CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 154th Edition.Trump's approval rating in Wyoming falls from 75% to 54%. Privation. The idiotic "republic not a democracy" line surfaces again. Viking funerals. Miley.

Barely hanging on in Wyoming.

Which is really remarkable

Wyoming is one of the few states where Trump has a positive approval rating, probably mostly attributable to the importance of the extractive industries to the economy, and due to agriculture.  Trump actually has farmers and ranchers upset now and as he's set to import foreign beef and hasn't really made any immediate actions addressing agriculture's concerns, this trend may continue.

Trump's endorsement of Megan Degenfelder fell flat in the state, and hardcorse Freedom Caucus rank and file were actually upset with his endorsement of Degenfelder followed by Hageman's endorsement of her as well.  So some cracks are actually appearing.

And now Trump's at odds with his Wyoming voters over data centers.

We don't see these statistics for Wyoming very often, which is no surprise given the low population of the state, but it will be interesting to see how this develops.  If he falls below 50%, and that's close to being the case, it may start a sort of freefall.

Trump only has a positive approval rating in 13 states.  Most of these states are ones in which he barely has a positive rating.  Wyoming has the highest approval rating of any state, which shows the extent to which Trump's really in trouble.  All of Wyoming's neighbors also have positive Trump approval ratings except for Colorado.

I've long thought that most of the Trump "supporters" are just followers.  When things begin to fade, and paying high prices at the pump and supporting data centers is creating fading, a lot of former supporters will claim to have never supported him. We see stuff like that all the time.

Just wait for the upcoming toilet paper shortages due to Trump tariffs on Canada.

Suffering privation

One thing about all of this is how absolutely tone deaf the Administration is to the suffering its causing, both here and abroad.

He's cutting off access to foreign good that Americans use (Bombardier also makes snow machines) and wiping out foreign markets for US products (Canadians used to buy a lot of American bourbon). At the same time, he's telling fairy tales about how you shouldn't mind, with the most recent example being that while you are paying a little more at the pump, it's not a big inconvenience and your sacrifice is worth it so Iran doesn't get the bomb.

Whether or not Iran was close to getting a bomb at any point during the Trump administration is an open question.  But beyond that, Americans, in spite of what we may collectively choose to imagine about certain eras, don't do sacrifice on the home front very well.  World War Two was the biggest example of restrictions for a national effort and people hated it.  Cheating and the black market was absolutely rampant.  The whole concept that the nation all pitched in and glady endured shortages is complete crap.  Even one of the most patriotic demographics, farmers and ranchers, notoriously evaded rationing illegally by selling livestock under the table.  And that was in a big national effort.

Americans aren't keen on high prices on anything.  Protectionist efforts only really work well in an economy if they're introduced really early, or they cause resentment.  If you are going to put up restrictive trade barriers, including tariffs, you need to do it nearly immediately, and you better have a really good reason for doing it.

We're doing it because Peter Navarro has Trump's ear and Trump has always liked the concept.  Trump's mind on this is rooted in the 1970s when the US was worried about Japanese imports.  Navarro is 77 years old.  Pining for the economy of the post World War Two world won't work, and making Americans suffer for a pipe dream won't either.

It particularly will not when a rich guy like Trump doesn't join in the suffering.  His fans like to note that he's not taking his pay. . . but not that he flies everywhere, including on golf trips, on the government dime.

We are a democracy, dumbass.

The moronic line "we're a republic, not a democracy" has been around for years.  I've heard it many times myself and corrected the speaker, usually with the speaker then looking deflated.  Democracy and republic are not only not mutually exclusive, they don't even describe the same thing.

Ancient Athens was a pure democracy, everything could be voted on by its citizens.  The United Kingdom is a parliamentary democracy, people vote for the House of Commons and the Parliament then functions as the government. We're a democratic republic, which isn't actually all that difference but which does make for problems if the elected representatives won't do their jobs, as they won't right now.  In a parliamentary democracy, they have to.

People who spout the "republic not a democracy" line have not thought out what they're saying at all.  Recently, in the MAGA crowed, it's "constitutional republic".  I've heard that from MAGAs great and small, including one Harriet Hageman. 

It's frankly a stupid comment.

It's been going around the last week, however, so somebody is feeding it out as a talking point for idiots.

And then there's this:

Worland Man Wanted His Ashes Put On USS Constitution Model And Set Aflame On Boysen

I guess it's humorous, sort of, but then, sort of not.

