The 47th President and the Post-Biden World 2.0

A week ago I wrote about a new CNN poll and how it showed Democrats were pretty evenly divided over "left" vs "centrist" politics (should the Ds "move to the left" or "move to the center") but very united over fight vs accommodation. So focus on the latter and agree to disagree on the former. I also noted however that these terms are wildly over-determined and mostly don't mean very much. For this specific question, those polling results are still broadly valuable because those are the catchphrases by which a major intra-party debate is identified. So if that's the language being used and people split roughly down the middle, you know it's very divisive and no one side is going to beat the other. It's a standoff, and what you really want going into a critical midterm is unity.

But it's still important to remember how little these terms actually mean, and to consider the complexities and uncertainties they paper over. I was reminded of this when I saw Axios describing a Reuters poll which Mike Allen said showed that independents are "progressive-curious." The evidence was that substantial majorities of independents support higher taxes on corporations and billionaires (64%) and government-provided health care for all Americans (60%). But 43% are less likely to vote for a candidate who identifies as "democratic socialist."

If you study or spend much time thinking about public I don't think either of these findings will surprise you at all. They're both pretty textbook, in fact. And this quickly brings us up against the fact that most of the definitions and categories we use to discuss these factional and ideological debates are either fake and meaningless or confused. Even weirder is that most of us know this despite the fact that we use them. Let's start with the idea that "independent" voters are or tend to be "moderates" or "centrists" — something that is mainly not true. Most of those who self-label as independent are people who don't like to identify with a political party. You have people who by every marker are clearly Democrats or Republicans. They just don't like being owned by a political label.

The best descriptive use of "independent" is probably swing voters, voters who swing back and forth between parties. So they should be in the "center." Only they're not. Or rather, if you're familiar with public opinion data, you know that those people follow politics the least and have the least settled and least coherent political beliefs. They're all over the place, and tend to have very weird or inconsistent politics ideas in the view of people who follow politics closely.

Within the Democratic Party, we often talk about "establishment" Democrats vs the progressive left. I don't know any Democratic voter who identifies as "establishment." They may tend to vote for elected officials who can fairly be classed, in descriptive terms, as "establishment." But that's not the same thing. One of the backdrafts in this primary cycle has been complaints from progressives that Black voters are "establishment" and that gets in the way of the political left. Some Democratic voters identify as "moderate" or "centrist," but far fewer than did a generation ago. It's fairly telling that we don't actually have a word for the non-progressive left group in the Democratic Party that isn't either a line of attack or some version of pundit-speak. If really pressed most of those people would just call themselves "Democrats."

Of course we're not running a poli sci class here or trying to come up with the perfect political taxonomy. If we're just talking about semantics, who cares? But we're not. One of the things people find the hardest to accept in politics is that most problems can't be solved, only managed. The greatest sin of punditry is the idea that one clever guy can fix the big vexing challenge with one weird trick. But if you're going to manage these challenges effectively — and factional divisions among Democrats are one of those things — you have to understand them, accept their nuances beyond zero-sum binary oppositions. That gives you a sense of what definitely won't work and areas where creative solutions might allow people to work together, if not necessarily agree. A lot of these divisions come down to different instinctive attitudes about risk aversion, pragmatism and ideology. Another central division is more accommodating or oppositional attitudes toward traditional social mores and customs: trans rights, language politics, sexual morality, identity politics. To the extent people are fighting or trying to grab attention these points don't really matter. There's us and them, and we need to beat them. But if you want to keep things on the rails we usually want and need better and more creative solutions.

At 4:00 this morning, just before they left for a five-week recess, Senate Republicans confirmed Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to the position of Attorney General of the United States. This makes President Donald J. Trump’s personal criminal lawyer the top law enforcement officer of the country.

The attorney general is supposed to be the lawyer for the people of the United States.

Some Republicans, like 92-year-old Senate Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley of Iowa, were enthusiastic about Blanche. “Mr. Blanche is a tough, fair prosecutor dedicated to ⁠the rule of ​law, and his leadership instills that same zeal throughout the entire Justice Department,” Grassley said.

Other Republicans were more skeptical but said if they didn’t confirm Blanche, Trump would choose someone worse. Perhaps in a permanent rather than an acting capacity, they said, he would be more likely to resist Trump’s pressure.

Republican senators played a very different role in the United States 52 years ago.

In late July 1974 the House Committee on the Judiciary had passed three articles of impeachment, charging the president with obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress over his handling of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.

The House would almost certainly send those articles of impeachment to the Senate, but what would happen there was not clear.

And then, on August 5, in response to a subpoena, the White House released a tape recorded on June 23, 1972, just six days after the Watergate break-in, that showed Nixon and his aide H.R. Haldeman plotting to invoke national security to protect the president.

Even Republican senators, who had not wanted to convict their president, knew the game was over. A delegation went to the White House to deliver the news to the president that he must resign or be impeached by the full House and convicted by the Senate.

On August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon spoke to the American people to tell them he was resigning the presidency of the United States.

“Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me,” he said. “In the past few days, however,” he continued, “it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort….”

“From the discussions I have had with Congressional and other leaders, I have concluded that because of the Watergate matter, I might not have the support of the Congress that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult decisions and carry out the duties of this office in the way the interests of the Nation will require.”

“To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body,” he said. “But as President, I must put the interests of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad….

“Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow.”