Tag: news

Over and over in the past decade, we have seen students, usually left-wing, respond to the presence or expected presence of right-of-center speakers with attempts to stop them from speaking, either by threatening to show up in force or by demonstrating in large, often unruly groups. These scenes have tended to feature raucous activists disrupting orderly and peaceful proceedings. And while they rarely result in serious violence, they frequently devolve into tense, seemingly out-of-control situations where the speakers and those who gathered to hear them have legitimate reason to fear for their physical safety. 

Typically, this has limited immediate effect. The targeted speakers might delay their speeches or appear off campus. Even if they cancel entirely, they can still get their message out through social media and other forums.

But over time, this has a corrosive effect on campus culture. Colleges are institutions founded on open debate and intellectual inquiry. Mobs undermine that foundation by chilling the speech of students, professors, and others who don’t wish to risk face their wrath. The direct results may not always be visible, but over time, the chilling effect can degrade an institution’s values and capabilities, rendering it unable to fulfill its mission. And while the physical threats are often modest, sometimes people are injured. 

These mob tactics have been lumped in with an array of speech-squelching activities that have come to be called “cancel culture.” As Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education, has noted, the rise of campus cancel culture has been driven in large part by students, who in the early 2010s began to demand strict speech codes and the disinvitation of unwanted speakers. But although the demands originated with students, administrators played a key role in encouraging them, supporting cancel mobs through explicit policies and implicit support. The administrators may not have participated directly in the mobs, but they shared some culpability for coddling and even encouraging their obnoxious and destructive behavior. 

There has been some debate about what to call the scene at the United States Capitol yesterday, in which hundreds of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the building, vandalized offices, stole equipment, and caused Congress—which was in the middle of certifying Joe Biden’s election as president—to drop its official proceedings and flee the legislative floor out in fear. Is it sedition? A coup? An insurrection? A riot? 

One or more of those labels may be correct, but I think I have another answer: This was a right-wing cancel mob. Except instead of coming for a campus speaker or a controversial newspaper column, they came for the symbolic heart of democracy itself. They came to the Capitol to exercise a heckler’s veto over the results of a presidential election. This was cancel culture on a national political scale. 

The attack on the Capitol yesterday was an attack on the foundation of democracy: the peaceful transition of political power following a legitimate election. Democratic self-governance, in which large groups of people work to make political decisions on their own rather than have them handed down by unelected rulers, is the necessary precondition for ensuring the individual rights and liberties that are the (oft-unmet) American ideal. And a baseline requirement for democratic self-governance is a fair and transparent system for agreeing to accept that sometimes, people you disagree with have won political power. Yesterday’s riot was an attempt—a lame and disorganized one, but an attempt nonetheless—to cancel a core democratic function. 

As with campus mobs, the immediate effect may seem limited, and those sympathetic to the rioters may downplay its consequences. The House and Senate reconvened in the evening to finish their business, voting to confirm the election result. The Capitol was damaged and vandalized, but not burned to the ground. The building and all it represents still stands. 

But yesterday was far from harmless. Four people reportedly died, including one shot by Capitol Police. The property destruction was not insignificant. The necessary precondition for democratic governance—the peaceful transition of power—was not met. Power will transfer, but it has not been peaceful. 

Over time, if this mob and its beliefs are not firmly rejected, there will be a chilling effect on the values and systems that are designed to promote peaceful power-sharing, the institutions that are designed to make productive self-governance possible. These effects may not be obvious or apparent in the short run; over the next year or two, Congress is likely to proceed in a way that looks a lot like business as usual. But without a firm rejection of the mob and what it stands for, there will be a cost, even if that cost is largely invisible. 

Yet like campus administrators, much of the Republican Party continues to indulge the mob. Indeed, President Trump began yesterday by spurring on the crowd that would go on to storm the Capitol. Despite having his legal challenges to the election outcome repeatedly and often brusquely rebuked in court, including by judges he appointed, he called the outcome an “egregious assault on our democracy” and told his assembled supporters to “walk down to the Capitol.” 

“We are going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women,” he said, “and we are probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them—because you will never take back our country with weakness.” Later, after the mob had crashed into the building and halted legislative business, he posted a video repeatedly reiterating the false claim that the election had been stolen, and a tweet seeming to express sympathy for those who had overrun the Capitol: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.”

At the beginning of the day, a large contingent of Republicans, including more than a dozen senators, planned to use the certification of Joe Biden to object to the vote on spurious grounds designed to comfort, if not explicitly validate, the conspiracy theories surrounding the election results.

