Senate Republicans Perfect the Art of Appeasement
In giving Trump basically everything he wants, they have defined deviancy down.
A HALLMARK OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY is the belief that “right makes might,” in Lincoln’s famous articulation; and that the inverse of that equation—that might makes right—is the brutal logic of the autocrat and his enablers.
In recent weeks, we have seen a remarkable abandonment of Lincoln’s bedrock principle by high-level Republican elected leaders, who in the infamous words of Donald Trump, “always bend the knee.”
We have seen various flavors of this submission: The throne sniffing and ring kissing, the tactical flattery and ego stroking, above all the submission to threats. Behind all the rationalizations it shows an unhealthy regression to the lizard brain seen often under the rule of monarchs and autocrats.
Senators have voted to advance individuals like Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Kash Patel—people who are by any objective standard not only experientially unqualified for the positions to which they had been nominated, but repeatedly advanced beliefs that are contrary to fact, science, and America’s national interest.
No matter. Senators who expressed rational concerns early on folded at the critical moment. I have been told by a member of the U.S. Senate that any Republicans who suggested they might vote against Donald Trump’s nominees were threatened with a primary, paid for by Elon Musk. That’s not the worst of it. According to Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman, Senator Thom Tillis told colleagues of “credible death threats” reported by the FBI when he was considering a vote against Pete Hegseth. The threats appeared to have their effect: Tillis voted yes and Hegseth was confirmed, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote.
This is not consistent with the American tradition, but it’s a pattern that history recognizes all too well. It is the advancement of an agenda through fear. It is the appeal to greed. It is the belief that might makes right.
It never ends well, but in the short run, the logic is self-serving. Don’t speak out. Don’t stand up. Don’t apply your principles consistently. Just go along with the party and you’ll keep your job.
This is a dereliction of duty by a Senate required under the Constitution to give advice and consent before a president’s cabinet nominations can be sworn in. It is evidence of cowardice by people in power. It is especially ironic to see so many individuals who not so long ago proclaimed themselves proud “constitutional conservatives” abandon everything to which they once subscribed. The party of Reagan is now the party empowering Trump’s entirely predictable pivot to Putin.
It is true that bullies only respect strength; and so the capitulation under threat inspires a subterranean contempt among the very people they are trying to please with their compliance.
These Republicans have apparently forgotten Churchill’s definition of appeasement: It is feeding the crocodile and hoping it eats you last.
THE GRAVER DANGER of the ongoing assault on the functioning American democracy by the forces of polarization and hyperpartisanship is the death of a unifying standard, sometimes called the Politics of the Golden Rule.
This is the simple yet surprisingly difficult idea of treating other people the way you would like to be treated. It is a concept most of us learned in kindergarten and it is a moral underpinning of any civilization. It is the wisdom behind the filibuster as originally conceived (not currently executed), which says that different parties will be in power at different times and, therefore, allowing radical changes with simple majority votes is unwise for the stability and success of American society.
It is also the principle which says that if—for example—an MSNBC weekend host with a history of sexual assault allegations, alcohol abuse, and failure to run even small organizations, were to be nominated to run the world’s largest, most complex bureaucracy which is also the guarantor of America’s national security, that person would be summarily rejected.
Treat others as you would want to be treated.
That standard has now been abandoned. The final insult was the narrow confirmation of Patel as FBI director—a ten-year appointment, designed to keep that powerful office above partisan politics.
Remember that President Joe Biden kept Trump’s FBI director, Christopher Wray, in place. Trump’s threat to fire Wray for doing the nonpartisan business of justice led to his resignation. That, in turn, opened the door to the once unthinkable nomination of Patel—a hyperpartisan apparatchik who, far from committing to upholding the idea of impartial justice, has literally published a public enemies list in his own book. It is, not surprisingly, comprised of leading Democrats and Republican opponents of Donald Trump. In interview after interview over the past few years, Patel advocated a policy of political revenge to Trump’s enemies. There is no chance that the Democratic equivalent (if there even were one) would be nominated or confirmed.
Now, the elevation of Patel, a prominent backer of the Orwellian-named “Stop the Steal” movement after the 2020 election, rewards the corrosive idea that Trump Republicans will only accept the results of elections they win.
Those 51 senators who voted for Kash Patel have surrendered any credibility to speak about the virtues of bipartisanship or the highest common ground upon which our best American traditions are based. They have voted for the belief that might makes right and they will presumably live to regret it. They caved when they had the power to stop America’s slide and they will own every single abuse of power that has been promised. The appointment of right-wing commentator Dan Bongino to serve as deputy FBI director is just a confirmation of the dangerous detour we will be taking because they opened the Overton window to chaos.
No one will be happier about the increasing dysfunction and division in our democracy than autocrats around the world who want to discredit the idea of liberal democracy.
Because all of this exists against the larger backdrop of the struggle between democracies and autocracies. Autocracies have always claimed that democracy is inefficient and ineffective because democracy produces a citizenry that is decadent and easily divided. The siren song of totalitarian states, especially in the 1930s, was the idea that autocracies would be able to achieve great change on behalf of the people more effectively than the often messy, deliberative process of rule by the people.
As the world discovered at that time, and no doubt will again, free societies ultimately have a strength that autocracies cannot match. Rule through fear may be persuasive in the short run, but it is brittle and tends to be relatively short-lived.
Still, we should make no mistake that American democracy, and the American claim to represent a spirit of exceptionalism on the world stage, is being damaged daily. And if our leaders will not lead, it is up to citizens to step up and demonstrate a stronger civic backbone than we have seen in the Senate.
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