How Fragile Are Our Constitutional Norms?
A new study sounds the alarm.
Catching up:
Boom. U.S. economy adds 216,000 jobs in December, ending 2023 with a bang — Axios
Graft in plain sight. Trump Received Millions From Foreign Governments as President, Report Finds — New York Times
Chris Christie commented on CNN:
Christie: This was the problem from the beginning in the way Donald Trump decided to handle his business affairs and having his sons nominally be in charge. I think all of us know that he never really let go of his business interests while he was president. And so these are things that just continue to add to the reasons why he's unfit to be President of the United States again.
Gormless GOP Update: Trump gloated about Tom Emmer’s endorsement after he derailed the top Republican’s speakership bid: ‘They always bend the knee’ — Business Insider
Our fire bell in the night. Biden marks Jan. 6 with election-year warning on democratic threats — Reuters
The Black Swans of 2024? We’ve got you covered. The Unpredictable But Entirely Possible Events That Could Throw 2024 Into Turmoil - Politico Magazine
My contribution:
Let’s set aside the obvious Black Swan events that could upend 2024: assassination(s), heart attack(s) or stroke(s). Let’s also stipulate that the entire year will be a Black Swan of sorts — with a leading party nominee facing trials on 91 felony counts. America might elect a convicted felon to its highest office. The swans don’t get any blacker than that.
What else could go wrong? A hell of a lot, because we live in an era of chaos and fragility. The new year is a nesting doll of unknown unknowns.
J6 hero announces. Harry Dunn, Capitol Police officer on Jan. 6, announces run for Congress (msn.com)
I’m not sure that word means what you think it means. Most Republicans think Donald Trump is a person of faith. We asked why — Deseret News
Look upon these numbers, and despair.
Happy Friday!
What Will the Supreme Court Do?
On this week’s episode of The Trump Trials, Lawfare’s Ben Wittes and I speculate about how the Supreme Court will handle the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Trump immunity claim.
You can listen to the whole thing here. Or watch us on YouTube.
Democracy Hypocrisy
How fragile are our liberal constitutional norms? On Thursday, the Democracy Fund released a sobering study that is very much worth your attention.
They found that the overwhelming majority of Americans say that having a democracy is a good thing. But when it comes to the details…
“Many Americans disregard these principles when their side’s agenda is slowed by political opposition, their leaders say that they know best, or their preferred candidate claims a rigged election.”
“There is a significant segment of the population that may be willing to embrace or accept the cause of authoritarian figures if and when it is in their partisan and political interests.”
Here are the key findings:
While the vast majority of Americans claim to support democracy (more than 80 percent say democracy is a fairly or very good political system in surveys from 2017 to 2022), fewer than half consistently and uniformly support democratic norms across multiple surveys over the past seven years.
Support for democratic norms softens considerably when they conflict with partisanship. For example, a solid majority of Trump and Biden supporters who reject the idea of a “strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress and elections” nonetheless believe their preferred U.S. president would be justified to take unilateral action without explicit constitutional authority under several different scenarios.
Only about 27 percent of Americans consistently and uniformly support democratic norms in a battery of questions across multiple survey waves, including 45% of Democrats, 13% of Republicans, and 18% of Independents. When adding responses to hypothetical scenarios about unilateral action by the president, the share of Americans who consistently supports democratic norms over this time period drops to just 8 percent, including 10% of Democrats, 5% of Republicans, and 11% of Independents.
On the other hand, the portion of the public who are consistently authoritarian — Americans who consistently justify political violence or support alternatives to democracy over multiple survey waves — is also relatively small (8 percent). This leaves most Americans somewhere between consistent democratic and authoritarian leanings, a position often heavily shaped by partisanship.
