"Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities."
So said Thomas Jefferson in 1808.
He did so in a letter to General Kosciusko, the Polish-Lithuanian military leader who had joined and then become an engineering hero in the Continental army during the Revolution. Kosciusko was responsible for designing American fortifications at Sarotoga, strengthening West Point, and building the famous swamp boats that allowed America's Southern Army to flee Cornwallis in the years before Yorktown. All were seminal contributions to the Revolution's ultimate success. By 1808, however, he had returned to Europe.
In his letter, Jefferson explained that he was delaying the submission to Congress of his own proposal to impose new federal conscription laws on state militias. Versions of his plan had twice failed to pass given the various states' jealous regard for the longstanding practice of local militia recruitment and control, and though Jefferson thought he could get the measure passed by a small margin, he did not want that. He understood that his proposal was a major undertaking, the acceptance of which required widespread public support. He knew that such support did not yet exist and that, without it, the plan would either be undermined or seed embittered dissent. Having become President after the vicious campaign of 1800, he also knew how embittered dissent could become.
So he pulled the plan and shelved it for another day.
For many reasons too long to list, Donald Trump is no Thomas Jefferson. One, however, is that he does not follow the "slender majorities" rule. In fact, he and the current Republican party have replaced it with a more dangerous approach.
Call it their "large pluralities" or "substantial minority" rule.
One of the hallmarks of the last two Republican presidencies is that neither was birthed by a majority vote. George W. Bush received around 500,000 fewer votes than Al Gore in 2000 and Trump received three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016. Under those circumstances, adherents to Jefferson's slender majorities rule would have been circumspect in their use of executive power. They would not have forced big changes on electorates that had not supported them.
Neither, however, did so.
For his part, Bush was the lesser villain. Though his tax cuts and Iraq War lacked majority support and his appointment of Sam Alito put a hardened conservative on the Supreme Court, his education bill was bi-partisan and the Roberts appointment to the Court less extreme than Alito's.
Trump, however, has thrown Jefferson under the bus.
From his Cabinet to the assault on Obamacare; from the tax bill to his Court appointments; from killing the climate change convention to his recent "national emergency" build-the-wall executive order, the Administration has embraced and pursued the agenda of the far right. It is an agenda the majority of the country does not share. In declaring a (false) national emergency at the southern border, he also has flouted the will of Congress and more likely than not violated the Constitution's separation of powers.
Somewhere between 35 and 42% of America supports him and about 25 to 30% does so enthusiastically. To retain their loyalty, Trump holds regular campaign-style rallies in which he reprises his in-your-face insults cum mendacity style of persuasion. In that arena, opponents -- indeed, entire arms of the governmental "deep state" -- are engaged in "witch hunts"; the free press is the "enemy of the people"; "lock her up" is still a bellowed response; and violence often breaks out. In one of Trump's recent rallies, a reporter was actually assaulted. In his two hours stream of consciousness appearance at CPAC earlier this month, he called the Mueller investigation "bullshit". It is a view he has cultivated for two years, sparing no lie or f-bomb. The people who love him buy it, even though the country as a whole doesn't.
Prior to the second Bush Administration taking office in 2001, Vice-President (then elect) Cheney was worried that any hesitancy, any uncertainty or circumspection in the pursuit of their plans, would create an appearance that the new administration doubted its own legitimacy. He therefore counseled an unapologetic assertion of power in the service of their announced plans. Bush II, however, was not always on board. Somewhere in the recesses of familial lineage, the voice if not of Jefferson than of his father or grandfather counseled moderation; hence, No Child Left Behind and (perhaps) John Roberts.
But Trump is no Bush (pere or fils) either.
He does not court moderates or moderation.
This is dangerous.
The Constitution makes minority government legal and therefore possible. Five Presidents have failed to win the popular vote, two within the last twenty years. The regional separation of our political parties is now stark. Democratic office holders are largely coastal and metropolitan. Republicans win in the south, the plains and in rural areas.
If this continues, or if Presidencies birthed in popular vote defeats become the new normal, we will face a choice.
We can either drive Americans further apart in a winner take all exercise of power that ignores the will of the majority.
Or the "winner" can court and accomodate the actual majority.
The last time parties were so polarized and regions so dominated by one or the other was in the first half of the nineteenth century. It took a Civil War to lance that boil. And given that the issue then was slavery, on which compromise was never really possible and the end to which was not going to come voluntarily despite the protestations of latter day revisionists, perhaps war was the only possibility.
There is no equivalent issue today.
But there is a similar, stark division of loyalty. And there also is a similar resentment of opponents that is growing and that threatens to undermine the whole republican project. Trump -- our divider in chief -- fuels that resentment with abandon. His followers love him. His opponents hate his utterly aberrant lack of civility. There are few in the middle.
Prior to the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln embraced Thomas Jefferson. In a letter in 1859, Lincoln wrote: "All honor to Jefferson, to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression." The "document" was the Declaration of Independence. The abstract principle was that "all men are created equal."
Embracing that principle was the solution to that era's bloody divisions.
So perhaps embracing his less abstract principle -- written thirty-two years, one Revolution, three Presidencies, and one fraught transition (in 1800) later -- can be today's solution.
For self-government to survive and thrive, those who lose elections must retain the belief that the system is fair and legitimate. This is especially the case where, as here, electoral victory does not require a majority vote. In that case, the "losers" -- who in at least one respect were actually the "winners" -- cannot be ignored. They have to be cultivated. Insulting them is worse than demeaning. It is stupid. Power at some level has to be shared. The loyal opposition must remain . . .
Loyal.
"Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities."
And they should not be enforced at all by bare pluralities or substantial minorities.
The alternative is not pretty.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment