Tag Archives: Factional Government

This President – and the Republican Party that has his back – is off the rails

Look in vain in this report for a Congressional Republican to stick his head out of the bunker, where Republicans who expect another primary election in their future hide, and to offer a comment. “Trump’s plan” – to transport migrants detained at the border to sanctuary cities, like so much else in the Trump (and McConnell) era, is a reckless assault on democratic norms and the rule of law.

In my first post in this blog (July 7, 2018), “Is this the most divided you have ever seen the United States?” I commented on the answer to that question offered by an experienced journalist (Jamie Dupree): “My answer is always – no, this is not the most divided that our country has been, even in my lifetime.” He justified his response by pointing to the U.S. in 1968.

In that banner year we endured a losing war with high casualties, the My Lai massacre, a military draft, brutal clashes in the streets between protesters and police, and two political assassinations (Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy).  So, why did I dissent from the journalist’s sanguine view that things were worse then than a half century later?

Because in 1968, we elected a president, Richard Nixon, who – however you assess his campaigns and administration – strove to be president of the whole country: Republicans and Democrats, rural and urban, partisans and swing voters, working folks and the GOP donor class. Richard Nixon was not ignorant or indifferent to public policy, to enacting laws and overseeing federal agencies to benefit the nation as a whole. He had a conception of the presidency that is beyond the ken of Donald Trump. And the Republican Party that Nixon led had not yet become the outlier – the scorched-earth, win at all costs group – that it is today.

Trump is presiding over a factional government. That’s the bottom line for a president who only plays to his base. As I said in that first post: “The stubborn refusal of our president to embrace America whole – all of our citizens; our country’s abiding national interest; what we share in common, not what divides us – sets this era apart from the divisive years that Dupree recalls.”

To reiterate: it’s not just Trump. The Republican Party has his back, with no more than occasional murmurs of displeasure (almost invariably fashioned to be absolutely ineffectual).

Hat tip to Josh Marshall for flagging this story (“MSM Journalism Can’t Handle Trump”), with the observation that the article is emblematic of “the problems MSM/bothsidesist journalism faces in the age of the Trump.”*

Update: *In the 8 or 10 hours since I saw Marshall’s initial post, he has revised it and edited out most of his commentary, including the sentence that contained the quote immediately above. I’ll still give him credit for alerting me to the WaPo story describing a “plan” to punish political opponents by a man who is unfit for the presidency.

“Is this the most divided you have ever seen the United States?”

Jamie Dupree, a reporter whose career began during the Reagan administration, reports hearing that question frequently.

His response: “My answer is always – no, this is not the most divided that our country has been, even in my lifetime.”

He points to events of 45 to 50 years ago (1968-1973).

I was a freshman in college in 1968, a year the nation experienced two political assassinations – of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy; the My Lai massacre; and brutal clashes between protesters and the police at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago, which paved the way for the election of Richard Nixon.

The nation was engulfed in the Vietnam War abroad and protests in the streets at home. In 1970, National Guardsmen fired on protesting students at Kent State University, killing four of them. (Dupree’s post features a soundtrack of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “Ohio,” with a photo montage from that year to illustrate the social chaos the country was experiencing.)

We don’t have half a million troops fighting a war in Southeast Asia today with high casualties and a military draft. We don’t have the level of violence in the streets that we had 50 years ago. So Dupree’s conclusion that we are less divided today than we were then is not unreasonable.

Nonetheless, this conclusion leaves something out. Since the late ’60s and early ’70s, our politics has become much more tribal. We are more separate than before in many ways. And in 2016, we elected the first president in my lifetime who, in Jonathan Bernstein’s words, “doesn’t even attempt to be president of the whole nation.” Even Nixon, who kept an enemies list – but kept it private, often spoke to the country as a whole and sought to appeal to – and to represent – both independents and Democrats, not just the Republican base.

Donald Trump began his political ascent as the chief proponent of the birther theory – intending to delegitimize his predecessor in the White House. His political rallies in 2016, and the Republican National Convention that nominated him, featured frenzied chants of “Lock her up!” directed at his Democratic opponent.  So (although for many months following his election, pundits predicted, and often professed to see, a pivot – the turning point where Trump adopted the norms and mores of recent – and distant – presidents) his approach to governing has been of a piece with his campaign. It’s either all-in with Trump; or excluded and excoriated.

The 45th president has, in effect, championed factional government. (Josh Marshall makes this point.) He has done so very deliberately and for all to see.

The phrase, “factional government,” is something we are accustomed to hearing applied to unstable regimes, or where opponents control separate regions – in the Middle East, for instance. When sectarian divisions exist, and there is no shared conception of the national interest, then insular, zero-sum tactics predominate. When one faction gains the upper hand, however precariously, disfavored groups – and a common, overarching public good – suffer.

The concept of factions has a special place in American political thought. James Madison – who feared that democratic society could be ripped apart by factionalism – wrote, in Federalist 10: “By a faction I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

The stubborn refusal of our president to embrace America whole – all of our citizens; our country’s abiding national interest; what we share in common, not what divides us – sets this era apart from the divisive years that Dupree recalls.

(Post revised July 13, 2018 to introduce Josh Marshall’s reference to factional government.)

(Photo from video montage – CSN&Y’s “Ohio.”)