determine their own destiny and the destiny of the nation, and 3) those who believe that democracy has outlived its usefulness and should be substituted by an authoritarian rule.

I am squarely in the first camp, and I quietly hope that for the sake of the nation the House Republicans will go overboard in their zeal to undo the Biden/Pelosi agenda and punish the Democrats for their audacity to craft bipartisan support for their major legislative achievements in the 117^th Congress. The crew that delivered the gavel to Kevin McCarthy, only after extracting a steep price in concessions he initially pledged he would never make, is more than likely to comply. If the Republican focus in the 118^th Congress is retribution rather than problem solving, we will be given a clear compass for where to place our votes in 2024. In the meantime, whether we like it or not, it is what it is.

IT IS A CRIME

While we are still waiting to see if the Special Counsel Jack Smith will indict Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection or for this misappropriation of secret documents, it isn’t unreasonable to ask ourselves why it is that the former President isn’t getting prosecuted for a wide range of other crimes that he has committed in plain view throughout and after his time in the White House.

Let’s first see what the crimes are that we are talking about and then address why, at least until now, Donald Trump hasn’t been indicted for any of them.

When we say: “it’s a crime that…….” we don’t necessarily refer to an action that meets the criteria of our penal code. We really mean to say: “this should have never happened.” That’s what we are dealing with as we evaluate the Trump presidency and the damage it has done to our democracy and our sanity.

The story of the Trump presidency is how he has managed to run the office and business of the Commander in Chief as the Godfather ran his criminal empire and turned it into a fiefdom that only served his personal interest and ambition. The story of the Trump presidency is one of lying, grifting, embarrassing America on the world stage, undermining our institutions, and attempting to nullify the constitution. The whole thing was one big criminal endeavor. Realizing this, it makes us feel slighted and small if the only thing Trump will be held to account for is his mishandling of government papers.

On the other hand, we must realize that Al Capone was only convicted and put in prison for tax evasion, although that was one of his least damaging criminal offenses.

It is a crime that for the time of his presidency the White House has been run as a subsidiary of the Trump enterprise, staffed with members of the Trump family and other lackeys.

It is a crime that he has used the office of the President for the benefit of himself, his family, and his business that, as improbable as it may seem today, he was never forced to separate himself from when he entered the Oval Office.

It is a crime that he has been allowed to silence victims of his criminal conduct by means of non-disclosure agreements and silence fees.

It is a crime that his hostile take-over of the Republican Party has driven so many competent and law-abiding republican office holders away from participation in our public governance, people like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Ben Sasse, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Charlie Dent, Rob Portman, John Kasich, Pete Meyer.

It is a crime that, as President, he has not taken the threat of Covid seriously from the day the virus was identified, misled people with his advocacy of Clorox and hydroxychloroquine as treatment, and denigrated, sidelined, and overruled the health officials at the Center of Disease Control and other parts of the medical community.

And then of course there are the crimes that he has been impeached for twice, but for which he was let off the hook by a partisan vote in the Senate.

As to the reasons why, as of yet, he has not been held to account for these crimes, the first explanation comes from the uniquely American principle that a sitting President cannot be prosecuted for alleged criminal offenses under the theory that the constitutional way to hold a President to account is by the process of impeachment. Only after a President is removed from office can he/she be indicted and prosecuted for a criminal offense. As an additional safeguard, Trump made sure that at the top of the Department of Justice he had an attorney general who had demonstrated to be willing to do his bidding.

The other explanation comes from an uncertainty about the judicial process when dealing with a (former) President of the United States. In America we like to say that “nobody is above the law”, but do we really mean that? Trump lawyers will argue that a President is immune from criminal as well as private suits and it is far from certain how the current Supreme Court will respond to that argument. Another argument goes that the animal didn’t change his stripes. When we elected Donald Trump to be our President, we knew exactly what we were getting ourselves into. He had made that abundantly clear in a two-year campaign process and by his behavior as a real estate mogul and a media celebrity. Are we now justified going after him when he did exactly what he told us he would do and behaved exactly like he behaved all through his adult life and his election campaign?

The final explanation, and the one that Jack Smith and Merrick Garland are now chewing on, is that it is no sinecure to obtain a conviction of a duly elected politician who has managed to elevate himself to a cult like status from a ‘jury of his peers’. In the first place, a cult leader has no peers and furthermore it will be exceedingly difficult to get 12 randomly selected citizens to unanimously agree on a guilty verdict for any crimes committed by someone who is the cult leader of at least several of these jurors. Without a unanimous verdict there is no conviction.

