Advocacy and Analysis

 Being reasonable is always the uphill climb.

The academic world has been replete with the clash between advocacy and analysis, particularly in the clash between Palestine supporters and Israel supporters. Advocates stand by their beliefs and deny the claims of the opposite side even if I think the arguments unequal in that the historical evidence supports Israel’s history and the Palestinian argument is that relative suffering makes you right on the merits. It just depends on when you start your grievances: the expulsion of the Jews to Persia or the Nakba, the withdrawal and removal of Palestinians from Palestine during the Israeli War of Independence. In academic terms, and preceding for decades the present war, advocacy meant promoting a conclusion so as to consult only the evidence that suits you and framing the terms as inevitable while analysis meant going where the facts and ideas will lead-- new facts, clarified ideas-- so as to find out something new. Academic life consisted of honing arguments so that it was more analytic rather than just advocated. So students who argued that the United States was a colonialist could indeed cite the results of tube Spanish American War but had to stretch the term to include the Marshall Plan which reinvigorated Western Europe and colonialism had to be transformed into a Cold War between the only two superpowers, which is a kind of warfare rather than the exploitation of the poor rather than the rich, however much subsidiary people like Katanga or Vietnam became embroiled in that conflict. The entire academic enterprise is endangered, so the argument goes, if people don’t attend to complexities, to make distinctions, rather than marshall only the arguments on one's own point of view. Rationality is itself at stake, as it always has been as when American Firsters could make a case that the United States could avoid entanglement with Europe but could no longer do so after Pearl Harbor, while George Wallace could defend “Segregation Now and Forever” because Americans of African descent seemed inevitably backwards. African-Americans were inevitably tainted by their origins, but that was advocacy rather than analysis because Wallace was not facing up to African American advancement, that nurture overcame what seemed to be nature.

Closer to home and in a political rather than an academic setting, was the debate on Fox News a few nights ago between Gov. Desantis of Florida and Gov. Newsom of California . Their fireworks provided some entertainment, though the Liberal media panned the event as so vituperative as to diminish both debaters, which is what happens in most recent debates, where Nikki Haley seems reasonable by comparison even if she is largely a trimmer. Look with some care at part of the Desantis-Newsom debate just so as to clarify the difference between advocacy and analysis and why that is important.

Sean Hannity started the debate by claiming he would be an impartial moderator and then offered as his first question a gotcha one aimed at playing to the Conservative playbook. He asked Newsom why it was that so many Californians in the last two years had left California while so many people were moving to red state Florida?  Hannity pointed to the fact that taxes were higher in California than in Florida. Newsom’s answer was rather lame or so fatuous that he had not prepared an answer. He said more people were leaving Florida for California than Californians going to Florida which was beside the point about the overall trend. Newsom also vaunted the educational and economic preeminence of California, which did not go to the point of why people were leaving. 

Hannity had leveled a logically flawed advocacy argument to make his point. He had asserted a fact  and then inferred whatever he might offer as the explanation of that fact without detailing the fact or the connection to the inference. If I had been the analyst I would have asked about the fact. A two year finding is hardly much of a trend in demographics. Second, were there any studies of interviews of emigres to examine why they left California? Without those, there are only suppositions that are not evidence but predilections already believed in, which is that taxes rather than other matters is the main issue. As an analyst, I would look more largely as to why people move from their home state. People have been moving south ever since air conditioning and the end of legal segregation. California is spreading to satellite states like Nevada and Utah. My own family moved to Utah just three years ago because it was their ancestral home and because, yes, they found the political climate more amenable. But does that mean that going was a sign that Utahns are more insular rather than willing to intermix with people of different persuasions? That would put leaving California a bad trait rather than the good one of leaving a high tax state. As an analyst, forget whether the outcome is good or bad, only why it is happening, just part of the reasons people do thighs. Just look at the factoid bauble and don’t justify a fact with a premeditated directive but engage in facts as Newsom tried to do when he said only rich people in California had high tax rates. Analysts look at complexity not simplicity. 