While some of the senators changed their plans, more than half of House Republicans voted to reject the election results. Just hours after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), who led the Senate GOP effort to reject the election outcome, used the certification vote as an opportunity to give a speech condemning violence—and questioning the election’s legitimacy.

These Republicans didn’t participate in the mob, and in some cases they offered pro forma rejections of its violent impulses. But they coddled it, treating its fallacious and dangerous beliefs as essentially justifiable, contorting themselves to embrace the unfounded feeling that the election was somehow illegitimate despite all evidence to the contrary.

They gave comfort to the mob’s animating beliefs, tacitly encouraged its delusions, and built a permission structure for those delusions to continue. And in doing so, they failed their most basic responsibility to both their voters and to the ideals they supposedly serve. In the process, they have degraded their institution and embarrassed themselves. They have proven themselves cowards unworthy of their positions. And like those campus administrators caving to student cancel mobs, they share some culpability for what happened yesterday, and some blame for whatever happens next.

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President Donald Trump may have a shot at becoming the first president in American history to be impeached twice.

In a Thursday afternoon announcement, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) said Congress “may be prepared to move forward with impeachment” unless the president’s cabinet moves quickly to remove him via the 25th Amendment. Pelosi said Trump committed “an act of sedition” by inciting a riot on Wednesday afternoon that led hundreds of the president’s supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol.

“The president has committed an unspeakable assault on our nation and our people,” Pelosi said.

Earlier on Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called for Trump to be removed from office by the 25th Amendment, which includes a mechanism allowing a majority of the president’s executive cabinet, with the support of the vice president, to remove a president from power. That part of the 25th Amendment has never been invoked.

It’s not clear whether there would be time for Congress to impeach Trump for a second time before the president leaves office on January 20—to say nothing of the Senate trial necessary for removal from office. Both chambers of Congress recessed after finishing the final certification of the Electoral College votes in the early hours of Thursday morning and are not scheduled to reconvene until January 19.

But there are increasing calls for Trump to be removed from office via one constitutional mechanism or another—and not just from Democrats.

In a video posted to Twitter on Thursday, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R–Ill.) called on the cabinet to “invoke the 25th Amendment and end this nightmare.”

The National Association of Manufacturers on Wednesday became probably the first trade association in American history to call for the removal of a president. In a statement released yesterday, the group said Trump’s actions amounted to “sedition and should be treated as such” and said Pence should “seriously consider” invoking the 25th Amendment.

Former Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.), one of just two then-Republican legislators to support Trump’s impeachment last year, has also called for the president “to resign or be removed from office.”

Donald Trump needs to resign or be removed from office. America has endured enough.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) January 7, 2021

One major procedural difference between the use of the 25th Amendment and the possibility of impeachment is what it could mean for Trump’s political future. If the House voted to impeach Trump and the Senate agreed to convict him, he could be barred from holding federal office again.

Unlike last year, when Trump was impeachment for a phone call in which he sought electoral assistance from Ukrainian leaders, the facts of the current situation are not in much doubt. “This need not be a lengthy process. The evidence of the president’s actions are clear and available to all,” writes Keith Whittington, a professor of politics at Princeton University. “The House does not need an elaborate inquiry. The Senate does not need a lengthy trial.”

Even so, the timing makes it unlikely that Trump will be impeached or removed. It is far more likely that the cabinet will choose to stagger through the next two weeks with Vice President Mike Pence as the country’s de facto leader and that Congress will, as usual, do nothing. Still, as Gene Healy, vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute, wrote for Reason in 2017, Congress should be willing to invoke its impeachment power on a more regular basis.

Impeaching Trump for his general bad behavior and recklessness, Healy wrote, “wouldn’t just remove a bad president from office; it would set a precedent that might keep future leaders in line.”

That’s still true—maybe even more true—today.

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As Americans deal with the aftermath of the Trumpist riot and invasion of the Capitol on January 6, a difficult question looms for the citizens of a troubled republic: How do you maintain a political system when much of the population ceases to believe in its underlying principles? The problem is not just President Donald Trump—whose petulant refusal to accept his loss at the polls set the grounds for the violence that disrupted Congress’s count of Electoral College votes—but also his cultists who are more interested in maintaining one thuggish politician in power than they are in how power is acquired and used. Beyond them are all too many Americans who have come to believe they can’t afford to lose elections.

This moment didn’t drop out of the blue. The country has suffered growing political polarization, harsh feelings between the political factions, and an increase in political violence in recent years. We saw that in the 2017 ambush of Republican members of Congress and their protective police detail, the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the litany of riots that started as demonstrations against abusive law enforcement before taking on a life of their own.