Maybe, the crime is on us. It is a crime that America has allowed this deeply flawed, corrupt, and dangerous man to hold the highest office in the land of the free. We now must deal with the consequences of the Republican abdication of duty when a large majority of Republican Senators twice refused to convict their President for the crimes he so blatantly committed.

THE FEVER HAS BROKEN

On the eve of Election Day, November 8, 2022, I tweeted “This moment feels like an episode of Will the Real America please Stand Up?” There was, and had been, so much talk, including from me, about the threat that the mid-term election of 2022 could spell the end of our democracy as we knew it, but all the doomsaying had come from the partisans and the pundits; we had not heard from the voters and that was about to change. The debate in the media had reached a fever pitch with so much at stake and the realization that we are a divided country and that a few votes here or there could make a huge difference in the tug of war between full democracy and the autocratic tendencies that had crept up in our political discourse.

The threat to full republican democracy emanated from the refusal of our 45^th President to accept the legitimacy of the vote in the 2020 Presidential election that he had lost by a wide margin and the support his election denial had gained in wide swaths of the Republican Party (141 House Republicans and 6 Republican Senators voted against certification of Biden’s victory). Further fueled by the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol and the discovery of the use of election denial as a tool to win in primary elections, election denial had infected the whole body politic and threatened to kill democracy as we had known it for centuries. Just like, before the discovery of antibiotics, a bacterial infection would keep the patient in a death struggle until the fever broke (or not and the patient died), the fever the nation was suffering from would have to be broken by the voters or democracy in America might have to be declared dead.

Even though not all results of the November 8 election are in, the real America has stood up and revealed that it stands, as before, with democracy. The country is as divided as ever (just look at a near evenly split Senate and House of Representatives), but in virtually all the headline races in competitive States and Districts, voters have dismissed the blatant election deniers, Q-Anon conspirators, and would-be autocrats. But, as many others have already pointed out, the threat has not completely been removed. We need to realize that a large majority of voting districts are non-competitive, some because of traditional political preference, many because of jerrymandered district configuration. The Cook Political Report identified 345 of the 435 voting districts ‘non-competitive’, 159 solid Democratic and 186 solid Republican. That is 79% of the House seats. In these districts election deniers had a free run and many of them got elected to public office. This built-in feature of ‘safe’ districts is a clear limitation of functioning democracy, which cannot be removed without adjusting the number of House seats in tune with the population growth and by political and judicial rejection of jerrymandering.

What we can derive from this reality is that a battle was won, but the war isn’t over. It will take several more election cycles, and defeats of extreme anti-democratic contenders before we can say for sure that republican democracy is safe in America. The 2024 Presidential election will be the next determinant.

Although Donald Trump took a severe indirect beating in the mid-term election by seeing most of his endorsed candidates go down in defeat, he will figure large in the next big showdown. He will announce his candidacy tonight and regardless of whether he will get the Republican nomination or not, he will have a huge influence on the outcome of the election. The future of the GOP and the future of the two-party system in America are in his hands. As Charlie Sykes, an American political commentator and editor-in-chief of the website ‘The Bulwark,’ has pointed out: “Trump can destroy the party whenever he wants, yet the party can’t destroy him without also risking its own crack-up”. The vote for the leadership position in the now Republican controlled House of Representatives will give us a first glimpse of the struggle within the GOP between Trump backers and those who want to move on from the stranglehold Trump has held over the party since 2016. If the GOP unity survives that struggle, it will have to contend with the primary elections for 2024 and particularly the looming confrontation between Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump. If in the end the GOP denies Donald Trump the nomination, I see him running as an Independent against the Republican nominee, which will split the party for good and hand the White House to the Democrats on a silver platter.

