Edit: In case you didn't notice, I lack any and all ability to be brief. I'd write a TL;DR for this, but it would probably be 18 more paragraphs long, so I won't bother trying. Apologies for that.
Doodle Dee. Snickers wrote:What this comes down to, I think, is that you seem more concerned about conservative politics, and I'm more concerned about the standards that guide our government collapsing.
Just to start out, this is a good assessment of where we stand, so I'll be starting out from the same place.
Doodle Dee. Snickers wrote:Trump is ineffectual at policy, sure. But people cheer when he screams at the media whenever they disagree that, perhaps, tap is spelled with one "p". They agree when he says "There are Democrats in (pick your position of authority) and thus they automatically cannot be trusted to do their jobs fairly", which could later be used to justify purging people from agencies en masse and sticking your own in. They agree when he calls the media the enemy of the country, and I don't have to tell you why that's a problem. A recent survey said that many Republicans would agree to void the next election if it's not conducted fairly--an innocuous qualifier, but I can easily imagine a world where Trump screams it hasn't been (Such as he did in the last one) and enough people agree that WHOOPS! We have a civil war on our hands (something you wouldn't have to worry about with, say, Pence). He doesn't strike out at these institutions because he wants to destroy them, he's a whiny bitch who can't take that someone's criticizing him, but the effect is the same either way.
My response to this section, in particular, is going to tie back to my earlier, more
abrasive response. I responded more angrily than I probably should have, but I won't walk it back because (and this will seem ironic given what I'm about to say later), I feel this kind of talk about Trump potentially overthrowing the government and installing himself as a dictator (which is ultimately what this argument comes to) is completely unheard of, and hinges on the idea that not only the American people, but the rest of the military and government would, as a whole, accept such a thing.
I assume the poll you're talking about is
this one. If it's not, please correct me and I'll reanalyze my response to this.
First, I want to address the sample here. 650 Republican-leaning voluntary online poll respondents. By its very nature, this is an extremely restricted view. It only counts Republicans who were involved in that specific polling website, who were inclined to respond to that specific pole, etc. Of those, 52% (338) said they would support postponing the 2020 election if Trump proposed so in order to ensure that only legal citizens voted. 56% (364) would support it if both Trump and Congress proposed it.
The article then goes on to say that this is all hypothetical, and that chances are the results would be different if such an event actually came to pass. This is important. It's very easy to say something when it's a far off hypothetical, and much harder to do when it really comes down to it.
More importantly, 650 online poll respondents doesn't exactly make a representative sample. As you may recall, polls from before the 2016 election said Hillary would win in a landslide, and they all turned out to be wrong. This kind of voluntary online polling with small samples is proving to be extremely unreliable, and statistics like this are already extremely unreliable. While it's something to keep in mind for the future, it's not something I would ever take seriously until the results have been replicated on a large scale in a more representative fashion.
Going beyond the poll, I get to the reason for my earlier response, which I'll explain here. This kind of thing, "The president wants to take over the country and force his ways on everyone and we can only stop it by getting rid of him" is almost the exact same thing the GOP and the right-wing media were selling for the entire Obama administration. One of the biggest reasons Trump got elected in the first place is because of fear-mongering and promoting the idea that the end of the United States as we know it was nigh, and everyone had to fight back against the freedom-hating Democrats lead by non-American Muslim Obama. Trump, of course, was a prominent figure in that movement.
This sort of thing did not put us in a good place, as a country. More than perhaps any other one thing, the fear-mongering of the right created the growing political divide in America by instilling in Republican voters the idea that, if they don't fight the left at every turn, America as we know it will be torn asunder.
Now that the tables are turned, and Republicans are in power, I believe it is absolutely imperative that we on the left take the higher road. Trump is bad. Many of his supporters are atrocious. But the chance of the American government, military, and people accepting a dictatorial overthrow of the state, lead by Donald Trump, is hardly different from the Republicans saying similar things about Obama. While it might be tempting to see it as something like "being vigilant", ultimately I believe it mostly serves only to create an atmosphere of fear, distrust, and even hatred towards the other side. The ones whom this argument declares to be in support of an authoritarian coup. It runs the risk of excusing any action against them (such as the kind of antifa violence the original German, Spanish, and Italian antifa used against their opponents in the 1930's) as being necessary to defend the union.