Miley

Miley Cyrus is provoking outrage as she's put out her last album as "Miley", which apparently somehow upsets fans of Dolly Parton.  As I don't care for Cyrus' music or Parton's, it doesn't mean much to me, but what struck me is that when I hit on the news story Cyrus was there wearing see through everything so you can see all of her really horrible tattoos.

They are truly bad.

They're the sort of tattoos that people who are junkies get from other junkies. What the heck?

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 153rd Edition. The Hunt for the Golden Pheasants, Delusional monuments, Recovering the imaginary 1950s.

Labels: 2020s, 2025 White House Vandalization, 2026, Bowling, Dancing, Donald Trump, Doug Burgum, Golf, J. D. Vance, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, The Second Trump Administration, Washington DC Vandalization, Zeitgeist

“We need to conceive of democracy as something more revolutionary” Osita Nwanevu on the imperative for a new American founding.

 

“We need to conceive of democracy as something more revolutionary”

Osita Nwanevu on the imperative for a new American founding.

Defining the terms 1. Yes, we're a democracy (and a republic as well).

The American system of government is democratic. We are a democracy

There's an odd objection in some quarters that arises from time to time to calling the US a democracy. At other times, we're proud of it.  During World War One we became, for instance, the Arsenal of Democracy.  Not the Arsenal of Republics.

Here's the deal.

Let's define democracy.

Merriam-Webster states the following:

Definition of democracy

1a: government by the peopleespecially : rule of the majority

b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections

2: a political unit that has a democratic government

3capitalized : the principles and policies of the Democratic party in the U.S.from emancipation Republicanism to New Deal Democracy— C. M. Roberts

4: the common people especially when constituting the source of political authority

5: the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges

Some might say, well so what, but that's about as good of set of definitions as any.

Given as we're discussing, principally, the means of choosing our leaders, we can probably exclude topics 3, 4, and 5, for the most part.

That leaves categories 1 and 2.

Some people, on this topic, like to say "we're a republic, not a democracy".  That displays, however, an erroneous understanding of what a republic is.

Let's go to the same source.  It states:

Definition of republic

1a(1): a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president

(2): a political unit (such as a nation) having such a form of government

b(1): a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law

(2): a political unit (such as a nation) having such a form of government

c: a usually specified republican government of a political unitthe French Fourth Republic

2: a body of persons freely engaged in a specified activitythe republic of letters

3: a constituent political and territorial unit of the former nations of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, or Yugoslavia

We can obviously exclude 2 and 3 here.

Categories 1(a)(b) and (c) apply to the United States.

We choose our national legislature through democratic means.  We vote for them.  That makes us a democratic republic.

We're a democracy and a republic, just as the United Kingdom is a parliamentary democracy.

The United States has always been a democracy, but over time, its democratic nature has expanded enormously.  Only men could vote originally.  Indeed, in some colonies only propertied men could vote.  Native Americans and the enslaved couldn't vote, no matter where they were born, either.  Now all of this is in the past, and the voting age is 18, which it was not originally.

Also, we directly elect Senators, which was at one time not the case.  They were originally chosen by State Legislatures, although some case can be made that this might have worked better than the current system.

Operating against this, as the government has expanded enormously, certain legislative functions have been turned over to regulatory bodies, which do not function democratically, although they are required to take public input for their decisions.  And the Court started acting extra judicially in the 20th Century, which isn't democratic.  Both of these things have recently been scaled back, which has been a subject of controversy.

And we're not a "pure democracy".  No modern nation is.  A pure democracy is one in which the citizens vote on everything.  Examples of that are rare, with only ancient Athens coming to mind.  A pure democracy wouldn't work, for obvious reasons, for any sizable nation, or perhaps any modern nation of any type.

Before closing, we should note that we're a federal republic.  I.e, a system that brings in regions into the larger government.  So, once again, our national legislature is based upon regions, i.e., states.  We're not the only nation to have such an arrangement, by any means. Many do, and the varieties of that vary enormously.

Before we depart, the United States has traditionally been a "Liberal Democracy", which doesn't mean what it might at first seem to mean.  The Collins Dictionary defines a Liberal Democracy as follows:

a democracy based on the recognition of individual rights and freedoms, in which decisions from direct or representative processes prevail in many policy areas

Pretty broad, but other definitions get quite lengthy.

