How Trump is helping to save our democracy

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: September 24, 2017 at 7:36:14 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] How Trump is helping to save our democracy
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> How Trump is helping to save our democracy
> By E.J. Dionne Jr., Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein
> Sep 22 2017
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-trump-is-helping-to-save-our-democracy/2017/09/22/539b795e-9a1f-11e7-82e4-f1076f6d6152_story.html>
>
> E.J. Dionne Jr., Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein are the authors of “One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the 
> Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported,” from which this essay is adapted.
>
> The election of Donald Trump could be one of the best things that ever happened to American democracy. 
>
> We say this even though we believe that Trump poses a genuine danger to our republican institutions and has done 
> enormous damage to our country. He has violated political norms, weakened our standing in the world and deepened the 
> divisions of an already sharply torn nation.
>
> But precisely because the Trump threat is so profound, he has jolted much of the country to face problems that have 
> been slowly eroding our democracy. And he has aroused a popular mobilization that may far outlast him. 
>
> Many of the trends that led to Trump’s election have been with us for years; he has created a crisis by pushing them 
> to their alarming endpoints. Political norms, for example, have been decaying for decades, but Trump has eschewed 
> norms altogether. One reading is that there will be no going back from the diminished public life he has created, and 
> it’s certainly true that the breaching of norms often produces a cascading effect: Behavior previously considered 
> inappropriate is normalized and taken up by others. Yet Trump’s sheer disregard for the normal practices and 
> principles of presidential behavior has cast a spotlight on the vital role that norms play in regulating and 
> protecting our democracy. Only when norms disappear are we reminded of how important they were in the first place.
>
> The steady radicalization of the conservative movement since the 1960s paved the way for Trump by undermining trust 
> in government and promoting a sense that public officials are not interested in solving the problems of everyday 
> Americans. This was a successful strategy for the Republican Party, but it produced the least-qualified and 
> least-appropriate president in the nation’s history. While many Republicans remain in denial, hoping that Trump will 
> deliver them policy victories and court seats, some of them are starting to reexamine their consciences and their 
> long-term political interests. 
>
> A large group of influential conservative thinkers — Jennifer Rubin, Michael Gerson, Max Boot, George F. Will, Peter 
> Wehner, William Kristol and Tom Nichols, to name just a few — has spoken out against the nativist and xenophobic 
> strain in the Republican Party that gave rise to Trump and against his manifest disrespect for our institutions. They 
> want a problem-solving Republican Party, a necessity for our political system to operate. Only a handful of 
> Republican politicians have joined them, but their ranks are growing and include Gov. John Kasich of Ohio and Sens. 
> John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona. 
>
> Meanwhile, Republicans’ failure to pass any major piece of their legislative agenda, despite their control of the 
> presidency and both houses of Congress, is a sign that tea partyism provides no plausible path to governing. A purely 
> anti-government creed is out of touch with an American majority that may mistrust government but still expects it to 
> provide significant services, social protections and help in time of catastrophe. We have seen this in the backlash 
> to the efforts to repeal Obamacare. Republicans were scrambling this past week to pass another destructive repeal 
> billthat would leave millions without health insurance, simply because the congressional majority is desperate for a 
> legislative victory. But they have already lost the battle for public opinion.
>
> The Trump era has pushed corporate leaders out of their comfort zones, too. The mass resignations of chief executives 
> from White House business advisory groups in the wake of Trump’s shamefully equivocal remarks about the violence in 
> Charlottesville were one sign of this. So was the strong pushback — from Apple’s Tim Cook, Hewlett Packard 
> Enterprise’s Meg Whitman and JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, among many others — against Trump’s elimination of the 
> Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program protecting immigrants who were brought to the country illegally 
> as children.
>
> And Trump’s victory has led to soul-searching in the media. The election was a near-perfect case study in the dangers 
> of false equivalence, as Hillary Clinton’s significant but certainly not disqualifying problems were often portrayed 
> as more or less comparable to Trump’s obvious inappropriateness for the presidency, his hateful rhetoric and his 
> astonishingly long list of scandals. But many of the country’s leading news organizations have covered the Trump 
> White House’s lying and evasions with straightforward vigor. If Trump has exacerbated the problem of media echo 
> chambers, particularly on the right, he has also created a newly powerful constituency that cherishes a free press — 
> witness the soaring digital circulation numbers of The Washington Post, the New York Times and many other media 
> outlets devoted to hard-hitting reporting and analysis.
>
> The Trump jolt has done more than force the country to a necessary reckoning. It has also called forth a wave of 
> activism, organizing and, perhaps most important, a new engagement by millions of Americans in politics at all levels.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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