In times like these, we need to spread ideas of unity and support and helping those who need help, even if we disagree with them politically. We cannot lower ourselves to the level of the Tea Party and alt-right by trying to spread fear and hatred. This kind of feeling is an infection that grows and festers under the skin. If left unchecked, by the time the problems are obvious, it may be too late. We cannot risk contributing to this atmosphere. At best, it's irresponsible and should be beneath us. At worst, it's contributing to the same outcome we claim to want to avoid.
Doodle Dee. Snickers wrote:These are incredibly dangerous precedents that aren't directly authoritarian but pave the way for someone who wants to be. Hell, right now, you have your blueprint, it's just going to be a crapshoot the next election as to whether we get someone who actually respects all these things and can fortify them.
I won't rehash what I said above, but I want to add one more thing in regards to Trump's authoritarian views. Trump, like every authoritarian, has and will always have his core supporters. However, as Trump's presidency goes forward, he is slowly but surely losing support. Independents abandon him, moderates abandon him. The longer he goes in his ineffective, shriek-filled way, the more support he loses. If things keep going on the track they're on, by the next election in 39(?) months he'll likely be down to a very significantly diminished base of his very, very core. At that point, it's entirely likely we'll just see his back. With no support, he can't continue on. He certainly doesn't need any help losing support of Congress, since he can't seem to go a week without making at least one friend into an enemy.
On the other hand, removing him from office risks uniting his current supporters, and bringing back those that haven't quite hopped the fence. It risks opening up the narrative that the left is in favor of removing presidents they don't like. At the very least, it gives Trump a potential lock on the 35% who still support him. Instead of slowly becoming disillusioned over the course of the next 3 years, they instead see someone they currently see as a potential savior, or at least a good president, removed from power only a few month into his term.
That's where I see the real risk of normalization. If Trump is dismissed over, say, colluding with Russia, it ultimately does nothing about his authoritarian methods that have so far worked. Any future replacement may feel fine saying, "Well, all his yelling and shouting and bigotry worked out super great. All I have to do is not get caught colluding with foreign governments". On the other hand, if we let Trump continue on his own so far self-defeating path, we have much less to worry about. If we let him continue to sabotage his own administration, it's much more likely to send the message that hateful authoritarian rhetoric might get you elected, but it isn't accepted in a head of state. Many Trump supporters don't support him because of his hate and authoritarianism, but because of his promises to end corruption and bring jobs back to their areas. If they see all those hopes dashed because their president spent all his time shouting and insulting people and trying to be a king, they're unlikely to support the next guy who does the same thing, if only because it doesn't help them get what they want.
Ultimately, Trump seems to be doing an excellent job of ruining his own chances so far. Why risk attacking our enemies, when our enemies are already doing it for us?
Doodle Dee. Snickers wrote:And, just as a reminder, Trump has nuclear weapons. We better pray we don't have our own version of a Cuban Missile Crisis in the next 3.5-7.5 years.
I see this argument thrown around a lot, but I feel it misconstrues the Cuban Missile Crisis. While I understand the point, I want to take a moment to emphasize how extremely lucky we were in the Cuban Missile Crisis. During the crisis, every single military adviser to President Kennedy wanted to nuke, or at least bomb, Cuba in some way. Some wanted to blow up the entire island. Some wanted to tactically nuke a few places. Others wanted to bomb all Cuba's launch sites quick and defeat them. The only two holdouts were John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert.
The reason for this is due, possibly 100%, to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion a year and a half earlier. When Kennedy assumed the presidency, the Eisenhower Administration informed him that the whole Bay of Pigs invasion was set up and ready to go, and all he had to do was trust his military advisers. Kennedy could just sit back and the military would overthrow the Castro government and capitalism would return to Cuba.
The invasion, of course, failed catastrophically. Kennedy had trusted Eisenhower, who had told him to trust his military advisers, who had f'd the whole thing up immediately. So when the Cuban Missile Crisis came about, Kennedy didn't have any trust for those advisers who had told him Bay of Pigs would be a cake walk. He ignored them, Robert negotiated with the Russians, and in the end no one killed anyone else and we're all safe.
If Bay of Pigs hadn't happened, or if Kennedy hadn't been one of the most stubborn presidents we've ever had, or hell, if it had happened a couple years earlier during the Eisenhower administration (and Eisenhower was a good president and a great general, so don't take this as badmouthing him), it might have gone a totally different way.
