By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, December 10, 2019
Once liberalism and progressivism give way to Jacobinism
— and they often do, as we have seen in revolutionary France, China, and Russia
— no leftist is safe from the downward spiral to ideological cannibalism.
Yesterday’s true believer is today’s counterrevolutionary and tomorrow’s enemy
of the people.
We saw something like that during both the Trump
impeachment frenzy and the current trajectory of the Democratic debates and
looming primaries.
The fury over Trump’s election led to a graduated and
escalating series of efforts to remove him by suing three states for supposedly
fraudulent voting machines. Then articles of impeachment were introduced. Suits
followed citing the Constitution’s emoluments clause. The Logan Act was raised,
as was the 25th Amendment. At each juncture, the zeal to remove the president
accelerated in direct proportion to the failure of the previous effort. A lack
of success was always explained as a result of insufficient revolutionary zeal,
not an absence of evidence.
The escalation culminated in the appointment of Robert
Mueller and his “dream team” of partisan anti-Trump attorneys. After their
failure to find actionable obstruction and any evidence of collusion, Mueller
confirmed in congressional testimony that he was largely a tired
administrative-state figurehead, a shill for the anti-Trump zealotry of
progressive prosecutor Andrew Weissmann.
After the collapse of each of these agendas, all that was
left was impeachment itself. The criminal was still Trump; but what was needed
was a new and better “crime” — and far more passion and hate. And both were
found with Ukraine, as first defined as quid pro quo, later replaced by
“bribery,” and finally recalibrated as “abuse of power.”
The weekly Jacobin rhetoric made the prior progressive
talk seem counterrevolutionary — until we finally reached the crux of the
matter with admissions by various Democrats such as Representatives Alexandra
Ocasio-Cortez, Al Green, and Nancy Pelosi that impeachment was likely the only
means to stop Trump in 2020.
The Democrats in their impeachment frenzy have now
established that a president can be impeached for thinking about withholding
foreign aid to a country that he suspects is mired in corruption, including
foreign malfeasance that might have affected him personally in the past and may
in the future.
But criminalization of such a hypothetical quid pro quo
has all but condemned both Barack Obama and Joe Biden in the court of public
opinion. By that logic the Republican House should have impeached Obama in 2012
right before his reelection bid, for dismantling missile-defense plans in
Europe in exchange for Putin’s putting off his annexations of Crimea and
eastern Ukraine until after Obama’s reelection — in effect bestowing upon
candidate Obama a private quid pro quo benefit of assuring voters that Obama’s
“Russian reset” was sound foreign policy.
Candidate Biden stands accused of no thought crime, but
of actually leveraging foreign aid to force the firing of a Ukrainian
prosecutor who, by his own admission, later claimed he was looking into Biden’s
mysterious activities with regard to the board of a corrupt Ukrainian energy
company.
Obama had refused to provide needed lethal aid to
Ukraine. He sent Biden to Ukraine, who used the stick of threatening to cancel
all nonlethal aid in return for the carrot of not embarrassing Biden, Obama,
and the Democratic party with a messy investigation of Burisma — and by
extension Biden’s son — with obvious importance to the 2016 campaign cycle.
If Trump can be impeached for delaying lethal aid to
Ukraine for a few weeks, then surely Obama and Biden should have been impeached
for doing something worse. In other words, once presidential prerogatives are
criminalized and impeachment is used for short-term political gain, then the
revolutionary process takes on a life of its own and will eventually devour its
own creators. In such a downward spiral, impeachment has become no big deal,
but a simple way of discrediting a president the opposition hates.
From now on, the party that holds the House majority will
cite the present impeachment inquiry as good precedent for seeking the
impeachment of any first-time president whose agendas they abhor and who they
fear will be reelected. We are in revolutionary times, and those who redefined
impeachment as a crude political effort will one day discover that they are
being guillotined by the very instrument of retribution they erected.
Meanwhile, for most of 2019, no Democratic presidential
candidate has allowed any other to appear to his or her left. They’ve gone so
far leftward that they’ve begun devouring one another. Hyper-liberal Joe Biden
eagerly renounced his prior centrist positions but was nonetheless tagged as a
veritable racist by Kamala Harris, herself eager to disown her entire prior
career as a California state attorney. Beto O’Rourke tried to trump his rivals
by promising to confiscate guns — as if merely banning their sales was
right-wing.
Soon frenzied candidates were trying to outbid one
another by making calls to pack the Supreme Court and abolish the Electoral
College — the latter a constitutional provision revered by leftists from 2008
to 2013, given that it seemed to assure a permanently unassailable blue wall.
All rushed to be purist supporters of the unhinged Green New Deal, the
abolishment of ICE, slavery reparations, Medicare for All, a wealth tax, and
free medical care for illegal aliens — until there was nothing left but a
socialist Democratic party without a single issue that could win majority
public support. Within weeks they were falling over the cliff, with no ground
beneath.
