The American System Is Already Failing

 By Andrew Sullivan

The Mueller hearings told us almost nothing that we didn’t know already. We knew that the president welcomed assistance from a foreign power in order to win an election, and has fawned over his political patron in this endeavor, Vladimir Putin, since he became president. We knew that though he was not competent enough to construct a conspiracy, he was eager to collude with a foreign foe to defeat his domestic one. And we knew that he then lied about it as baldly as he lies about almost everything, and tried repeatedly to obstruct the investigation into the affair. His attorney general then blatantly lied about the key conclusions of the Mueller report, distorting the public debate for weeks as he kept the contents under wraps, and then bet that Americans, with our gnat-like attention spans, would simply move on.

We also knew that in contemporary America, none of these facts matter in the slightest. The notion that the average citizen should care deeply about the rule of law and constitutional norms — and even actively defend them — has become terribly passé. Now, all that truly matters is whether we are entertained by someone who can command televisual excitement the way Trump does on a daily, hourly basis. If he can’t, whatever the underlying facts, no one gives a damn.

American political elites are no better. The president’s assault on the Constitution has merely revealed the Democratic Party as the lame farce we knew it was. Its ancient, pusillanimous congressional leadership was never going to do what duty, rather than politics, requires. The Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, moreover, has set an extraordinary precedent: that clear evidence, meticulously collected, that a president has committed what she calls “crimes against the Constitution” does not constitute sufficient grounds for impeachment, even when those crimes were designed to cover up an alliance with a foreign power. If more than that is needed, the impeachment power has effectively been nullified.

On Wednesday, Pelosi spent the early evening quashing any impeachment talk among Democratic leaders, and then, as if she were a Fox News parody of aloof Washington elitism, attended a cocktail party hosted by her chief fangirl, Maureen Dowd, in Georgetown no less.

The Democratic candidates for president are, for the most part, no better. Biden, who is beginning to resemble the somewhat out-of-it Robert Mueller, backs Pelosi’s lameness, and says he doesn’t think anyone expected Trump to turn out as badly as he has, revealing just how clueless and smug the Democrats really were in 2016. He openly admits he hasn’t even read the Mueller report in its damning entirety, showing just how minor he thinks Trump’s transgressions are. Those candidates far more aggressive toward Trump, meanwhile, have crippled themselves preemptively, by backing policies massively unpopular with most Americans: decriminalizing illegal border crossing, offering free health care to migrant noncitizens before actual Americans, and throwing everyone off their current private health insurance, whether they like it or not.

And the rank and file is as reckless as the leadership is feckless. Indulging their woke fantasies, they have advanced a policy agenda that would win Brooklyn in a landslide but is not quite so popular, let us say, in all of the Electoral College states a Democratic presidential nominee actually needs to win back the presidency. The most visible leaders of the activist left — “the Squad” — have mastered the art of getting attention, especially through social media, broken through the defensive crouch of the past, and created a truly dynamic minority female presence in the Congress … but then they’ve used that to push policies that would require a quantum leap to the far left in the middle of the country. It’s as if we have to choose between craven cowards who have a grip on how to win the House and refreshing radicals who know how to lose it.

The Republicans, meanwhile, are quite simply a cult behind a lawless wannabe strongman, led by cable news conspiracy theorists. Cults guarantee total unanimity, expel dissenters, and seal themselves off from outside information — and the GOP now does all three. That’s why the only actual conservatives left in the Congress, like Justin Amash, have had to leave the party to make their case.

And watching today’s Trump party on Wednesday further turn Robert Mueller, an old-school law-and-order Republican, into a stooge for the Democrats, revealed just how deep the cult has gone. They mocked and scoffed at a war hero and honorable public servant in order to defend a draft-dodging liar and corporate fraud. For every through line of fact, they concocted an equal and opposite farrago of fantasy. The truly chilling thing about the hearings, however, is that the Republicans were obviously not trying to persuade the wider public; they were each vying to ingratiate themselves with one audience alone: their dear leader. This is how parties behave in authoritarian states, not liberal democratic ones.

The president, of course, is a shameless liar who can declare, as he did this week without any widespread outrage, that Article II of the Constitution allows him to do “whatever I want,” including ending any possible investigation into his own crimes. He has an attorney general who shares this view of executive power, and he has compiled a massive bench of new judges and justices who hold one belief in common: that the Executive branch has legal and constitutional impunity.

This isn’t entirely new. The invocation of a “unitary executive” gave George W. Bush the right to break any law, even those prohibiting torture. Now, Customs and Border Protection feels itself empowered to detain an American citizen as an undocumented immigrant, subjecting one Francisco Erwin Galicia to 23 days of squalid imprisonment, no showers allowed, despite having his birth certificate. During his illegal detention, he lost 26 pounds because he was effectively starved by his own government. In what other democratic country can a chief executive do this to a citizen? And yet it is very likely that no one will be prosecuted or fired for what was, in effect, a suspension of habeas corpus combined with grotesque mistreatment. One precedent for law-breaking leads to another. And all the victims of this abuse just happen to be non-white.

The awful truth is that the American constitutional system is failing on almost every level. The system, it turns out, is not even strong enough to withstand one Trump term, let alone two. Trump intuited this in 2016, and if he wins reelection, as he now has a good chance of doing, what’s left of liberal democracy will be under acute duress.

The “extinction-level event” that I feared in the spring of 2016 is already here. Look around you. And it wasn’t even a fight. –Intelligencer