Those concerns grew as the election loomed. “We are increasingly anxious that this country is headed toward the worst post-election crisis in a century and a half,” wrote Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution, Lee Drutman of New America, Tod Lindberg of the Hudson Institute, Nathan P. Kalmoe of Louisiana State University, and Lilliana Mason the University of Maryland in an October 1 piece in Politico. “Our biggest concern is that a disputed presidential election—especially if there are close contests in a few swing states, or if one candidate denounces the legitimacy of the process—could generate violence and bloodshed.”

They had good reason to fear a disputed election. “About three in 10 (29 percent) Republicans say it would be appropriate for President Trump to refuse to leave office because he claims that he has credible evidence of illegal voting,” the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group warned last summer. “On the other hand, 57 percent of Democrats say that it would be appropriate for a Democratic candidate to call for a do-over election because they claim to have credible evidence of interference by a foreign government.”

The election results didn’t exactly sweep in an era of good feelings. Twenty-four percent of likely U.S. voters “think Biden voters are America’s biggest enemy as 2020 draws to a close,” Rasmussen Reports noted early in December. “Nearly as many (22%) regard Trump voters as the biggest enemy.”

It’s tempting to suggest that the Trumpist rioters in D.C. did a credible job of fulfilling their detractors’ fears. But that overlooks the evidence from sources like the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group that neither dominant political tribe was prepared to accept a loss. Even the Biden-aligned Transition Integrity Project—which anticipated Trump’s bogus claims of electoral fraud and unwillingness to concede—also warned of political chaos if Biden’s supporters were disappointed. In the end it was the current president’s fans who rioted, but an uneventful tally of ballots didn’t appear to be in the cards.

Elected officials, like Trump, who defy constitutional constraints and sheer reason can be removed from office at the polls, by impeachment, or by processes such as those outlined in the 25th Amendment. But what do you do when many voters themselves think the only legitimate elections are those that they win?

One important step would be to make elections less consequential so that Americans aren’t so fearful of the instruments of government in the hands of their enemies.

“It is more and more dangerous to lose an election,” economist John Cochrane, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, wrote in September. “Regulation has supplanted legislation, and dear colleague letters, interpretations, and executive orders have supplanted regulation… The vanishing ability to lose an election and not be crushed is the core reason for increased partisan vitriol and astounding violation of basic norms on both sides of our political divide.”

For example, Trump threatened that companies which displease him “will be taxed like never before” as punishment. He led supporters in chants of “lock her up” aimed at his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton. His opponents have had every reason to fear that his tenure in office constitutes a real danger.

On the same note, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo strong-armed financial institutions into denying services to his political opponents in what the American Civil Liberties Union called a threat to “the First Amendment rights of all organizations to engage in political advocacy without fear that the state will use its regulatory authority to penalize them for doing so.” The vast power he wields is perilous to people with whom he disagrees.

In its reach into all areas of life, government in modern America increasingly resembles what the Israeli historian J. L. Talmon called “totalitarian democracy.” This approach “treats all human thought and action as having social significance, and therefore as falling within the orbit of political action.” Since there’s no room for going your own way, contests for political power necessarily become existential fights that nobody can afford to lose.

By contrast, wrote Talmon, liberal democracy “recognizes a variety of levels of personal and collective endeavour, which are altogether outside the sphere of politics.” If most of life is under the control of the people living it rather than subject to the whims of government officials, losing elections is disappointing, but not catastrophic. To lower the political stakes, we need much more of our thought and action to be “altogether outside the sphere of politics.”

What does remain within the political sphere should be decided as locally as possible. Centralized decision making sets the stage for conflict in a vast country of diverse values and preferences. During the Trump presidency, his opponents spent much time and energy complaining that the Constitution gives his rural supporters too much power through the Electoral College and the Senate. With Biden in the White House, we’re bound to hear renewed griping about the cultural and economic dominance of urban liberals. While tension between dissimilar groups is inevitable, it doesn’t have to be poisonous—if those groups aren’t battling to dominate each other.

So, while we’re expanding the realm of human life that’s beyond the reach of government, much of what it does should be devolved down the political food chain, closer to the people who are affected, to reduce the likelihood of subjecting them to policies they despise. Ideally, as much decision-making as possible should be returned to individuals.

None of this guarantees that the Trumpists who stormed the Capitol, or any other Americans who no longer believe in the peaceful transition of power, will suddenly regain faith in vote counts. But making election wins and losses less important should lower the political tensions that are consuming the country. And that might give us all a little necessary breathing room while we figure out, once again, how to get along with one another.

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