The result was that the candidates served themselves up
on their own menus. Elizabeth Warren trashed charter schools, championed
noncharter, unionized public education, railed at elitism — and, after
customarily lying, ultimately confessed that she had sent her own child to one
of the most prestigious, elitist, and costly prep schools in the nation. Thus
she de facto negated all of her revolutionary rhetoric, or rather was convicted
as a counterrevolutionary by her own admission that she sought an elite refuge
for her own.
A doctrine of radical feminism is that sexual harassment
includes boorish behavior with women in public — no exceptions allowed for
loose, overly familiar talk, paternal condescension, and unwanted physical
contact of any sort. That more or less sums up the public career of Joe Biden,
whose continued uninvited hugging, squeezing, and blowing into the hair of
teenage girls seems almost pathological.
The same zero-tolerance standards exist for racist talk.
There can be no slips of the tongue, no clumsy expression. When Joe Biden said
of Barack Obama, “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is
articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” when Joe Biden talked
of the ubiquity of Indian Americans (“You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’
Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent — I’m not joking”) when Joe Biden
boasted of his youthful work at a swimming pool with inner-city kids and
claimed he learned there about “roaches” and showed them “his blond leg hairs,”
then in progressive logic he opened up windows into a racist mind.
A chief tenet of left-wing identity politics is
“disproportionate impact.” The idea mandates that racism does not have to be
proved to exist. If a particular professional, field, organization, or company
is not as racially diverse, on a proportional basis, as the general population,
then it is implicitly racist and must take the necessary reparatory measures.
Of course, “disproportionate” is a relative term and does
not necessarily apply to an organization such as the U.S. Postal Service, the
NFL, or NBA, in which African Americans are vastly “overrepresented” compared
with their percentage of the population.
An empiricist would say that Kamala Harris dropped out
because she was a lousy candidate: She had little political experience and a
thin grasp of issues, lacked deeply held views, and proved to be a poor
campaigner and an ineffective campaign administrator.
Nor is Cory Booker a viable candidate: He is subject to
bouts of hyperbole bordering on incoherence; his herky-jerky style is
off-putting. He too has no consistent views, veering from near centrism to hard
progressivism as the situation calls for. Both self-identified as young
charismatic African-American identity-politics candidates. Neither possessed
Obama’s political savvy or rhetorical skills, which had demolished white elite
Hillary Clinton in the primaries and won him greater white support in 2008, in
his defeat of old white male John McCain, than John Kerry had earned in 2004,
But under progressive disproportionate-impact theory, the
Democrat field and indeed Democrat voters, at least as evidenced by their
preferences in the polls and campaign donations, are all guilty of racism. You
see, they somehow have prevented both Harris and Booker (still in the race)
from being present on the next presidential debate stage. Note that no one rued
the implosion of hapless white male Beto O’Rourke, a charlatan of privilege
without any record of achievement other than reinventing himself as a “white
Hispanic.”
Without Booker, Julián Castro, and Andrew Yang present,
the finalists are lily-white, and thus the entire process is deemed racist not
by its methodology but by its disproportionate result. Note also that a slew of
dull, uncharismatic white male candidates has fared as poorly as Booker,
Castro, Harris, Deval Patrick, and Yang: de Blasio, Bennet, Bullock, Delaney,
O’Rourke, Sestak, and others. Indeed, there are far more boring and
unimpressive white male candidates than there are candidates of color.
Again, no matter. According to Jacobin logic, there must
be nonwhite faces on the debate stage, or the entire party stands guilty of
what it regularly accuses others of. The party that insists we are categorized
by our superficial appearance has more or less destroyed the candidacies of
three black candidates, a Latino candidate, and the sole Asian candidate, not
because empirically these were poorer candidates, but, accordingly to their own
logic, because Democratic grandees and their constituents were racists!
There are a few Democrats who see the lines lengthening
at the guillotine and wish to duck out. Joe Biden is now once more
recalibrating, but this time back to good ol’ Joe from Scranton. Pete Buttigieg
is suddenly, at least this week, a pragmatic mayor first and an ideologue
second. Michael Bloomberg wants to enter the debates and stand on one side of
the stage facing all the other candidates to the left. A few newly elected
Democratic House members understand that the star-chamber impeachment inquiries
rub their own constituents the wrong way, and they are desperate to glue back
on their 2018 veneers as sober pragmatists at odds with the hard-left wing of
their party.
Unfortunately, the voices of the sane and the moderate
are usually crushed in revolutionary cycles where extremism operates on its own
logic and trajectory — until chaos and cannibalism finally lead even to the
extremists’ own suicide.
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