In selecting California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate, Joe Biden has embraced the diversity of the Democratic coalition. An eminently well-qualified woman of color of a different generation than the former vice president rounds out a well balanced ticket to take on Donald Trump and Mike Pence, who lead the monochromatic Republican Party.
In a photograph of Biden and Harris chatting by video, a Danish philosopher and the author of Nihilism (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series) spotted a Hagar the Horrible cartoon behind the former VP’s laptop.
That cartoon suggests that a higher being (whether the God of Biden’s Catholicism or an ancient Norse deity) directing the storms and tribulations bedeviling Hagar doesn’t answer to any man. Whether or not an individual suffers misfortune is often the furthest thing from a personal choice.
No one needs that comic reminder less than Joe Biden, who lost his first wife and their one-year-old daughter in 1972 and his oldest son, Beau, in 2015, and has credited his faith with helping sustain him. In an interview with Stephen Colbert, four months after Beau’s death, Biden spoke about putting one foot in front of the other when experiencing great suffering — and of other people who keep going when confronted with tragedy in their lives.
. . . Think of all the people you know who are going through horrible things and they get up every morning, And they put one foot in front of the other. And they don’t have, like I said, anything like the support I have.
I marvel, I marvel at … at the ability of people to absorb hurt and just get back up. And most of them do it with an incredible sense of empathy to other people. . . .
Biden tells Colbert that his wife Jill tapes quotes to his bathroom mirror, which he sees in the morning when he shaves. Biden has mentioned one quote, from Kierkegaard — “Faith sees best in the dark” — on several occasions. It illustrates that when tragedy strikes, when our suffering is most intense, reason (human understanding) has nothing to offer — that’s when believers must rely on faith.
One need not share Biden’s faith (as Colbert does) to appreciate the man’s compassion and empathy for other human beings. The Colbert interview offers a sense of the man whom Democrats have chosen as their candidate for president. His empathy distinguishes him in a fundamental way from the current occupant of the White House. Indeed, the contrast could hardly be greater.
It is extraordinary and calamitous to have Donald Trump as president in the time of a global pandemic. The man hears of the deaths of Americans — more than 165,000 and counting — and thinks only of the misfortune to himself.
Trump often launches into a monologue placing himself at the center of the nation’s turmoil. The president has cast himself in the starring role of the blameless victim — of a deadly pandemic, of a stalled economy, of deep-seated racial unrest, all of which happened to him rather than the country. (“Trump the victim: President complains in private about the pandemic hurting him,” by Ashley Parker, Philip Rucker, and Josh Dawsey)
And while Trump is psychologically deviant — an outlier unrepresentative of his party, the GOP still embraces him and accepts the harm he brings. Moreover, one of the fundamental differences between Democrats and Republicans is the empathy that Democrats feel for others — including folks not in our tribe — who suffer.
We might draw the contrast this way: The circle of moral concern — the width and breadth and diversity of the group of human beings whom Democrats regard empathetically — is clearly greater by far than the batch of folks whom Republicans view as worthy of moral consideration.
Think of those kids separated at the border to illustrate this point. Or of our Kurdish allies, whom Trump sold out to Erdogan. Or of tens of millions of Americans — our neighbors — without adequate health care coverage.
Americans will have a stark choice — Trump-Pence or Biden-Harris — on the ballot this fall.
But when the NBA makes the wrong geopolitical call, watch out.
“The idea of China interfering in the sanctity of the NBA is somehow incredibly offensive to them, whereas the same standard for American elections results in the sound of crickets.” — Jake Tapper in an interview with Politico
Original post:
“This president doesn’t appear to know or care much about the Constitution, especially the limits it puts on his power.
. . .
Trump took an oath to defend the Constitution. Instead, he’s attacking it — by inflating and abusing his powers, ignoring laws he swore to protect and demanding unconstitutional reprisals against anyone who opposes him.” — Doyle McManus, in Sunday morning’s Los Angeles Times
The headline and sub head in Sunday’s print edition conveys the gist of the column — “A constitutional blind eye: Trump neither knows nor respects how our basic law limits his power” — which contrasts the President’s view of his power under Article II with the view of the founders.
As Trump approaches 1,000 days in office (on October 17, 10 days from now), a recurring question has been, When will Congress step up and check the President? An Iowan put the question to Senator Joni Ernst last weekend:
Charlie Cook (who also used the expression, shelter in place) had an answer in July:
“Those who can’t understand why elected Republicans and party officials don’t stand up to Trump seem to miss a point. The survival instinct in humans is a powerful one. In anticipating human behavior, it should always be kept in mind. The track record of what happened to those who did is pretty clear. They lost primaries or chose retirement. Instead, for many pre-tea-party Republicans, the strategy has been to shelter in place. The thinking goes that there is nothing that can be done to stop Hurricane Donald. The key is to survive the storm and be in a position to put the pieces back together and rebuild the party after it has passed. They know that the final edition of Profiles in Courage has already gone to the printer.
Cook references pre-tea-party Republicans, those who (mostly in silence) still embrace conservative principles (who hope to put the pieces back together and rebuild the party post-Trump). That’s not everyone in the Senate, of course:
“Everyone is getting a little shaky at this point,” said Brendan Buck, who was counselor to former House speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). “Members have gotten out on a limb with this president many times only to have it be cut off by the president. They know he’s erratic, and this is a completely unsteady and developing situation.”
The few who might harbor thoughts of opposing Trump are even less likely to speak out. As former Senator Jeff Flake put it, “There is a concern that he’ll get through it and he’ll exact revenge on those who didn’t stand with him.”
The founders didn’t expect Profiles in Courage. They anticipated men acting badly, but believed that institutional checks would hold. Personal ambition and rival interests, both good motives and bad, were all part of the equation:
“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public.“
They expected personal ambition, “opposite and rival interests,” and perhaps even institutional pride (or, in less positive terms, institutional jealousy) to be incentive enough to check an errant president.
But when Trump holds sway over Republican primary voters, and is ready to exact revenge for disloyalty, personal ambition requires sheltering in place.
Marco Rubio was ambitious. (“And two weeks from tonight, right here in Florida, we are going to send a message loud and clear. We are going to send a message that the party of Lincoln and Reagan and the presidency of the United States will never be held by a con artist.” Trump beat Rubio by 18 points in the Florida primary.
Given this environment, could Republicans break from Trump?
“Nobody wants to be the zebra that strays from the pack and gets gobbled up by the lion,” a former senior administration official said in assessing the current consensus among Senate Republicans. “They have to hold hands and jump simultaneously … Then Trump is immediately no longer president and the power he can exert over them and the punishment he can inflict is, in the snap of a finger, almost completely erased.”
Expecting Republican Senators to “hold hands and jump simultaneously,” between now and November 3, 2020, even as we learn more about Trump’s extortion of Ukraine, is far fetched.
If the story metastasizes far beyond where we are now, might 3 or 4 Republican Senators vote for impeachment? I would regard that as a victory.
Meanwhile, Republican Senators can be expected to fall into 3 camps. From the first camp, we’ll see an avalanche of lies, diversions, attacks on Democrats and the media, and a bottomless narrative of grievance.
From the second camp, we’ll hear tut-tutting and murmurs of disapproval, but the conduct will not rise to the level of impeachment.
And, a third possibility, 1 or 2 or 3 (or …?) Republican Senators will acknowledge that Trump’s misconduct is undeniable and renders him unfit to serve. At least we can hope that this category is not a null set by the time the Senate votes on impeachment.
