Sowing the wind.

It has long been part of the American political canon that what George Washington did for the country should be and must be repeated by his Oval Office successors.

Washington served two terms as the first President under the Constitution.  As he approached the end of his second there was serious debate in some quarters on whether he would step down and out, run again, or just declare himself to be the chief administrator of the country.

He simply retired and went back to public life.

No American President broke that tradition until Franklin Roosevelt kept running, ultimately dying in office.  Controversial at the time, it lead to the Constitutional Amendment prohibiting that.  But Roosevelt's presence in the office was democratic, not judicial.

Now President Trump has shattered that tradition, refusing to concede that he has lost when he did, and resorting to crackpot litigation.  Lawyers who are deeply in Trump's camp have signed on for the effort, including the Attorney General of Texas and Ted Cruz, who offered to argue the Pennsylvania appeal at the Supreme Court level if it got in the door. . . as if that was really supposed to achieve something.* The Republican Party has generally gone along with this.

The real thing that separates democracies from dictatorship is the democratic habit.  That's about it.  Lots of dictators started out as elected officials and then retained office by refusing to step down, manipulating the organs of power in order to make their retention of power appear legitimate.  It's extremely common.

Here the US judicial system has been put a stress test and really held up. The Republican Party has been put to one and has not.  Real questions remain going forward what this will end up causing.

Back in 2016 when Trump secured the GOP nomination I commented here that the GOP would have to live with the implications.  It will, and now the question really is, is there a GOP?  The party has certainly changed from what it was four years ago, and one of the things that has developed is a scary section of belief that the leader's word must be true because he is the leader. Added to that is the additional element that power must be retained as the opponent is unworthy of power, or even traitorous.

That crosses over a political line from supporting democracy to something akin to what fascist parties believed.  At their core they believed that only they were worthy of rule as their opponents were evil.  Indeed that outlook caused a debate in the 1930s on whether or not Communist parties were fascist parties, as that was in essence their belief as well.  It's not that the Soviet Union didn't have elections, it always did.  It's that only the "right" votes counted.

Added to that you can only stress things so many times before they bend.  Due to the disfunction of the American Federal Government since the 1990s the Courts have increasingly become an unelected national legislature.  Chief Justice Roberts complained about this openly in an oral argument just the other day.  Now the Courts are all that is keeping an attempted coup through the courts from succeeding. They're doing a magnificent job of it, but how many times can they keep doing that, and will it now be the case that every one of our national elections is legislated this way.  

If the latter is the case, we're now a second or even third rate nation, protected only by the overabundance of lawyers in our society.  That's a scary situation to be in.

We really don't know where this will lead over the next two to four years.  My suspicion is that the Trump banner will rapidly fade and with it will come a restructuring of the GOP back to a more Buckleyesque part.  If not, it'll split in two into a center right party and an alt right part, neither of which will be able to contend against the largest party in the nation, the Democratic Party.  

"they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind"

The sad thing is that this is pretty conclusive evidence that there is something extremely fractured in American society.  It'd be too early to consign the country to the grave in terms of it being a first rate nation, but the US is fooling itself it believes that there's a quick fix to this.  Donald Trump promised to "make American great again", and he has some economic advances to his credit.  But the political damage now done to the country won't be repaired in four years, eight years, or twelve.  His legacy will be principally defined by an effort to illegitimately hold on to power, just like Richard Nixon's long and distinguished career is defined almost wholly by Watergate.

The country did get over Watergate, of course, although in real ways the reaction to Watergate and what it brought into the nation's politics is responsible for what we're seeing now.  It's certain, retrospectively, that Gerald Ford is partially responsible for what is happening now by his pardoning of Nixon, something that never should have been done.  Nixon should have been tried and convicted for his crimes so as to set a standard and example for the future.

Indeed, Nixon's pardoning is one of the two great American pardoning political mistakes that continues to haunt the nation, the first being the United States decision to decline prosecuting the treasonous Southern figures who lead the rebelling against the country in 1860 to 65.  Just as Washington's peaceful transfer of power set an example that lasted over 200 years, the post Civil War  and post Watergate examples set a precedent that you really can attack the institutions of the country and get away with it.  Trying the Southern rebels for treason would have shocked the Southern population into reform, which they were already inclined towards, in 1865 and have kept their antebellum masters from returning to rule over white and black alike once again.  Trying Nixon would have proved that the President wasn't above the law even when sitting behind the Resolute Desk.  Instead we made heroes out of traitors in the first instance and inserted the concept of near dictatorial powers while in office in the second.  Indeed Nixon openly opined that the President couldn't commit a crime.

But the President can and in a loose non judicial sense a crime against the American political culture is being committed right now and shows ever sense of running right up to the inauguration.  The Atlantic magazine has turned out to be prophetic in what Trump intended to try.  For the most part only the courts, and some brave state Republican officials, have kept this from occurring.  If it had succeeded the result would have been complete anarchy.

Some commentators, at this point in time, have begun to ponder if what is presently occurring goes further than that, however.  It might be a real crime, they're stating, with that crime being sedition.