I am afraid that media and public discourse very much engages in the flawed reasoning I pointed out in areas other than that of Californians going East. You take an uncertain fact and then deduce the premise that makes the fact acceptable. That reasoning leads to very extreme conclusions. Trumpists assert the fact that Jan. 6th was a lark in the park because they do not want to believe Trump was trying to overturn the government and when press footage showed otherwise it was possible to consistently say the footage had been doctored, which meant there was a vast conspiracy afoot to mislead  Trump. Facts will not get in the way of the original premise however outlandish the inference required to keep the proposition true. Analysts, on the other hand, are free to go where they will go unburdened by having to reach a set conclusion. Analysts who examined civil rights could still admit not as a concession but just as a fact that inner city gang violence was a problem  for Black advancement.

Conservatives seem particularly inclined to posit some fact, however dubious, and then infer as obvious any pet policy they may already favor.  Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, who is intelligent and articulate but not very sophisticated about social life, worked that in a committee hearing recently when he insisted that his witnesses answer whether there were two sexes or four or six? He was flabbergasted to find the experts could not answer that simple question. It did not occur to him that sex was a sliding scale or that biology, being what it was, would not occasionally have mismatches between sexual identity and sexual anatomy and that was as natural even if much more rare than the  usual association, and to be managed as best doctors can without adding the inference that helping people to adjust to that situation was horrific rather than humane. After all, only a minority of people are lactose intolerant and rather than blame them for that condition or try to convince them to change their minds, milk companies provide lactose free milk. Conservatives tend to say that whatever is uncustomary is unnatural.

For their part, contemporary Progressives engage in a similar short circuiting of reasoning but with a different concept than nature. They regard as a fact that minority and poor people are exploited, the rich receiving their ill-gotten gains at the expense of the poor and the minorities. Black slave labor allowed capitalism to flourish, some people say, and so the present day injustice is how much wealthier the rich have become rather than how just crumbs more in taxes on the rich would allow providing generous entitlements to the poor and the minorities. The inferences or compensations offered by Progressives are far afield and have to do with pet projects like reparations or District of Columbia statehood or voting rights legislation rather than looking at them on their individual merits. Why isn’t D. C. absorbed into Maryland? Why not bring back the full Voting Rights Act of the Sixties? Who would qualify for reparations? Kamala Harris? An octoroon?

Sometimes the reasoning is so short-circuited that there is no way for two sides to argue. Pro-Palestinians will say that the slaughter on Oct. 7th was done by the Israelis or that Palestinians had the right to kill women and children because of the indignities in Gaza.Then there is no alternative than war to settle the matter and the Israel-Hamas War is inevitable and very long lasting, for decades or centuries. The ideological gap between Democrats and Republicans seems almost as deep a cleavage in  that both Biden and Trump regard the other as anti-democracy. But advocacy can still be modified by analysis by most citizens, I like to think and I find it difficult to imagine how the two sides would engage in military combat however many Ultraconservatives imagine themselves as the descendants of Minutemen and Confederates. Just defeating Trump in 2024 would ease the advocacy, voters  forced to choose between an  insurrectionist and an institutionalist, no ifs and buts about it. A binary ballot cuts through the qualifications, the specious facts and the dubious inferences.  

Rationality is always at stake always and not only in demented times. Marcuse claimed that modern capitalism was irrational as could  be evidenced by listening to the nonsense of jingles and the insatiable consumer demands foisted by the advertisers even though rich Romans also engaged in baubles like nightingale tongues. Are they also capitalist? And why are multiple brands of bbq chicken wings so terrible? Or buying a car that shows your career accomplishment? Rather, the eclipse of reason is ever av available and cooler heads have to prevail, as Jefferson did when he explained why the Colonies needed to sever themselves from Great Britain as opposed to voicing a slogan such as “Give me liberty or give me death” just as centuries later people voiced “Better dead than Red “ in advocating against the Soviets rather than figuring a way through that. Stay calm and carry on being analytic even in bad times.

The New Speaker

Herblock, the political cartoonist of the Forties through the Seventies  who severely criticized  Richard Nixon, said that even Nixon would get a clean shave after Nixon  became President and so Nixon would be judged on the basis of what he did after he was elevated to that office. I approached Jim Johnson, the new Speaker of the House, in the same light, giving him the benefit of the doubt when, in his inaugural speech, Johnson was filled with high sounding religious invocations. Johnson said that in the Declaration of Independence God had created men as equal rather, I suppose, than that rights are a human creation, but Christians are often unfamiliar with or find it incomprehensible that Jefferson was a Deist who thought the rules of nature are the only things that apply. Johnson also said that public officials have been anointed by God, which I took to mean that when elected officials had a supernatural mandate, they should meet the highest moral standards in their legislative crafting, eschewing petty matters,so as to be Godly. So Johnson’s opposition to same sex marriage and abortion could be read as taking seriously the most important and fundamental matters and so to be respected even if I disagree with him.

