The Revolution Next Time

                In the 60’s, it was common to talk about revolution, that was before we turned 30 and became investment bankers and helicopter parents.  In the heat of the moment, revolution sounded like the bold and romantic alternative to a world of uptight hypocrisy and war.  It seemed properly defiant in a world where National Guard troops shot students, cities were in flames, and the war was in your living room every night.  So much of what was wrong could be reduced to one word, Nixon.  Now, the same animosity and revulsion is associated with Trump.  Just as in the 60’s, the idea that it might take a revolution to change the course of democracy is gaining popularity and credence.  I think it’s important to compare these moments of revolutionary rhetoric, because as naïve and inconsequential as the revolutionary calls in the 60’s turned out to be, what we face now is entirely different.

                Nixon was impeached in a world that was violent and corrupt, but it still had both a cultural and economic coherence that is missing in today’s political theater.  Although they were famously slow to react, it was Republicans who forced Nixon from office.  Viet Nam had strained American political solidarity, but it was still a force.  Even though it was coming to an end, the economic expansion following WWII meant that the culture wasn’t fragmented so much that a majority of folks thought they had nothing left to lose.  In Trump’s America, the forces that eventually held sway in Nixon’s impeachment have all been hollowed out and the center is too weak to hold.  The revolution this time will be the real deal and not a youthful fantasy of cultural liberation.

                Nixon and Lee Atwater launched the ‘southern strategy’ in ’68 that set the modern Republican party on the path to embracing minority rule.  Even though there are other elements of the coalition Atwater assembled, such as Evangelicals, abortion, and conservative ideology, the core of that coalition was and is racism.  It created a block of committed and active voters who, even though they have always been a minority of the population, have dominated the politics of the nation for the last 50 years.  They have become more violent and vitriolic while becoming less and less tethered to reality.  They have their own news and their own ‘alternative facts’ that make it impossible to engage them in civil discourse or democratic compromise.  Nixon and Atwater started undermining the institutions of American democracy, and the weight of Trump’s lawless and venial presidency has brought it to the point of collapse. 

                What Trump and the Republicans make obvious every day is that the ‘nation of laws’ that we have always thought we lived in no longer exists.  Trump’s impending impeachment is about to make that painfully clear.  There will be no statesmanship or patriotism that saves the day this time.  This time the battle will be fought and resolved on entirely different grounds.  In some ways that is both healthy and predictable.  American democracy has gone through several resets along the way.  We moved from a confederacy to a republic.  Civil rights and labor rights both reconstructed democracy to include more voices and level the playing field.  But the biggest reset was obviously the Civil War, when there was no way to reconcile the competing visions of what the country should be.  Without being unduly alarming about it, that’s where we are now.

                Clinton’s impeachment was a charade, but it was a political charade of no constitutional consequence.  Trump’s impeachment is going to make our whole system of government and its dependence on law and procedure into a charade.  I don’t think there is any way to avoid this.  We have been traveling down this path for 50 years; we can’t turn back now.  Finally electing not just a corrupt but a thoroughly incompetent president has broken the institutional framework of what we called a democracy.  There will be a lot of talk about how to restore those institutions.  It can’t be done.  More to the point, it shouldn’t be done.  We have tried to legally and institutionally construct a democracy based on diversity and we have failed.  We have to win this fight – never underestimate the depths of depravity to come – but when we win it, we have to start building something new, something different.  Jefferson thought a little revolution every now and then was a good thing.  After 230 years or so, a little revolution probably isn’t enough.