Sedition, in Federal law, is as follows:

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

As can be seen, the elements require two or more people, making it a species of conspiracy, who conspire to overthrow the government or "to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States".  

There's been commentary that this must be an attempt to violently overthrow or hinder, but that's not really clear.  Law is not only in the details, but also in the grammar.  It's perfectly possible to read 18 USC § 2394 to prevent conspiracies to 1) overthrow, or 2) put down, or "destroy by force". That doesn't require the conspiracies to overthrow, put down, or  hinder to require force.

Of course, that question is academic as nobody is going to charge Trump or his confederates with sedition.  And if they did, they'd fail, contrary to what some commentators have argued, as the effort has been pretty open and doesn't look like any sort of conventional conspiracy so much as a rather odd litigation based strategy.  The point, however, is that by sow the winds of the court, the doors are now open to what that may reap.  Some on the left are now openly advocating for trying Trump for something.  

By and large, that would be disastrous for the left unless something really dramatic comes forward post election, which some are speculating will.  That, they argue, is Trump's real reason for trying to hold on to power. The evidence doesn't support that, however.  It appears just to be an effort to hold on to power combined with a disrespect for the American democratic tradition.

Disrespect, of course, won't take a person anywhere without support and it seems pretty clear that the last time a crisis of this type, Watergate, existed neither the public nor the Republican Party were willing to participate in it. Of course, in that case an outright crime had occurred.  Still, being old enough to remember 1973, I can remember Nixon being held in contempt by average people for what he did.

Here we are seeing something else.  People are signing up to be part of this effort.  And that points to something just as troubling.

It wasn't in 2016 that the nation suddenly had a disgruntled populist segment of the country that was voting to light the match to the nation.  That impulse went all the way back to the latter part of Ronald Reagan's administration in the figure of such people as Newt Gingrich.  Starting in the 1970s the blue collar, rust belt, section of the nation began to suffer a decline which nobody made any effort to reverse.  At the same time the American left went from begin a WASP based sort of Episcopal left to an increasingly Hight Ashbury sort of left that had a really strong element of contempt for Western culture and tradition.  The right, in turn, began to give lip service to deep nativist impulses that have always been a feature of American culture even while directly participating in left wing agendas that directly impacted and damaged the people they were pitching to.  Rust Belt denizens who felt that they'd been forgotten and abandoned by both parties and cultural elites were completely correct, they had been.

Hence what we are now seeing with Donald Trump.  Trump is a populist and if he seems a populist in the mold of Huey Long or Fr. Charles Coughlin, it's because he is. Both of those men from the 1930s pitched to the same base and in the same fashion, and if people suspected that they were anti democratic, it was was a suspicion that was merited in the first instance and correct in the second.  Indeed, Trump may be more like Long in his personality that Coughlin, who was more anti democratic but not personally tainted by personal vice.  

That should be really frightening as what that means is that a large demographic really doesn't care if what Trump does in an effort to retain power is democratic or not.  And that's what gave Italy a figure like Mussolini, Spain a figure like Franco, or Portugal Salazar.  They didn't seize power on their own, they obtained it as they were supported by a real base that had lost interest in democracy in the greater sense and who were concerned only about their own agendas, which they believed to be the correct agendas.

What this means is that the incoming President, Joe Biden, has a massive amount of work to do in order to address populist complaints.  Ultimately, all populist movements break upon reality and the key is to address the complaint, or alternatively to completely bury the complaining demographic politically.  Indeed, all totalitarian populist movements ironically achieve that latter result. Portugal went right from a right wing dictatorship to a radical Socialist government with nothing in between. The Spanish Falangist are thing of the political past.  In the US, however, the disgruntled populist demographic is too large to ignore.

Biden has only four years to really get this fixed.  It'll be a big task, but frankly not an impossible one.  To do it, he has to ignore the advice of his supporters who want to treat the nation like a giant sociology petrie dish.  Forcing more left wing ideology down the throats of the public on social issues will cement the populist drift of the GOP and likely bring a rapid end to Democratic power in Congress in 2022.  Biden, who was once a Republican, and who was at one time an observant Catholic, can return to much of his roots and assuage fears while also addressing issues that need to be addressed.  If that's done, he may come out a hero in what is likely to be his single term, and perhaps start to repair the damage being meted out to the country by a President who clearly doesn't respect American political culture.  Or he can ignore that, or just be ineffectual, and make the damage worse.

At some point, however, people who supported this poorly thought out effort to effect a sort of judicial coup will have to come to account.  We can expect them all to have long political careers, but like American politicians who said nice things about the Nazis in the 1930s, and not like the American politicians who said nice things about  the Soviets in the 1940s, they'll need to address it.  With this having been loosed in the hot wind of this election seasons, something is going to be need to send when the wind calms and the weather cools.  It'll be necessary for the country.

*It probably did put an end to speculation that Cruz would make a good Supreme Court justice.  There's no way he'd pass muster now.