My willingness to be respectful to Johnson lasted all of twenty four hours. It ended when he said that his only response to the mass murder in Lewiston, Maine was that it should be addressed with prayer concerning the evil amidst people. No legislation required. Johnson certainly doesn’t think only prayers should be addressed to the evils of abortion. He wants laws concerning it enacted. But no laws on gun control or even just quicker interventions to take away guns from mentally ill and dangerous people. So Johnson is just the same old MAGA Conservative, with Trump credentials, rather than one of the high minded religious sorts. His religion is not independent of the shibboleths of the Right about gun control, which believes that people have a right to bear arms so as to protect the people from a national army. But if that was the case, they would not stop at allowing people to have assault rifles rather than the rifles carried in the Revolutionary War. They should allow citizens to arm themselves with tanks and howitzers so as to attack the Pentagon, should that be needed. But I doubt many gun owners would accept that, and so what are the limits of gun control? As far as I have heard, Johnson doesn’t say.

Johnson is now second in line after the President, and he does not accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election and so would disrupt the orderly succession of power that has existed up to then since the time of the Constitution. Representative Matt Gaetz says that the other side should recognize the Republicans are the party of Trump. I am willing to recognize that such is the case, however sad that might be to acknowledge. The “moderate” Republican members of the House are said to have caved into the extreme of the party because they are indecisive and cowardly and confused and exhausted but I think they think of party over nation and so cannot go to Jeffries and get elected a Republican Speaker who will do limited things like money for Israel and Ukraine and Taiwan and the southern border and a continuing resolution until the next year and nothing much else until the 2024 election, however unprecedented it would be to have coalition government in the House, even if constitutional, but because the Republicans could not organize themselves except under the leadership of an  extremist. Who said Trump wasn’t in charge? The GOP doesn’t need tweaking; it needs an overhaul if it is to be regarded as a legitimate party.

Faulty Indictment Arguments

Don’t expect some bombshell facts to be revealed in the indictment of Trump for the events concerning January 6th. Sometimes something new arises in a cause celebre where so many facts and strands of possible history are assembled, as when years later the real espionage was revealed that cleared Dryfuss of his name. Looking into the details of a political cause celebre usually ends in nothing, as when Jim Garrison tried to figure out who killed JFK and what happened on the grassy knoll in Dallas. We never did find out why Nixon had gone along with the Watergate cover up. Maybe it was his bad demons overcoming his statesman-like alternative instincts, as bloody as he required it to be in dealing with Vietnam. What can be said about the indictments of Trump is that they reveal just the facts covered by the House Jan. 6th Committee with added on details that a political junkie might relish.  Of more interest and moment is how arcane and contrary to ordinary psychology are the legal proceedings themselves and those will not be addressed, except here, much less reformed.

Distinguished commentators on the law, ex judicial officials themselves, say that the reason for offering up those people who worked at Mar a Lago is to show he had a guilty intent in that he was covering up his having government documents and so must have known it was wrong to take those papers. Jurors might be inclined to think that Trump must have known he had no right to those papers, quite aside from his admission that the one he flaunted around was still unclassified in that as an exPresident he could no longer do so. But we don’t know what he was showing around. Maybe it was just  boasting and there would have to be witnesses to testify that they had read the plans to invade Iran. Maybe just Joe McCarthy shuffling papers about the non existent names of those State Department Reds. 