When looking at the exact same respondents over time, Republicans have the highest levels of inconsistency. While 92 percent of Republicans supported congressional oversight during the Biden administration in 2022, only 65 percent supported oversight during the Trump administration in 2019 (a 27-point swing). While 85 percent are supportive of media scrutiny during the Biden administration, only 63 percent were supportive during the Trump administration (a 22-point swing). This contrasts with a 6 percentage point difference for Democrats in their views between the Biden and Trump administrations on these questions.
Among the 81 percent of Republicans who believed in September 2020 that it is important for the loser to acknowledge the winner of the election, 62 percent rejected Biden as the legitimate president after the election, 53 percent said it was appropriate for Trump to never concede the election, 87 percent thought it is appropriate for Trump to challenge the results of the election with lawsuits, and 43 percent approved of Republican legislators reassigning votes to Trump. Republicans who exhibit higher levels of affective polarization were the most resistant to accepting an electoral loss.
In contrast to an overwhelming and consistent rejection of political violence across four survey waves, the violent events of January 6, 2021, were viewed favorably by Republicans. Almost half of Republicans (46%) described these events as acts of patriotism and 72 percent disapproved of the House Select Committee that was formed to investigate them.
This should probably not come as a surprise:
You can read the full report here.
Quick Hits
1. They Are Sending Their Best People
YOUNG OFFICERS OFTEN ASK ME two questions: What’s my most significant career accomplishment? And were the wars worth it?
This afternoon, when I speak at my retirement ceremony, the answer to the first question will be sitting approximately fifteen feet in front of me: scores of Afghans I helped evacuate.
I ferried some of them into the airport. Others I smuggled through porous borders. And some I fought bureaucratic knife fights over. Many of them came to rely on me when they made it to the United States. I often spend my nights providing advice to them on various issues: how to buy a car, how to craft the perfect resume—the good, ordinary questions of building a life in America. My wife tells me that I’m an Afghan guidance counselor.
To answer the other question—whether the wars were worth it—I want to tell you about one of those Afghans, one whose story of unbelievable heroism and resolve remains my inspiration as I retire from active duty. I want to tell you about how he saved himself, saved his family—and saved me.
2. Democrats! Time to Re-Embrace Merit, Free Speech, and Universalism
Ruy Teixeira in the Liberal Patriot:
Democrats have historically done the best when they were viewed as the party of the common man and woman, of the ordinary American. That party stood for universal uplift of all Americans, especially all working-class Americans, against entrenched economic interests and guardians of the status quo.
It’s still a great model. In our new book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, John Judis and I put it this way:
[T]he New Deal Democrats were moderate and even small-c conservative in their social outlook. They extolled "the American way of life" (a term popularized in the 1930s); they used patriotic symbols like the "Blue Eagle" to promote their programs. In 1940, Roosevelt's official campaign song was Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." Under Roosevelt, Thanksgiving, Veterans' Day, and Columbus Day were made into federal holidays. Roosevelt turned the annual Christmas Tree lighting into a national event. Roosevelt's politics were those of "the people" (a term summed up in Carl Sandburg's 1936 poem, "The People, Yes") and of the "forgotten American." There wasn't a hint of multiculturalism or tribalism. The Democrats need to follow this example.
Think about all three of these principles—merit, free speech, and universalism—and it’s extraordinary the extent to which each of them has become right-coded, if not tinged with racism, for broad swaths of the Democratic Party. This is bizarre. Democrats desperately need a “back to the future” movement to re-embrace these core principles and get back in synch with the American people.
Harvard may not like it, but ordinary Americans will.
BONUS: After Harvard’s president resigns, an opportunity for universities to rethink their purpose - The Washington Post Editorial Board
The lesson for Harvard and for all universities is that it was a mistake to create the expectation that university presidents must weigh in on the great issues of the day. If administrators, as a matter of principle, avoided pandering to left-wing activists on campus they would be on firmer ground resisting activist, right-wing or otherwise, voices off it. And their claims to respect all speech — within uniformly applied time, manner and place limitations — would have more credibility.