Oh, how would the Republican establishment wish that it had backed away from Donald Trump when it had an open chance with the second Trump impeachment! It would have neutered Trumpism and election denial and it would have given the Republican Party a resounding victory in the polls this November; it would have delivered them complete control of the Senate and the House of Representatives (as it is, Republican candidates for the House of Representatives garnered 4.5% more votes that their Democratic opponents). The only thing that stood in the way of a red wave was Donald Trump and the acolytes he pushed forward for elected office. The same phantom will be standing in the way of a Republican recapture of the White House in 2024, even if between now and then he ends up being indicted for the crimes he has committed while in office. Which is a shame, because in my opinion the GOP has a much more qualified bench with people like Liz Cheney, Larry Hogan, Chris Sununu, or Charlie Baker than the Democrats. And, with all due respect, Joe Biden will be too age limited to serve a full and productive second term in his eighties. He may be their strongest candidate to win the election, but he should consider getting elected and stepping out of the way in favor of the person he would pick as his running mate.

Yes, the fever has broken, but the source of the infection has yet to be removed.

A few more takeaways from the mid-term election held precisely a week ago:

·        Florida and Ohio are no longer swing States, they are bright red.

·        Democrats lost control of the House because of poor performance in California and New York.

·        Democrats failed to break through in Texas.

·        New England is reliably blue.

·        Incumbency has been a marked advantage even for seriously challenged candidates like Ron Johnson in WI; Chuck Grassley in Iowa; Greg Abbot in TX; Marco Rubio in FL; Michael Bennet in CO; Rand Paul in KY; and Brian Kemp in GA.

·        If the Democrats win one more Senate seat in the December 6 run-off election in Georgia, the power of the Democratic hold-outs Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema will be greatly diminished.

·        The report of the January 6 Committee, who’s work will now be finished during the 117^th Congress, and DOJ action on the various Trump investigations, will greatly determine how the political picture will change between now and November of 2024.

·        In addition to getting help from the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe vs Wade and from Trump’s grip on the GOP, Joe Biden has staved off a devastating defeat for the Democrats by being effective in garnering bipartisan support for some important legislative initiatives and by resisting any temptation to change the rules of the game by eliminating the filibuster rule, packing the Supreme Court, or granting Statehood to the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico.

·        Gen Z has had an impact on the election result by voting overwhelmingly Democratic even if its turnout has been pegged at only 27%.

DEMOCRACY UNDER ATTACK

We are three weeks away from the mid-term election and as I look at the world today, I see a very different picture from what I was used to seeing for most of my life and from what I expected to be seeing as an inevitable path to destiny.

Growing up in the Netherlands as I did after the second world war, I looked at Eastern Europe as a backwater that was hardly worth paying attention to. A lost cause, largely hidden behind the iron curtain. All through my schooling years, I was a fervent proponent of European unification, but Eastern Europe was not part of the consideration. Civilization, in my eyes, had developed on a continuum from ancient Greece to the Roman Empire, to the Renaissance in Western Europe, and was now in the custody of the Western Alliance that had been forged out of the two world wars. America, having been the decisive factor in winning the wars, was in my eyes the undisputed champion of freedom and democracy.

Today, the world looks a little different. If the polls have it right, (and that is a big “if” because with the disappearance of landlines for telephone communication and peoples’ tendency to block calls on their cell phone from unnamed sources, who really gets polled?) American voters see democracy in peril but are disinclined to make the issue the litmus test when it comes to voting for or against candidates who are a threat to the voting rights for all eligible citizens and a threat to democracy as we know it.

I wipe my eyes in disbelief when I read that suddenly 28 percent of all voters, including 41 percent of Republicans, say that they have little or no faith in the accuracy of this year’s midterm elections. This is what the echo chambers fed by the partisan media have wrought. Republicans, who are now faithful Trump followers, are set to only accept election results that come out in their favor and Democrats have doubts that this time the system will hold and that the popular vote will prevail in all cases, against any shenanigans that Republican governors, Secretaries of State, State legislatures, and other election officials can come up with.

Isn’t the American election apparatus supposed to be the envy of the world in fairness and accuracy? And hasn’t it been proven over time to be incorruptible and unassailable? What has suddenly changed? The answer has to lie with the current mass media which allow for falsehoods, rumors, innuendo, and conspiracy theories to spread instantaneously and widely without being seriously contested. Opposing voices are simply muted out.