Recently we wrote on Illiberal Democracy.  Wikipedia defines Illiberal democracy as the following:

An illiberal democracy describes a governing system in which, although elections take place, citizens are cut off from knowledge about the activities of those who exercise real power because of the lack of civil liberties; thus it does not constitute an open society.

Proponents of illiberal democracy, and it does have proponents, would not define it that way. They'd probably define it as a system of government in which leaders are chosen democratically, but within an overarching set of agreed to principals and values which supersede and override democratic impulses, and control what can legitimately be debated.

Helpful?  Probably not much, but keeping in mind the deeper meaning of the terms is useful.

Basically, if people get to vote, and the vote determines the government, it's a democracy.  If people get to vote, but that doesn't matter, it isn't.

So we've had a week of Impeachment hearings and

they don't make President Trump look good.  It's clear that he was pressuring the Ukrainians to engage in the investigation of Hunter Biden and that he had intellectual capitol invested in a conspiracy theory that nobody believes in who has looked at it.

Moreover, as Ms. Hill noted, the Administration's ongoing belief about Ukraine and election interference means that Vladimir Putin's efforts to mess with our election were not only successful, but it continues to be successful.

Yume, Vladimir Putin, and Buffy.  Any way you look at it, the figure who looms large over all of this is Vladimir Putin, the autocrat of Russia.  He has to be laughing as Americans openly continue to struggle with Russian interference in the 2016 election and the success of those efforts in destabilizing American democracy right up to the present moment.  Krelim official photograph, kremlin.ur.  

Beyond that, the current President doesn't seem to have any lines between the personal and political.

All of which is bad.

But is any of it illegal?

A reader poses the question if this conduct violates 52 U.S.C. § 30121

Apparently there's been some speculation out there that this is the provision that all this bad conduct violates.  

It doesn't.

Here's what this provision states:

Contributions and donations by foreign nationals  

(a)Prohibition 

It shall be unlawful for— 

(1)a foreign national, directly or indirectly, to make— 

(A)a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State, or local election; 

(B)a contribution or donation to a committee of a political party; or

(C)an expenditure, independent expenditure, or disbursement for an electioneering communication (within the meaning of section 30104(f)(3) of this title); or 

(2)a person to solicit, accept, or receive a contribution or donation described in subparagraph (A) or (B) of paragraph (1) from a foreign national. 

(b)“Foreign national” defined  

As used in this section, the term “foreign national” means— 

(1)a foreign principal, as such term is defined by section 611(b) of title 22, except that the term “foreign national” shall not include any individual who is a citizen of the United States*; or 

(2)an individual who is not a citizen of the United States or a national of the United States (as defined in section 1101(a)(22) of title 8) and who is not lawfully admitted for permanent residence, as defined by section 1101(a)(20) of title 8.

Let's take out the obvious.  Trump isn't a foreign national.

Okay, so in order for this statute to apply, the President would have to "to solicit, accept, or receive a contribution or donation described in subparagraph (A) or (B) of paragraph (1) from a foreign national."

So, some are theorizing, by pressuring the Ukrainian president to investigate Hunter he's soliciting "a contribution or donation".

That's strained in the extreme.

Whether the Democrats rely on this provision in their upcoming articles of impeachment is yet to be seen, and I doubt they will.  Frankly, I don't think the articles will have any citations to statutory law at all.  It'll be a series of accusations that he did improper things, but they won't be things that they can pin as illegal.  Immoral?  Perhaps?  Exceptionally crude and inappropriate?  Perhaps again. Vested in debunked theories?  Perhaps yet again.  But violating a statutory code?  So far, that seems unlikely.**

All of which puts everyone in a bad spot.  

The simple solution to this is an election. But the Democrats now have so much invested in this that they seemingly  have to go forward no matter what. For that matter, the Republicans have been put in a terrible spot as well as they've been left with seeming little choice but to defend conduct that they never otherwise would have.  All of this is serving to elevate extremist in both parties to greater heights.  And that will serve to make the upcoming election ever more extreme.

Indeed, as a trial will occur in the Senate, at this point it's impossible not to imagine the Impeachment Trial turning into a weeks long Republican effort to praise the President and perhaps give credence to discredited theories and, moreover, for the entire process to be converted by the Administration as a way to dominate the news for election purposes.  It'll be one long campaign rally, potentially, just as the House Impeachment hearings have been one long No Confidence Hearing in a country that lacks a No Confidence feature in its Constitution.