Anyway, that is false psychology. A person can truly believe that they are in the right and therefore feel free to hide their doings so as to protect what they think is their right as happens when Huck schemes with Tom Sawyer to free Jim. The legal claim that evasion is evidence of guilt is just an assertion that is useful just so as to incriminate someone. Lawyers offer a reason so as to treat it as a proof. That does not mean there is no way to assess whether Trump was allowed to have secret papers in his possession. He could make the case that he could indeed declassify papers simply with a mental act to do so, but no lawyer is willing to say so in a court of law. Or he could explain why he needed these documents and offer proof that the Defense Department were warmongers against Iran but as an aside rather than as an explanation in a report or address that he was a whistleblower doing his duty as an ex-President, but he hasn't done that. The lack of an excuse is not an excuse and so his retaining the secrets is either vain or slovenly orf to sell for money or for any other number of reasons to which one can speculate, none of them legitimate or to be tested as legitimate.

The same false psychology and the more palatable reasons for thinking Trump criminally liable are also operative in the central case having to do with the insurrection that was regarded as justified because the election had been stolen from him. Prosecutors may offer witnesses that show experts and key politicians told Trump that he had legitimately lost the election and conclude that Trump lied about the election results. But that would just mean that Trump should have known that he rightly lost. It does not prove he believed he had lost, whether for vanity or an inherent conspiratorial nature. Most people would follow the experts, but it will be Trump on trial and so it is necessary to prove in a particular case rather than as a general practice people in such circumstances are liars. Moreover, even if prosecutors can show that Trump admitted the election was not rigged, that would not settle the matter because Trump is a notorious liar and so might be lying at some occasion for lying that the election was legit, Trump has the liar’s defense, which is that you can’t trust anything he says. Checkmate. But not quite. If he believed the election was rigged, then he might not assert that as a fact but offer the reasons for thinking so in  a statement or an interview, which he never has. You might think him incapable of the rational thought required to prepare or read such a report, but that may well be the ultimate defense, which is Trump’s mental incapacity to think through thoughts, something clear since he announced in 2015, and then the national electorate is to be chastised for ever having voted for so damaged a person, but that means Trump can and should be defeated by an electorate rather than a judiciary that would put him in an asylum rather than a jail but left off because he is harmless so long as he does not run for public office, Michael Cohen to have been blamed for his own troubles because he did not shy away from the guy as soon as getting wind of him.

Rather than the recondite aspects of the indictment, look at what is obvious on the face of it as its central features however many years it takes for a person to become aware of what is obvious and therefore undeniable and conclusive. It isn't that the meeting at the Willard Hotel of conspiratorial figures doesn’t show that the attack on the Capital was planned rather than just a protest that got out of hand, but that even better evidence of Trump’s malign intent is available on tape out of his own mouth for all to see. Jack Smith has avoided these issues so as not to be open to the accusation that what Trump did was an expression of free speech, but I will dig into that because it is the heart of the matter. Trump in his speech to the crowd on Jan. 6th was inciting riot if you pay attention to the rhetoric of his words even if he did not say explicitly that the followers should riot. He said that they should be strong. Maybe that is a reference to be clear in their determinations, to be resolved that their beliefs were proper, but it is also to say that they are determined to prevail in preventing the certification of the electoral vote, and what else were they doing milling about except to do just that when he was told to. Being just short of incendiary words does not make the words incendiary. 

Further, when Trump finally asked the rioters to go home, to cease rioting after having Trump for hours watching on tv that they had been rioting, Trump says to them that he loves them. “Loves them” for what? For merely being partisan? No, an easy inference is that he was endorsing what they had done, which was to threaten the elected Senators and Congresspeople. That is the clear meaning of the language and that is his crime, to egg on and afterwards praise an insurrection. Not just unstatesmanlike but also criminal. That is the gist of the case even if Alan Dershkowitz thinks Trump was just letting off blather. Moments count. They reveal the real motive. Words tell you what people say in their Jack Smith pile up the illegal activities Trump and his associates engaged in. What Trump said is something about which he did not lie and places him as what he was: a destroyer of the Constitution. hearts and that is enough. 

Prosecute Trump. I want him shamed though he likely won’t live long enough to go through the appeals process so that he will ever have jail time. Nixon tried to rehabilitate himself during the eternity between resignation and his death. Trump will not try rehabilitation because he will be a martyr to his cause, himself. We will just be rid of him if even his supporters decide he is too sullied to be dealt with. So I am already bored and passed beyond the indictment or future indictments to the 2024 election because the Constitution cannot protect thbed people if thbe people have gone sedriously astray.

