Authoritarianism and its enablers

Paul Waldman has a useful if somewhat eclectic look at the current American authoritarianism, The Trump depression (and we don't mean the economy): Key symptom of autocratic regimes Salon 09/15/2019.

What particularly resonates with me in Waldman's piece is his discussion of the enablers, as district from supporters. One of the lessons of the Weimar Republic to me is that if enough people want to do away with democracy, and enough people are indifferent to it.

One of the most significant things about the end of the Weimar Republic is that in a technical, constitutional sense, Hitler's regime never did away with it. The Weimar Constitution was never formally abolished under the Nazis. The government just ignored it.

He quotes Elizabeth Mika:

The Democrats' ambivalent response to Trump's lawlessness contributes to the problem:

Demoralization and disillusionment with the Democrats' ability to understand and respect the wishes of their supporters, and to effect change, are likely to result. ... Their ambivalence of course serves to embolden Trump and legitimize his actions. One necessary action to take is to contact and confront our representatives, let them know what we think and publicize it through social media. We are the people. They work for us, after all.

This is true. Sam Seder on The Majority Report has recently said that the Founders of the US Constitution foresaw a President like Donald Trump, but what they didn't foresee was a Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House or Chuck Schumer as Senate opposition leader who would simply decline to use their available powers to effectively counter a President like Trump.

I don't think that's literally true, but it makes an important, realistic point. The famous separation-of-powers enshrined in the US Constitution and now generally considered to be essential for any constitutional democracy was based on a Montesquiean/Madisonian idea that setting up parts of the government as having complementary but also competing institutional roles would allow the effects of personal ambitions and institutional self-protection to have not only the usual corrosive and inevitable side-effects, but would also serve as a check on tyranny and on one Branch of the government overstepping its proper role.

The concept is not that everyone would put aside politics and "divisiveness," because it basically didn't occur to them to rely on an idea so foreign to everything they knew about human history. And they certainly didn't think that functioning of the government would always be benign. That was the whole point of having checks-and-balances and a democratic electoral basis for the government, so that it would limit the worst abuses and force the government to pay attention to the demands of the public.

Yes, it's important to remember that they were making a government for a political community of property-owning white men. But it was the world's most far-reaching experiment in democracy at the time. And was so perceived by other nations in the world, especially Europe and the Americas. And the Constitution is still in effect, so what the Founders understood about it is still very relevant to today's politics.

Did the Founders think that it was possible that the politicians elected under that system might do such a bad job that they the system itself might fail? They clearly did. So in that sense, they understood the potential for fecklessness on the part of leaders of the Pelosi-Schumer kind. Heck, they were familiar with female sovereigns in Europe, including queens of England, so at least some of them must have imagined the possibility of a female Speaker of the House, too.

I wonder what Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) would have thought of Pelosi's defense of Trump and presumably Kavanaugh against impeachment.

Here is Madison channeling Montesquieu in Federalist #47:

No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty, than that on which the objection is founded. The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. ...

From these facts, by which Montesquieu was guided, it may clearly be inferred, that in saying, "there can be no liberty, where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates;" or, "if the power of judging, be not separated from the legislative and executive powers," he did not mean that these departments ought to have no partial agency in, or no control over the acts of each other. His meaning, as his own words import, and still more conclusively as illustrated by the example in his eye, can amount to no more than this, that where the whole power of one department is exercised by the same hands which possess the whole power of another department, the fundamental principles of a free constitution are subverted.

Pelosi and the House Democrats have a real Constitutional responsibility here. If they are capable of managing it right - not a foregone conclusion! - an impeachment process against Trump and/or Kavanaugh would benefit them politically. But there are no guarantees. Wht they do have is a Constititional responsibility.