It is inconceivable to me 1) that Americans going to the voting booths on November 8 will ignore the threats to democracy represented by those candidates for public office who still deny the results of the 2020 presidential election. 2) That the voters will forgive the Senate Republicans who endangered our democracy by not impeaching Trump and eliminating him from elected office after it had become clear that he would do just about anything to block a peaceful transition of government. 3) That American women will overlook the fact that sovereignty over their bodies is being denied by one of the two political parties. 4) That Independent voters, who represent a larger segment of the voting population than either the Republicans or the Democrats, would be accepting of the far-right or far-left positions espoused by the candidates who have survived the partisan primaries. 5) That young voters would allow retrograde illiberal policies to rule their lives and prospects. 6) That senior citizens would accept the Republican proposal to subject their social security to a five-year sunset provision. 7) That patriotic Americans would look up to Putin as an effective national leader rather than a thug. All of that defies logic. And yet, all of this may come to pass and will be revealed by the outcome of the mid-term election.

The bottom line is that American democracy is in peril, and it is unclear if “the People”, who under our constitution are supposed to be the final source of authority, will fend off the challenge presented from within.

Contrast this with the heroic display of courage, belief, and conviction by the people in Ukraine and Iran who are literally under the gun and are willing to put their lives on the line for the right to live their lives as they see fit. I was wrong all along, pinning my hope and beliefs on the Christian western civilization and dismissing the value and strength of the east European culture and the willingness to fight for what is right now on display in Ukraine, as it was in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

It becomes clear to me how telling it is that, after the Revolutionary War, America has never had to fight again for the system of government its founders had designed and implemented. It was only threatened, one time and from within, by the issue of slavery and the Civil War. That kind of fight has, until now and in the Atlantic sphere, been the fate of the East European powers. It now looks like complacency has set in on our shores. We have had it too good for too long and now we no longer recognize how precious and tenuous democracy, the right to be governed by the people we elect to the offices we create, truly is. If the American people are okay with allowing a President to thwart an orderly transition of government to a duly elected successor and putting people like Herschel Walker and Mehmet Oz in the Senate, we are no longer serious about good democratic governance.

Democracy is under attack, here, and in Ukraine; in Iran the people are fighting to regain a democratic rule. If we are the only ones who don’t care enough about democracy to fight for it, maybe we deserve to get what the polls seem to tell us we will be getting. Then the fight for democracy will have to be fought again by future generations. We are already burdening future generations with a burgeoning national debt. It would be unconscionable to ask them to also restore us to democracy.

FROM UP HIGH

In this blog post, I’m going to a high elevation to review the landscape. It is a practice that I see used by native Americans hunting the pole circle wilderness for subsistence harvesting when they climb to a high point in their terrain to glass the surroundings for prey. So much we can learn from the culture and practices of people who got conditioned by the absence of modern conveniences like roads, tap water, power and sewage systems, cell towers and all of the utilities enabled by such infrastructure!

From our high point we are able to see the forest for the trees.

There is so much going on both domestically and internationally that it is hard to keep seeing the big picture. It is so easy to get myopically focused on one or two storylines and fail to see the complexity of so many things happening at the same time, atmospherically, geographically, politically, scientifically, socially, and economically.

I’m taking my spot on the high perch and what do I see?

First, my eye catches the landscape of Ukraine, where, for the first time since the Russian invasion of February 24, the Ukrainian army seems to be on the winning hand and is slowly recapturing a good part of the ground it lost in the early phase of the Russian intrusion. The Ukrainian will and power of resistance is inspiring and effective beyond belief. No two situations are the same, but I can’t help comparing the Ukrainian refusal to bend for Putin’s troops with the ineffective defense of the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Denmark, and Norway against the onslaught by Nazi Germany. Including the heroic decision by the Ukrainian President Zelenskyy to stay put in Kyiv, lead the defense, and organize strong international economic, humanitarian, and military support. Who, at the onset of the Russian invasion, predicted that 7 months into the war, the Zelenskyy government would still be in control of most of the Ukrainian territory, including its capital, and in effect be on the counterattack against a mighty Russian military force? It is too early to foresee where this conflict will go from here, but what has been established beyond doubt is that Ukraine is a vibrant, determined, courageous nation that will not (again) be subjugated by an imperial Russian authoritarian regime.

My gaze drifts for a moment to England, where an end has come to a more than 70-year reign by Queen Elizabeth II. Nobody does pump and circumstance like the British! After Brexit, the fall of the Boris Johnson government, the dispiriting spectacle of the Tory battle for the Johnson succession, the poor state of the U.K. economy, the weakness of the pound sterling, and the painfully high rate of inflation, the Queen was a rare symbol of British stability. The mourning and the long display of tributes and ceremonies has given England some respite from the national malaise, but it will only be temporary and soon enough reality will sink in. One has to pity the new king who will not have the time, the character, and the popular support to make us forget the second Elizabethan reign. It may be up to the English national soccer team at the World Cup in November to salvage some of the global prestige of Britannia.

