At a press conference in September, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi fielded questions about the perilous backdrop to November’s election. Denouncing Donald Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he be defeated, Pelosi
was unequivocal: “You are not in North Korea; you are not in Turkey … You are in the United States of America. It is a democracy, so why don’t you just try for a moment to honor your oath of office to the Constitution of the United States?” Only moments later, Pelosi
dismissed calls that she leverage her role as speaker to shut down the U.S. government in an effort to block Trump’s incoming nominee for the Supreme Court.
The contrast between the two comments was stark. The first conveyed a sense of emergency, gravely implying (not without cause) that the very foundations of America’s democratic and constitutional order were in danger. The second, particularly if we accept that premise, amounted to nothing less than an abdication of responsibility from one of the country’s most powerful figures during a moment of national crisis. A sitting president openly flouting the rules of democracy represents a serious enough threat on its own; if the prospect of a Supreme Court appointment weeks before an election whose outcome could well be decided by that very body is not an appropriate moment for vigorous opposition, then what is?
This tension underscores a deeper paradox of liberalism that has arguably reached its apex in the Trump era. Since the president’s election four years ago, the political and intellectual leaders of America’s supposedly reform-minded opposition have issued warnings about the existential threat that Trump poses to democracy. Amid it all, senior Democrats have mostly maintained both the regular operation of government and a standard of congressional etiquette that connotes normalcy more than it does any state of exception: applauding the president’s speeches,
approving his military budgets,
awarding him new domestic spying powers, and even
fast-tracking his judicial nominees. A line from one 2019 CNBC
report detailing the overwhelming House approval of Trump’s marquee NAFTA renegotiation sums up the absurdity of this posture: “Democrats also wanted to show they can work with Trump only a day after they voted to make him the third president impeached in American history.” Determined opposition to Trump has sometimes been so nonexistent that Democratic partisans have had to invent it, as when an image of Pelosi during the 2019 State of the Union address went viral on the
entirely spuriousgrounds that the speaker had intended for her clapping to look sarcastic.
Liberalism in the Trump era has thus become a kind of strange pantomime act in which elite politicians deploy the rhetoric of imminent threats and national emergency only to behave like hapless passengers trapped aboard a sinking ship. Although it has certainly found its most potent expression in Washington, this posture of feigned powerlessness has gradually come to infect the broader culture and ideology of American liberalism as a whole.
Either get rid of the filibuster and pass voting rights and add seats to the court or shut the fukk up.
