By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, June 21, 2024
They told me that if Joe Biden was elected president,
gangs of Nazi raccoons would run wild in German cities—and they were
right.
The weird thing about that sentence is that the part
that’s not true is the bit about Joe Biden. Nazi raccoons are running
wild in Germany.
According to one version of the story, the Nazi Department of Forestry and
Conservation—run by Hermann Göring—released four raccoons into the wild in the
1930s, thus earning the sobriquet “Nazi raccoons.” Another version says they
escaped from their cages during an Allied bombing. Some critics of American
foreign policy no doubt prefer this version, because it supports the idea that
there’s always “blowback” to American leadership in the world. No doubt Candace
Owens, who now “thinks” we should have stayed out of World War
II, prefers this version. I mean, is stopping Hitler and ending the
Holocaust really worth it if it comes at such a high cost?
Regardless, the Nazi raccoons now number around 2 million
and are wreaking havoc. In 2017, one raccoon even
blew up a power station.
It’s funny, in the waning days of World War II, as the
Allies advanced further and further into Germany, Hitler and his advisers came
up with Operation Werewolf (Unternehmen
Werwolf), intended to wage merciless guerrilla warfare against the Allies
behind enemy lines and against any Germans who gave up the fight. The Werewolves
didn’t last long after the war, but Unternehmen Müllpanda—Operation
Trash Panda—is going strong nearly a century later. Nazi raccoons own the night
in many German cities, moving in bands through the streets and occupying
attics, garages, and cars. The Germans are fighting back: I learned today
that raccoon
sausage is a thing.
I Googled “Is raccoon safe to eat?” and apparently, if
cooked correctly (trash pandas can carry rabies as well as all manner of
parasites), they’re good
eatin’—at least according to the sorts of people who would ever think to
eat one. I am not such a person (though I’m not kosher, I don’t eat animals
with hands), but, because I didn’t use Express VPN (promo code Remnant!),
I’m sure I’m going to start getting ads for the sorts of people who are.
Anyway, like all Nazis, these raccoons are not content to
rule just Germany, they’ve crossed
the border into France, Belgium, and the Czech Republic claiming
evermore Lebensraum. None of the recent articles mention them
moving into Poland, but even the briefest Googling reveals
furry blitzkrieg crossed the Polish border a long time ago. I mean, of
course Nazi raccoons would invade Poland.
Why am I writing about this? Well, for a few
reasons.
First, there’s an old rule in my line of work: If you can
justifiably talk about Nazi animals, you should. True story: After my dad took
me to see Raiders of the Lost Ark, I said I felt bad about the
monkey dying. My dad said, “Well, he was a bad monkey.”
I responded that I didn’t think he was a bad monkey. Dad
replied: “Jonah, he was a Nazi monkey.”
Despite the monkey working with Nazis and even doing the
Sieg Heil salute, I don’t think my dad was right. But it sure is fun saying
“Nazi monkey.”
Second, I had a crazy morning with podcasts and meetings,
and not much time to think of something to write about. So, when the God of the
Deadline drops Nazi raccoons in your lap like a bottle of coke in The
Gods Must Be Crazy, you don’t ask questions.
But I do have a point to make, which brings me back to my
opening line. I went on a bit of a stemwinder on the solo Remnant (aka The
Ruminant) this morning about a familiar topic in this space:
catastrophizing. More on that in a moment.
I’m going to keep mentioning Yuval Levin’s new
book, American
Covenant, because I want people to read it. I also want to ingratiate
myself with him sufficiently that he finally fulfills his promise to me to get
Fresca back in the AEI office fridge. But that’s not important right now.
Part of Yuval’s argument is that we misunderstand the
role of unity in our constitutional order. The Constitution was crafted to
foster productive disagreement: faction against faction, state governments
against the federal government, the executive branch against the legislative
branch. The goal wasn’t to secure unity, but rather to foster healthy
competition. That’s what free speech is for—to let people argue. Contrary to
the rhetoric of a lot of Republicans these days, senators and congressmen are
not supposed to take orders from the president (never mind the party’s
presumptive nominee). Presidents are not elected to be the boss of anybody but
staffers in the executive branch. A king can tell a subject what to do; the
president can’t tell you to do anything without the benefit of law.
And the law is written by the legislature. Legislators
are not elected to be answerable to the president—even presidents of the same
party. Legislators are elected to be answerable to their voters. Newly elected
presidents are famously frustrated with the fact that they have to ask Congress
for permission and authorization to do all sorts of things. But that’s how the
system works.
This bothers cultists of the presidency—in all
parties—because they’ve become convinced that presidents are more like elected
kings in charge of the country. Thing is, they are not in charge of the
country. They’re in charge of … staffers in the executive branch. And even that
is subject to limitations set by Congress, the courts, and the
Constitution.
This is one reason why presidents, and acolytes of the
cult of the presidency, love crisis. As Rahm Emanuel famously put it, “You
never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an
opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
Before I go on, it’s worth noting that “serious crisis”
is a redundant phrase, like “close proximity,” “unexpected surprise,” “advance
warning,” “complete opposite,” and “boring New York Times editorial.”