All in all, this is doing damage to everything and now that the ship has sailed there's no recovering it.  The Democrats are yielding to uber snark rather than doing anything serious.  The GOP has been reduced in its arguments to defending conduct it no doubt doesn't really approve of, which may be why the GOP figures we've heard from in the House are people that we've never heard of before.  Adam Schiff is coming across like a pampas jackass.  Devin Nunes as somebody who needs to take a public speaking class. And Jim Jordan looks absurd.  The President comes across just as he always has, which shouldn't surprise anyone. Everyone looks pretty helpless.  

Indeed the only ones who have come out looking good so far are career diplomats and government service officers who are the heroes of the moment.  Unfortunately, at the exact same time this gives credit to those on the hard right who argue that Trump is sabotaged at every turn by "the Deep State" and disloyal staffers.  And not doubt those sort of claims will be amplified in the upcoming election.

Indeed, the election itself will become even more about Trump than it already is. And that's not going to be a good thing.  Issues and policies will be buried.  And that will mean, should the Democrats win in the fall, the country will have elected somebody it probably knows almost nothing about.  The vast field of Democratic candidates right now operates to to increase that problem in that its tough to know very much about any of them, particularly with this element of background chatter constantly going on.

All of which goes to show that those who claimed that Nancy Pelosi was a master politician were pretty much right.  Her instincts were to not go in this direction, and now we know why.  When she did, she probably didn't have much of a choice.  But my guess is that her absence from the press attention during this has been studied on her part.

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Addendum:

Thomas Jefferson.  Morally problematic and enigmatic, but still brilliant.  Has the day that he feared we'd get to arrived?

After I wrote it, but before it was published, I received an email from The New Republic which I think demonstrates the really surreal state of our republic at the current time.

The email linked in an article in the current issue entitled:

To Lock Up a President

It goes on to start off with:

Democrats seem to agree that Trump should be brought to justice. Whether they agree on the precise nature of that justice is an open question.

The Article notes that there are now protesters on the left wanting to "lock up" Trump. This quote from Bernie Sanders is included in the article.

“I think the people of this country are catching on to the degree that this president thinks he is above the law,” Sanders said. “And what the American people are saying, nobody is above the law. And I think what the American people are also saying is, in fact, that if this president did break the law, he should be prosecuted like any other individual who breaks the law.”

And hence the really disturbing problem.

Things may change, and if they did substantially I'd agree that the implications of violating the law are what they are. But so far, there's been no evidence at all that Trump broke the law.  What the evidence is that he mixed his personal political aspirations with official policy in a highly inappropriate way.

But that's political.

We've definitely had Presidents break the law.  Indeed, I'd argue that both George Bush II and Barack Obama broke the law in their licensing the use of military force without a Declaration of War, although I'm one of the very few people who seem bothered by that.  Richard Nixon undoubtedly broke the law.  Reagan's lieutenants broke the law in a way that would certainly seem to implicate Reagan.  Probably most of the Cold War Presidents crowded the law in some fashion.  But what we are really seeing here is the suggestion that Trump must have broken the law because, those people argue, they don't like what he did.

Well, that doesn't make it illegal.  There's been a lot of Presidents who did stuff that was outright icky and morally questionable in the extreme (John F. Kennedy for example), but that doesn't mean all of that was illegal (although the Bay of Pigs invasion may have been).

At some point since George Bush I we've started to stray into that dangerous area of making moral failings illegal and political failure illegal.  That's a scary development.  The entire effort to impeach Bill Clinton was a spectacular example of that, but there have been plenty of others.  Since at least the Clinton Administration simply being in an Administration has exposed office holders to potential prosecution simply for failure.  It's spread to industry and commerce as well, with "insider trading" laws being an example of actually making simply being in the know illegal, and crises to prosecute bankers for failed banking practices something we've heard since 2008.

Crises of "lock him up" can't come as too much of  surprise for somebody who campaigned against his 2016 opponent with cries that she was "Crooked Hillary" and who didn't shut down supporters when they yelled "lock her up".  So a person really can't feel too sorry for a politician who is now receiving treatment similar to that which he meted out.  But a person can feel sorry for the country.  People vilified nearly every President we ever had, but the efforts we've seen since Clinton to remove them on pretexts is new and distressing in the extreme.