Speaking of November brings me to the mid-term elections to be held in the USA on November 8. That will be the time that American citizens are given the chance to speak up on how and by whom they want to be governed. The ballot will be open on all of the seats in the House of Representatives, one-third of the seats in the Senate, and numerous State and local initiatives and elective offices.

While history and conventional wisdom point to a resounding defeat of the party of the incumbent President in his first term in office, there is tension in the air and a strong suggestion that this is going to be anything but a normal routine mid-term election. For three reasons. First, because of the commotion and indignation caused by the recent Supreme Court ruling in the Dobbs case, that reversed the 50-year-old Roe vs Wade ruling that gave US women a constitutional right to have an abortion. Second, because of the tumult in the Republican Party between the Trump fraction and the conventional Republicans. In many of the primaries leading up to the mid-term election Trump loyalists have come out on top but may have great difficulty attracting the vote of conventional Republicans and Independents in the general election. And third, because of actions and declarations of populist Republican office holders, governors and congressmen, on the subject of abortion and immigration that are far outside of the bounds of popular opinion. Each of these expressions of the culture wars raging in the USA are stirring the ire of the public and are likely to drive an extraordinary number of voters to the voting booths on November 8.

Unbiased observers will also point to the quiet but exceptional progress the Biden administration has made in the first two years of its term in office. Without having to resort to ‘nuclear options’ like abolishing the filibuster rule, packing the Supreme Court, or granting Statehood to Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, or the U.S. Territories. Given the wafer-thin margin of control of the House and the Senate, it is remarkable what the Biden Administration has been able to do with respect to infrastructure renovation, gun control legislation, chips manufacturing repatriation, veterans’ healthcare improvement, college debt reduction, and climate control measures. With the economy and the supply chain flow threatened by a rail labor dispute, it has decisively stepped in to avoid a strike. In foreign affairs it has rebuilt trust and cooperation within the Western Alliance, strengthened NATO and lead the free world to assist the Ukrainians in their struggle against the Russian invaders.

From my high perch I can see all the way to China where, starting on October 16, the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party will decide if it will keep supporting the personal cult of President Xi Jinping and give him an unprecedented third term in office. Although he has carefully and ruthlessly stacked the deck in favor of his ambitions, a tradition of collective rule and cultural aversion to a personality cult rivaling the one of Mao Zedong may put his leadership to a test at a time that it is weakened by the unpopular and ineffective control of the Covid epidemic that started in China, by a weakened economy and by resentment against the technology enhanced surveillance state he has put in place.

My panoramic view reveals a global struggle between progress and regress, between democracy and authoritarianism, and ultimately between peace and war. What has yet to come in focus is how these struggles will be decided, but it is clear that the next two years will, if not decisive, be indicative of the kind of future that awaits us. In America it will be shaped by popular vote in November of this year and in November of 2024. Not all nations are that lucky and it remains to be seen if our luck holds. By rights, sovereignty resides with the people of nations, not with whomever happens to temporarily have assumed secular administrative control.

DEMOCRACY DEMANDS

Liz Cheney’s resounding defeat in the Republican primary for the only Wyoming seat in the House of Representatives signals a watershed moment in America’s political constellation.

On one hand it provides clarity: There is no more doubt where today’s Republican Party stands. The litmus test is clear and absolute: If you are not an election denier, you are not a Republican. Of the ten Republican members of the House of Representatives who voted for impeachment in Trump’s second impeachment trial, only two are left standing, David Valadao of California and Daniel Newhouse of Washington.

On the other hand, the future looks murkier than ever, and more ominous. Liz Cheney’s defeat raises so many questions about the future of what she terms to be ‘this miraculous experiment called America’:

·        Who will stand beside her in defense of the American democracy while campaigning for public office in 2022 and 2024?

·        What platform will be left for her to continue her battle after the new Congress convenes in 2023 and she will no longer be the Vice-Chair of the January 6 Committee (which may not be there any longer either if Republicans win the House of Representatives in November)?

