Yes, Impeach Him Again – The Dispatch

In the most general terms, I would say that dilemma Democrats are likely to face is that one faction of energetic and influential partisans will demand another impeachment as practically the first order of business, while others will worry that such a move, being numerically doomed to failure, will produce only discouragement among Democrats and make it more difficult for the party to present itself as a reasonable alternative to chaos as opposed to a left-wing expression of the same counterproductive, rage-driven politics typified by Trump and his movement. That potentially serious downside has to be taken into consideration by Democrats if they assume there are gettable votes toward the middle of the spectrum and that these—and not the graduate students in the gender studies department at Bryn Mawr—would be the building blocks of more consequential and more durable Democratic power. 

We have a miseducated political class whose members have been taught, at great expense, that a certain kind of cheap verbal cleverness is the height of human achievement. (Yes, I do think I will title Vol. 2 of my memoir A Certain Kind of Cheap Verbal Cleverness.) Superficial cleverness, particularly among the so-called “comms professionals,” is an absolute plague on our politics and public life. Should Democratic candidates for the House run on impeachment? Should Democratic candidates for the Senate run on impeachment? Ask 10 clever people, and you’ll get 13 clever answers.

I would like to suggest a relatively simple approach: Democrats should run on a platform of what it is they actually intend to do in office, and that platform should be what they believe to be the right thing. I would offer the same advice to Republicans if they had not made it so perfectly clear that they cannot and will not do any such thing, that their party and their movement is incapable of candor and good faith. And here I have a stronger view than I do on the technical matters.

Of course Donald Trump should be impeached again. Today. Tomorrow. Yesterday. Twice on Sunday, on the theory that justice is justice even on the Sabbath. In a sane and self-respecting society, the impeachment and removal of Trump—and Pete Hegseth, and J.D. Vance, and many others—would be only the beginning of the affair. Various attempts by shambolically incompetent Democrats to prosecute Trump for his crimes the last time around came to nothing and helped to ensure that the non-shambolic, non-incompetent investigation of Jack Smith failed, too, but that fact does not in itself excuse us—all of us—from the necessity of pursuing justice in the here and now, again, today. That is not something that falls only to Democrats and to officeholders: The idea of citizenship in a republic entails ordinary people taking upon their own backs some share of the burdens of the state. We are not here to be bystanders; political power ultimately rests with us. Qui tacet consentire.

This is a serious matter, and one that does not need so much calculation and superficial cleverness. Just say what you think, try to do what you say, and follow the course that you believe to be the right one from day to day. If the voters don’t like it, then the voters don’t like it, and you can go back to being a lawyer or professor or business owner, or you might get a nice cable news gig or a new career as a podcast dope slinging dishonest horsepucky for fun and profit. But you’ll be able to say that you tried to do the right thing—and I think that is going to matter to you when things come to a close.

I don’t spend a lot of time quoting Scripture at people, but there’s some good advice in there for those engaged in public life:

This is going to make a mess: “100,000 Ordered to Evacuate as Rivers Rise in Washington State.”

A person who evacuates is emptying his bowels. A person removed from a place of danger is a person being evacuated. If you have 100,000 people evacuating all at once … well, maybe they won’t notice it too much in Seattle.

Those 100,000 were not ordered to evacuate; they were ordered to leave, to seek safety, to head for the hills, to make for higher ground, etc.

Another Times headline: “How Democrats Used One Word to Turn the Tide Against Trump.” They didn’t. It wasn’t clever rhetoric that turned some Americans against Trump and Republicans; it was reality. It was the grocery bill, the mortgage, the car payment. Democrats have been trying to convince themselves—and, as if by osmosis, some middle-of-the-road voters—that their problem is how they talk about policies and politics and culture, not that they have real problems with their policies, with politics, and with culture. They’ve been doing that since at least the era of What’s the Matter with Kansas? 

But how we talk about things only really matters to the extent that it helps voters and citizens to understand real connections and relationships between their own experiences and what officeholders do or what parties promise to do. Trump’s famous “She’s for they/them” ad, blasting Kamala Harris as an out-of-touch weirdo overly invested in boutique sexual radicalism, did not work because it was clever—it worked because Kamala Harris is an out-of-touch weirdo overly invested in boutique sexual radicalism. Trump can go out there and insist that the affordability problem is a “hoax” all day long, but even if he were capable of speaking about that—or anything—in a subtle or clever way, it would not matter very much to people who are going to be more informed and more persuaded by their own intimate, firsthand experience of inflation during the Trump presidency.

The professional speechwriters and such don’t want to acknowledge the fact, but it is a fact: Rhetoric is not magic. There is no “one word” that is going to turn the tide in any political contest. Put one word on one side of the balance and a ton of facts—the price of bread, the price of meat, the price of college tuition, the price of health insurance—on the other, and even so dim and credulous a creature as the American voter can detect the difference in weight.

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A hot Christmas take from the court of Herod (White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller):

Miller, like Our Lord, is Jewish, and perhaps he is not entirely familiar with the relevant Scripture here. Allow me to fill it in: The parents and child at the center of the Christmas story were shortly thereafter literal asylum seekers, in Egypt, you ridiculous f—ing numpty.

“Heritage Americans” is a funny expression. I mean, literally funny. 

One of the comical aspects of our current political moment is that every other anti-immigration activist and ethno-nationalist in the United States has a surname that is Irish, Armenian, Hungarian, Indian, Spanish—anything except Anglo-Saxon. Kash Patel is the son of Ugandan Gujaratis. Donald Trump is the grandson of a German immigrant who dealt in whores and horsemeat. The chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation is an Israeli national. There was not one Ungar-Sargon or Krikorian on the Mayflower or among the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The kind of white supremacy that includes people called Fuentes is pretty newfangled. Not a Cooper or a Standish or a Bradford in the bunch. But I suppose that is the way of the world: White people, even white supremacists, just ain’t what they used to be. 

WASP life is in a strange chapter. I remember when some Main Line social club rejected a local entertainment-industry billionaire’s bid for membership, there were whispers—familiar and not entirely unjustified—that he had been rejected because he was Jewish. But the story I heard and believe is that he was rejected for a different reason: because he was famous, and, for the old Main Line WASPs, that was the wrong kind of rich guy to be.

Over the years, the Main Line became less Anglo-Saxon and much more Jewish and Italian, as well as home to a great many more good old-fashioned American mutts. But the old WASP culture was transmitted, at least for a generation or two, to the newcomers. It is now much attenuated, and where the snootiness notions of class had once prevailed there is now only the worship of money. 

An elderly friend of mine who had arrived as a Jewish child refugee from Germany and who had observed the Main Line’s social evolution for the better part of a century used to do a little bit over lunch at the Union League. “You know, this club is going to hell,” he would say, switching to a very, very audible stage whisper. “I hear they even let … Jews join now.” He and his people had not always been made to feel entirely welcome. Making a lot of money and rising to a high position at a socially important, locally based business, as well as rising to high positions at socially important local cultural institutions, had opened some doors and made some difference for him. WASP ethnic clannishness had also declined over the years, while antisemitism was increasingly regarded as declassé. But he had not forgotten. He never did. And he wanted me to know that. But my friend had a way of putting things in their place:

“It’s always a special occasion when I get to see you, Kevin,” he would say with a smile. “I’m wearing my second-best toupée.”