When the country was founded, it was famously given a republican form of government which, as Benjamin Frankly wry noted, may be difficult to keep.  We have so far. A republican government is a democracy, in spite of those who really haven't thought it out occasionally stating "a republic isn't a democracy".  Yes, it is.  What we didn't get with that republic is a democracy without a written constitution, like the British Parliament, or a pure unrestrained democracy, like the ancient Athenian democracy.  And for good reason.

Thomas Jefferson theorized from the onset that American democracy was in fact completely doomed.  His view is that it would have a long run, but only as long as it had territory to expand into and therefore a population of yeomen farmers.  Once that class yielded to an urban class, and he was certain that it would, he was certain that the urban class would rise and that politicians would purchase its votes through favors to the urban class, which he regarded as a mob.

Jefferson proved absolutely correct that the yeoman unfortunately yielded to the urbanites.  But a lot of modern democracies are more urban than rural and appear very stable.  Quite a few of the European democracies were urban when they became democracies, although at least early in the history of most of them, and ongoing in some, a yeoman class was strongly represented politically.  Ironically, in recent years some European economies have become much more open and free market than our own and are functioning politically much better than we are.

At any rate, Jefferson's view was long term gloomy.  He probably didn't regard it as such as he thought that settling the western expanse of the continent would take 1,000 years, something he was massively off the mark on.  But there are real reasons to feel that what he featured would take place after the conclusion of that 1,000 years may have been right in some form.  Americans don't seem to interested in the democratic process any more.  Like Athenian democracy, they appear okay with screaming for the head of political opponents simply because they can, and are fine with making the opponents criminals because they are opponents. And like Jefferson feared, one party at least is pretty comfortable with buying the loyalty of voters in economic positions promising to fund all of life's decisions, from education (Sanders and others) to having children (Booker), and any other number of things that prior generations would have been insulted to have the government involved in.

A republic. . . if you can keep it.

Addendum, November 25, 2016.

This Week featured a couple of lawyers who are "Constitutional Scholars".  I don't know what their backgrounds are other than the very short snipped regarding them, and they may very well be that, although what that likely means is that they're academic lawyers.  Most practitioners don't get that title as a rule, unless they're being interviewed by the press on a specific topic or case.

Anyhow, they, and the panelist, irrespective of political persuasion, all tended towards the view that "high crime and misdemeanors" is sufficiently vague such that an impeachment can be done for political reasons.  That view surprises me, but it was the uniform view.  

Indeed, they discussed the current statute on bribery and debated if it is really relevant at all.  There was no real consensus.  Some suggested no, as it wasn't the law at the time.

Frankly, I think its relevant as the Constitution says "high crimes and misdemeanors", but the provisions are admittedly vague.  The uniform view is that its a political process, which means that as a quasi judicial process, if that view is held, it's more political than my general view here would have it.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*For those who might wonder, the line excepting foreign nationals who are U.S. citizens creates an exception for dual citizens.  It might frankly be impossible for a person to know who and who is not a dual citizen in common politics and therefore this exception precludes all sorts of accidental violations of the law.

**Indeed, in my view relying upon 52 U.S.C. § 30121 creates a legal risk as if the Senate was actually to remove Trump from office, which it is not going to do, it would raise the question on whether or not the Senate can remove a President from office for the violation of a crime upon which he has not been convicted.

This problem would exist anyhow, and always exists in Impeachment hearing in which the President has not been so convicted.  Of note, no U.S. President who has been subject to an impeachment trial has actually been convicted of a crime.  Nixon came the closest but he wasn't impeached.  Indeed, the Nixon example shows why the strange presumed prohibition on prosecuting a President for an actual violation of a crime during his office doesn't make any sense at all.  Anyhow, as no President has been removed, the impeachment clause of the Constitution has actually never been tested.

What we don't know, and its an interesting question, is what would happen if a President was removed.  It's a power clearly vested in Congress and up until quite recently such powers were pretty much absolute.  In recent years, however, the Supreme Court has held that they are not.  

In other words, had Nixon been impeached, or Clinton, and then they tried to take their impeachment to the Supreme Court, the Court would have ruled quickly it had no jurisdiction over the matter.  Now, we can't be so sure.  If the Court found it did have jurisdiction and took the matter up (there's some procedural matters that would have to occur in order for that to happen) it might very well hold that it has the exclusive right to interpret the clause and render a decision on its meaning.  There's good reason to hope that this never occurs.