·        Will she run for President in 2024, and if so as a Republican or an Independent? In her concession speech she emphatically and repeatedly declared herself to be a Republican. But the current Republican Party wants nothing to do with her.

·        Who will emerge as the Democratic front runner for the 2024 Presidential Election? In spite of all official pronouncements to the contrary, Biden will be too old to run effectively, and Kamala Harris has done nothing to deserve taking over the mantle. At this early stage, the absence of a clear front runner from within the Democratic Party – one who can unite all wings of the party and attract Independents in large numbers – gives Trump a huge advantage if he can win a contested Republican primary. Who is there on the Democratic side? Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Jamie Raskin? Ironically, the person who is best positioned to attract the vote of Democrats, Independents, and probably some remaining anti-Trump Republicans, is Joe Manchin, who has thwarted the original Biden agenda at almost every turn but is a stalwart of constitutional democracy.

The irony is that, if it comes to preserving the great American experiment in democracy, the best candidates to squash the authoritarian populist wave that has engulfed a significant part of the voting public are on the Republican side with people like Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, Larry Hogan, and Ben Sasse. But, sadly, none of these can be expected to prevail in a Republican primary contest against Donald Trump. And Ron DeSantis is too much of a authoritarian populist himself to be relied on for saving the constitutional republic.

There is much to be said for having one of these traditional Republicans, if none of them can beat Trump or DeSantis in the Republican primary, run as an Independent for the Presidency in 2024, but with a weak Democratic candidate, it would almost certainly siphon off Independent voters and some moderate Democrats and by default hand the victory to the person who should in Liz Cheney’s words never again be near the Oval Office.

It is now clear that a major, if not decisive, battle for democracy was lost when in February of 2021 only 7 Republican senators ( Lisa Murkowski, Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, and Pat Toomey) voted to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial which centered on his denial of his defeat against Joe Biden and his actions and omissions during the government transition period between the November 3, 2020 election and Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021. The January 6 investigation has established beyond any reasonable doubt that, following his electoral defeat, the former President tried every trick in the book to thwart a peaceful transition of power and he should have been impeached for that. It would have eliminated the pickle we are finding ourselves in today. Instead, the Senate, needing 67 votes for a conviction but getting only 57, acquitted him.

America will now be forced to go through four excruciating political contests: The midterm elections which will decide control of Congress for the next two years and the lead-up to the 2024 Presidential election; the primary elections to decide the Presidential candidates for 2024; the Presidential election itself; and -menacingly – the contest of wills following the election of the new President if, like in 2020, the loser refuses to concede.

America is facing a double threat to its democracy:

1.       There is a real risk that in the 2024 Presidential Election an anti-democratic, authoritarian, populist will be voted into the White House; and

2.       If that is not the case, we can expect to see a repeat of the denial of the electoral outcome, this time assisted by State legislatures and officials willing to overrule the popular vote and pick their own slate of electors.

In either scenario, we must fear for violence in the streets. America will then pay the price for having allowed ordinary citizens, including members of the political fringes on the left and the right, to arm themselves with an unlimited supply of military style weapons. We have already seen enough of the tragic consequences with the events of January 6 and recent attacks on the FBI and other law enforcement. No one can say we were not forewarned. The threats are everywhere on social and a-social media.

Democracy demands that American voters come to their senses and vote in droves, in November and again in 2024, for only those candidates for elected office who profess to abide by the verdict that the voters pass on them when they enter the voting booth.

DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED

There is no denying that, ever since I published my book NEITHER HERE NOR THERE in 2014, I have grown increasingly pessimistic about the political future of our beloved country. At a stage of my life, towards the end, that I should be mostly concerned with enjoying my retirement, my beautiful family, and the unshackling of any business obligation, I find myself obsessing with what I see developing as the undoing of the great American experiment in democracy.

I lived so long with the mantra “do the best with what is within your control and don’t waste any energy on things that are beyond your control”, but now I can’t help myself agonizing every waking moment about what I see as an inexorably disintegrating American dream, realizing full well that, if it is happening, it is completely beyond my control. It is well known that Benjamin Franklin on September 18, 1787 – the last day of the Constitutional Convention- in answer to the question ‘what have we wrought’ answered: ‘a republic if you can keep it’. For 235 years we have managed to keep a constitutional republic, but now I fear that we may not be able to safeguard it any longer.