The Politics of Drag Queens

There would seem to be a rage for drag queen events such as Drag Queen Story Time where Michelle Tea, in drag, tells stories to young people which tell them to be kind to people who are different and disclaim that the children aged three to eleven are not being groomed for sexual activities. And there are drag queen shows where families bring their children, though I don’t think I would have found that back then, but Republicans are supposed to believe that families should decide how they should conduct their children, but escorting children to drag shows was apparently a bridge too far. I do not know if such exhibitions have any impact on the children but the Republican Congress is outraged at the events, quizzing Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin at a committee hearing about whether they are taking place at military bases, he responding that no government money was being used, while avoiding the question of whether these events were facilitated by the military and whether soldiers retained the right to engage in free speech when off duty. Even so august a figure as a defense secretary goes out of his way to be as non confrontational as possible with Congresspeople lest he chide them for their grandstand plays, which is what I suspect they are. I sometimes wish witnesses at congressional hearings would talk back and call the Congresspeople outlandish and ridiculous rather than allow them to mouth off, always reclaiming their own time so as not to let witnesses answer the largely rhetorical questions. Ah well, the purpose of committees is, after all, to bloviate rather than develop information.

A suspicion that  politicians are out to engage in false rather than true outrage, that theory are lambasting gays because that is a group their constituents think they will like to be picked on, is evidenced to me by the long ago time when Gerald Ford, then a Michigan congressman, tried to get Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to be impeached because he had included a serious article within the pages of “Playboy”, a way for Hugh Hefner to claim it was not just a magazine of girlie pictures. I remember on camera a colleague telling Ford not to expose the pictures that were next to the Douglas article because they were so raw, however outraged Ford might be inclined to do so. But I knew Ford had been a ballet dancer as well as a football player and so probably not a prude but just hypocritical, faux angry at what would later be called a cultural issue.

But what if the current politicians are as honest as they can be about being outraged at displays of drag queen theatrics, especially including children, is not only seen as a danger to the children but also to the moral fabric of the nation? I would think then that there had indeed become a sea change in morals in that this generation had become within conservative precincts to have become much more prudish about sex since, let us say, when  women bobbed their hair and wore short skirts following the First World War. Consider a point in World War II when it seems men and women were copulating like crazy before men got shipped off to war. There was a film of 1941, just before that, called “All American Coed” starring Frances Langford about a slightly misspelled Princeton which included a drag team as part of its extracurricular activities showing off their skills, to comic effect, set to compete with an all female review of beauty queens out to strut their stuff as ringers employed by a girl college, a misspelled Bryn Mawr. Being in drag was good humored fun and children were allowed to see the movie because no qualitative ratings system had arrived. Would that movie today not be allowed? Is this today a serious enough issue on which to engage Congress?

Let us raise the ante and treat this as dealing with an issue about the morality of voting. An acquaintance of mine recently told me that she voted for the best candidate regardless of party which seemed to show that she was objective and therefore not swayed by political rhetoric. I certainly do require character and competence as bedrock or minimal standards for voting, though I remark that Republicans are more apt than Democrats to nominate questionable figures as their standard bearers. But there is also the question of the party agenda, its issues and programs, that are in a current election and persist over decades as their visions of the world. Stick to the party, I say, that has the point of view I espouse, and so be partisan. Sure, there are fringes of a party that I find I object to. After all, I came up with a party dominated by segregationists, though the Republicans were not very forward minded at the time on civil rights and that the squad of four, even though I disagree with Ilhan Omar and AOC on one or another of issues, these are serious people while Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Green are not, and though I disagree with some of the Democratic agenda which seem to me wrongheaded, such as with regard to climate change, on the whole I can endorse the Democratic view, while the Republican view is anathema, as in the present instant, sincere or not, as opposing gay and transgender groups, exhibiting a meanspiritedness not likely to earn my support, not a likely prospect, even should a more moderate standard bearer emerge.  Republicans are rightly not looking to court my vote but to court the acquaintance of mine who will let and see the qualities of the person nominated. I, on the other hand, will foreclose candidates who don’t just excoriate Trump but also excoriate those who malign the minority communities that now include drag queens, who are also just human beings even if a bit quirky in how they prance around. Is it really all that difficult?