It's only a very specific set of circumstances that prevented nukes being launched during the Crisis. I think that's important to keep in mind, because even a good president like Obama may very well have launched nukes. It didn't come down to just having a reasonable president. It came down to having that specific president at that specific time. I only say this because it's extremely hard to compare the Cuban Missile Crisis to any other event in American history. We were closer to World War 3 that day than any time since, and possibly any time we'll ever be.
Lastly, I'll mention Vasili Arkhipov. Out of three commanders on the Russian a Russian nuclear sub, only Arkhipov opposed launching nukes at the US, and his authority to do so was almost more of a technicality. Either way, when it really came to crunch time, and everyone's fingers were on their respective triggers, Arkhipov decided he'd rather risk not launching first than everyone dying in nuclear hellfire, and it ended in no one launching anything.
However, I do get the spirit of it. Trump with launch codes is dangerous, but luckily we have people like Mattis and others in place. Officially, Trump can give the word and launch all the nukes in the US in an instant. Realistically, this is extremely unlikely. Trump's launch codes don't just launch the missiles on their own. He sends out the orders and there are multiple people the order has to go through. Sure, military commanders are trained to follow orders, but as we've seen
historically when it comes to launching nuclear missiles, even people who are told to do so have a really hard time actually doing so. Whether it's loyalty, or self-preservation, or what, the chances of a nuke being launched on the whim of one man have turned out to be much smaller than they seem on paper.
That may be small comfort, but combine that with the fact that North Korea
always backs down against even moderate pressure, the fact that China's support of North Korea even without North Korea doing anything is extremely tenuous at best, and the fact that nuking North Korea would result in massive casualties in South Korea, one of our closest allies, and you end up in a situation where actually launching a nuke at anyone becomes exceedingly unlikely, even for Trump.
Doodle Dee. Snickers wrote:Pence, by contrast, will pass regressive social policy that will likely be highly divisive and probably watered down, only to be struck down by the next administration (and I should note that in his tenure as governor, he was super conservative but would bend under public pressure). If he tries to go economically conservative (which I doubt, because right now conservative economics are deeply unpopular even in conservative areas), we'll probably be pushed right into another recession, then we'll fix the course.
This is true, as far as Pence himself goes, but I'm far more concerned about "Pence-era Republicans" than just Pence alone. A successful Republican president will inevitably set the stage for repeat performances. A hard lurch right under Pence might be followed up with more, not just in presidencies, but in Congress and across the nation. The Republicans are still struggling with their Tea Party ties, and only a handful of Republicans have come back to a more moderate position (those moderates do not include either Pence or Ryan, of course, the next two in line for presidency). A hard-right conservative president who got stuff done runs the risk of not only being reelected in 2020 and 2024, but of setting the stage for an even more conservative GOP for the foreseeable future. We lucked out with the Tea Party in that they were so vitriolic that a lot of their support has died down a bit since its height (although it's definitely still there, as we've seen). Pence has the hyperconservative views of Tea Partiers, but the level-headedness of moderates, and that's a very dangerous combination for precedent-setting.
Doodle Dee. Snickers wrote:Pence can be damaging, sure, but he's damaging in ways that can be fixed the way our government exists to fix things. With Trump, he's basically undermining everything that keeps authoritarians from taking power, and that's not easy to fix, if it can be fixed.
This is where we diverge, in the end. We seem to have opposite views on long-term danger. While you see Pence as more of a one-off hardliner and Trump as setting the stage for future authoritarians, I see the opposite. Trump, to me, is proving to be the author of his own destruction. With that destruction, I think it's likely we'll see a great deal of destruction of the means he used to gain the power he did. Not permanently, of course. You can't get rid of such things permanently. But at least for the time being, I see him sabotaging himself as the best way of burning out the authoritarian fires burning in many people's hearts. Where I see the most danger for the future is in a president like Pence who could potentially unite the moderate and extreme branches of the GOP and create a GOP that is both very conservative and very effective, something we've so far mostly avoided.
Ultimately, dramatic, revolutionary change like what Trump promotes comes on quickly but disappears just as quickly. You see it not only in American politics, but politics around the world and throughout history. When too much change is foisted on people too fast, they reject it, whether the attempts at change are for the best or the worst. On the other hand, slow and careful change sticks around a lot longer. It becomes ingrained in the views of the people and the laws of the land. My fear is that a Pence presidency would be just that kind of slow, careful pull to the right. His regressive policies and beliefs would become reestablished in people's minds and in our laws, and those are a hell of a lot harder to change than demagogues shouting from podiums.