The business of a great university is not to take sides in America’s culture wars. In a previous editorial, we cited the University of Chicago as a bastion of consistent standards and open inquiry. In 1967, Chicago put forward Kalven principles, which outlined an ideal of the university as the venue for free, unencumbered — and, yes, at times offensive — debate and deliberation. When universities appear to take a “collective position,” they undermine this purpose, signaling to students and faculty that there is only one right way to think.
3. Republican Hypocrisy on Ukraine
Dalibor Rohac in today’s Bulwark:
A COMMON COMPLAINT addressed to President Joe Biden is that, notwithstanding his open-ended expressions of support for Ukraine, he lacks a clear vision for ending the war, has an undeveloped notion of the conditions of victory, and can’t make a compelling account of what is at stake for the United States. That’s the argument of a document released late last year—a “Proposed Plan for Victory in Ukraine” by Reps. Michael McCaul, Mike Rogers, and Mike Turner, who chair respectively the House’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Armed Services Committee, and Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. They write that the president’s “mantra of supporting Ukraine ‘for as long as it takes’ is a losing strategy.”
It is a fair criticism, as far as it goes—and to their credit, the three congressmen use it as a starting point for a constructive plan to mobilize further aid to Ukraine. Their recommendations are far more ambitious than the half-hearted assistance extended to Ukraine by the Biden administration.
But any critique along these lines must also be directed at these congressmen’s Republican colleagues, who either oppose helping Ukraine at all or would make U.S. support conditional on meeting other (alleged) priorities. They, too, need to game out what will happen if American military aid to our embattled ally dries up in the coming weeks, and how America’s interests in the region will be affected if it does.
Cheap Shots
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A few quick hits today:
1) I saw Scott Walker on CNN last night dutifully dog-whistling that Joe Biden's economic policies have failed America, as if opinion automatically equals fact. Let's take a closer look ... 216,000 new jobs added to the economy. Gas prices significantly down. Inflation down. Record online holiday season purchases. Jammed airports and highways for holiday travelers. In other words: Thanks, Joe. It's nice to see that Governor Divide-and-Conquer is just as wrong now as he was when he made hyperpartisanship and demonization of the political left and public sector workers fashionable in Wisconsin. Walker's schlock is well past its expiration date. Why anyone seeks his opinion at this point is beyond my comprehension.
2) Donald Trump's faith was on full display with "Two Corinthians" in 2016. Using the Bible as a prop during the George Floyd crisis wasn't a good look either. Anybody here think he breaks bread with friends and family with recitations from the Scriptures? Perhaps "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth."?
3) Can we stop pretending that whatever happens at Harvard is representative of what takes place at all other institutions of higher education? It has become exhausting to hear commentators equate what happens there, under their circumstances, with the very different reality at the vast majority of other, smaller, less affluent, less elite, more public than private, more classroom-driven schools. It isn't. For all the good work people like me do in the educational environment every working day, we wouldn't be allowed to walk on Harvard's campus, much less have a say in their policies and working conditions. So let's stop assuming that one size fits all on this issue. Better still, how about if we take some time to point out all the many things that our universities do well and right in preparing our students for bright futures, good careers, and becoming well-rounded citizens in our society and global community instead of always looking for reasons to denigrate them and call into question their legitimacy? The discussion has been way out of balance for far too long. In this forum as elsewhere, let's hit a reset button and see it as more than just a convenient, and too often disingenuous, political football, please and thank you on behalf of all of us who deserve better than the prevailing guilt-by-association approach.
Ruy Teixeira and John Judis are kind of (literally) whitewashing the history of the New Deal. They totally ignore the sausage making that went into the enduring legislation from that period and the dirty compromises necessary to get Southern segregationist Democrats to pass them.
What happened to the Democratic Party is that after the Second World War it began to take equality before the law for ALL people as a serious concept and a certain portion of the American people have never accepted or forgiven them for that.