If a crisis isn’t serious, it isn’t a crisis.
Emanuel rightly got a lot of grief for saying that, but
some interpretations of what he said are less damning than others. Crises do
create political opportunities to get things done. Donald Trump’s illegal
bump stock ban was implemented in response to a crisis—the mass
shooting in Las Vegas. The problem wasn’t that Washington responded to a mass
murder made possible by a modification that made a semi-automatic rifle into,
for practical purposes, an illegal machine gun. The problem was that, because
the Trump White House issued an illegal executive order, the pressure on
Congress to respond to a crisis appropriately and lawfully was
short-circuited.
That’s the problem with the triplet cults of the
presidency, crisis, and unity. In a crisis we want a Big Man to do what is
necessary, to represent the will of the unified people, and just get things
done. This is why presidents love to declare things are crises—to get
permission to work outside the rules. That’s the appeal of the “moral
equivalent of war.” Declare something an existential threat like a war, and
the president gets to act like a commander-in-chief or king on the home front.
“As in the great crisis of the World War,” Franklin Roosevelt explained in
1933 introducing the National Industrial Recovery Act, “it puts a
whole people to the simple but vital test: Must we go on in many groping,
disorganized, separate units to defeat or shall we move as one great team to
victory?”
Whether it’s climate change, chaos at the border, or a
thousand other crises—real and pretend—partisans and cultists love the idea of
using emergencies as an excuse to work around the system. That’s the crux of my
problem with catastrophizing: It gives people permission to stop thinking, stop
following the rules—constitutional, legal, moral, political, cultural—and
reduce questions to fear and panic.
In 2020, Donald Trump said
that if Biden was elected, “He’ll bury you in regulations, dismantle your
police departments, dissolve our borders, confiscate your guns, terminate
religious liberty, destroy your suburbs.” He said
that Biden’s energy plan “would mean that America’s seniors have no
air conditioning during the summer, no heat during the winter, and no
electricity during peak hours.” In a debate with Biden, he
also said, “They say the stock market will boom if I’m elected, if he’s
elected the stock market will crash. The biggest analysts are saying
that.” And he constantly said MS-13 would
rampage across America like so many Nazi raccoons hopped up on amphetamines and
cough medicine. (I’m paraphrasing.)
Now, don’t get me wrong: Plenty of bad stuff has happened
with regulations and the border. But the stock market is near
its all-time high, old people still have air conditioning and heat, and the
suburbs, last I checked, are still there. Ditto police departments and
religious liberty.
Trump didn’t say that if Joe Biden was elected, Nazi
raccoons would ravage Europe. But it’s the same idea. Joe Biden and his
surrogates insist that democracy will end if Trump is reelected. I don’t think
reelecting Trump would be good for democracy, but I also think democracy will
survive even if he returns to the White House.
I’m a broken record on
the problems with the cult of unity. Unity is amoral; a tool. Hamas is unified.
The mafia places a huge premium on unity. The Nazis were very unified, as are
the Nazi raccoons (though there might be some collaborators for all I know).
Unity can be moral when used for moral ends. And, in the
context of the American constitutional order, with moral means. However much
you think the border, climate change, MS-13, fentanyl, student loan debt, bump
stocks, etc. are crises, the way to deal with crises is to have a big argument
about them—not peddle catastrophes and demonize people who disagree with what
you want to do.
Persuade people. Hold hearings. Pass laws. One reason to
operate that way is because the people you demonize today will eventually be in
power, and the shortcuts you took will be undone using the same shortcuts. Laws
are hard to repeal; executive orders aren’t.
But another reason to do things the right way is that the
result will probably—though not necessarily—be better than presidential diktat.
What is certain, though, is that more Americans will agree with the result and
have a sense of ownership of it, because their elected representatives took the
time to debate, negotiate, and ultimately legislate.
Which brings me back to Yuval. “The breakdown of
political culture in our day,” he writes, “is not a function of our having
forgotten how to agree with each other but of our having forgotten how to
disagree constructively.”
That’s what the Constitution was set up to make possible:
Constructive disagreement.
People don’t think clearly and don’t necessarily act
decently when freaked out with panic over a crisis or threat of a catastrophe.
That’s why I keep pushing back on all the horse hockey about the “Flight
93 election” stuff. Essays like that are a deliberate effort to scare
people out of thinking straight.
It’s not that we don’t face problems, even crises. We do.
But the cheerleaders of crisis who insist that liberal democracy or
constitutional republicanism (which are, for nearly all practical purposes, the
same frick’n thing) is not up to these challenges have no credibility with me.
Because practically none of them have even tried to address these challenges
the right way, and some of them don’t want the right way to work anyway. Not
only would that prove them wrong, it would make the catastrophists and crisis
mongers irrelevant.
That is a goal worth unifying around—that, and the Nazi
raccoon menace.
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