The source of my pessimism is found in a message I recently received from an old friend of mine who represents the populist version of extreme right-wing ideology – the political undercurrent I fear most – in which he lamented: “Beginning about 1992 America began to feel guilty about our accomplishments, our exceptionalism, and our wealth. And from Inauguration Day 1992 (the start of the Clinton presidency) we have, inch by inch, foot by foot, meter by meter, disassembled the greatest God-fearing constitutional republic ever formed on earth. But today, 30 years and 6 months later we are absolutely doomed! I can’t fix it and I damn sure refuse to ruin my few remaining years on earth trying to understand why my country abandoned me and traded me for a very small community of left-wing kooks!!! I no longer believe in the USA. I did my part, so I am comfortable I did my best to help the USA!!! She’s truly of course, failing fast and sure to collapse.”

This is America in a nutshell today. We are both afraid that the great American experiment is doomed, but for diametrically opposed reasons. I am deeply concerned about the future of our democracy because in our two-party system one of the parties has chosen to put party over country and is making its case to the people by fearmongering, appealing to its most primitive nativist instincts, spinning the craziest conspiracy stories, and taking advantage of a carefully orchestrated take-over of State governorships, State legislatures, and the Supreme Court. At the same time, my old friend feels defeated by the threat of a take-over of the government of the nation by ‘left-wing kooks’. You would think that he would feel buoyed by the prospect of Republican control of the Congress after the November election, by the re-emergence of Donald Trump and his sympathizers, and by the support his ideologies are getting from a retrograde Supreme Court. But, instead, he believes no longer in the USA.

While I am concerned about the fact that voting rights are getting trampled in all bright-red States; that it has proven to be impossible in the current political constellation to strengthen our democracy by some simple improvements to our governance model by reducing the money influence in politics, eliminating gerrymandering, increasing the number of members of the House of Representatives, eliminating the ‘winner takes all’ rule in the assignment of members of the Electoral College, and making ‘ranked voting’ the rule in State elections; my old friend wants us to go back to the time that white male conservatives controlled all levers of power in the political domain.

While I am concerned about the cavernous inequality that has split American society; about peoples’ indulgence with the proliferation of guns in America and the resulting daily carnage they cause; about peoples’ tolerance for misinformation coming at us from social media and partisan news channels; about populist attempts to whitewash all sordid aspects of our checkered history; and about a clear resurfacing of racist, nativist, sentiment that gets openly spewed in political campaigns on the right; my old friends frets about our nation slipping into a socialist wasteland.

How can these diametrically opposed assessments of where we are heading and what the relevant threats to our nation are be reconciled? The only point we agree on is that the outlook is bleak, that we are on a path to doom of our own making. And I’m afraid my old friend and I are representative of the two camps the nation has split into and that is the reason for my increased pessimism. With the camps so diametrically opposed, and seemingly no viable constituency in the middle, how do we ever get out of this impasse and find a way to regain our democratic élan, bring our system of government up to speed with modern times, and thus save the republic that was created 235 years ago?

God forbid that we just throw in the towel and surrender to the antidemocratic groundswell that has swept what once was the Grand Old Party. It is now really up to the People. With the elections of 2022 and 2024 the voting public has the opportunity to right the ship, save the democracy -and the republic- by unequivocally denying the populist right-wing zealots access to elected office. What is needed is the mobilization of every citizen in defense of our constitutional democracy so that we can prosper under a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. And I mean all of the people, not just the ones who rule the roost.

Postscript. Tonight, in prime time, we will witness the final scheduled hearing of the January 6 Committee, which will be presided over by Republican Representative Liz Cheney (since chairman Benny Thompson is in Covid quarantine). The January 6  hearings have been the only serious push-back against the authoritarian take-over of the GOP by Trump and his sycophants. Faced with the near certainty that its work will be halted after the mid-term elections in November, the Committee is working overtime to get the record established on the insurrection attempted by the former President and condoned by most Republicans. Liz Cheney is a rare politician who is prepared to put her political future on the line in pursuit of defense of our democracy. As such, she is one of only a few bulwarks against a decisive slide into authoritarianism. Her warning is stern: “As a country, we’re at a moment where we really do have to step back from the abyss and it’s not totally clear to me that we’re going to. The forces that want to drag us over the edge are strong and fighting. But we have to.” I hope all of America will be watching tonight and be heeding her warning.