The Mer A Lago Indictment

There was already last night remarks from cable commentators on the Trump indictment regarding purloined secret documents. MSNBC pundits agree of the enormity of having an ex-President indicted for violations, among other things, of the Espionage Act, no other President ever having been accused of subverting the nation. It is a sad day that we've found ourselves in this situation, distasteful to think of anything similar to the authoritarian regimes that regularly throw in jail their defeated political opponents, which was the case in Russia and recently in Pakistan. Here is a response and a few comments on what has been said in the past day since the event of the indictment.

Lawrence O’Donnell said last night on MSNBC  that the indictment would have been less unsettling if Gerald Ford had not pardoned Nixon, allowing Nixon instead to have been indicted, and so a precedent for the idea that no one was above the law. But that context was very different. Nixon was disgraced and sorrowful of his own misdeeds. He said that he did wrong things even if his opponents had piled up on him. That was a lame excuse. Trump is unremorseful and running again for President and many of his supporters don’t care or disregard whatever he does. Commentators can find a number of people to blame for the present predicament but demur from blaming the electorate for having elected the scoundrel in the first place.  

Which leads to my own observation. The electorate for the 2024 election are not subject to the rule of law, including that Trump is innocent until convicted as guilty, when they make up their minds as to whether to nominate him again as President. They can use whatever evidence they want to use for judging a candidate, just a rumor or a bit of charm or a political disposition, or thinking that Hillary was haughty. And so there is enough evidence that Trump is a bad dude without waiting for the trial to proceed. Noone is entitled to be President even if everyone is entitled to a fair trial. So a public judgment can be made before the trial takes place. It is all up to the people again, they  having the final verdict on Trump’s political  fate.

The details of the indictment today also reveals the motive for the outrageous affronts committed by Trump to the nation. It was a simple and petty case of vanity. You would think that people who had been President were beyond this, but Trump, ever a petty man, wanted to show secret documents to political operatives only so he could show them off as in his own possession, which would have made him merely venal and amoral. Maybe he wasn’t planning to sell them to the highest bidder. How superficial can Trump be? That explains a lot of him.

The Republican leaders, for their part, are liars about the facts and, worse, unpatriotic in that they are craven to their constituents, unwilling to tell their constituents the truth, that being a higher calling than merely remaining electable, their higher calling being to lead a crisis through rather than obfuscate. It was ignoble for Trump as President to avoid what was happening with Covid, his excuse that he was shielding the people, when his duty was to speak the painful truth and many of his Republicans avoid the enormity of what Trump has done and claim, as did Nixon supporters, that everyone in politics did such shenanigans, which was not true, and as in presently the case where important Republican Trump defenders, do the same thing by conflating Trump’s appropriation of secret documents with Pence and Biden cooperating when documents were found inadvertently to have been sent to their homes.  Shame on the Republicans and don’t trust whatever they say about anything. This is the litmus test.

Bob Woodward on CNN today echoed Ben Bradley’s instruction after Nixon resigned of no gloating, and applied it to Trump. He is right in that even a Trump conviction would be just a recognition of a tragedy rather than  revenge satisfied. But don’t anticipate. Trump has weaseled out before from a lot of things managing just fines for Trump University and E. Jean Carroll. There is a long way before a  conviction much less a sentencing which I hope leaves him out of jail to live out his life without the remorse Nixon felt. That absence of humanity is on Trump.

Another observation of mine. In my generation, we turned on the television set to see if some additional major political figure had just been assassinated. Now, we await breaking news as to when Trump will be indicted in a different inquiry. Is this not progress rather than devolution?

Chris Christie

The moral thing is to vote for the one you believe in.

Chris Christie has announced that he is running for :President and the cable and New York Times commentators immediately opined whether he had “a lane” whereby he could become President, that meaning a combination of constituencies that could add up to a majority of convention delegates and decided that he couldn’t because he could never break into the Trump supporters but could only serve to unseat Trump and letting someone else inherit his following. That was the same reasoning that led none of the Republican candidates in 2016 to refuse to oppose Trump, making nice so as to inherit the booty when Trump would inevitably falter. Well, maybe there is no such  thing as a lane, only an opportunity whereby someone manages to catch fire, to capture attention. Both Obama and Trump made their own lanes when so many constituencies turned out in favor of them while Jeb Bush, with the money and the name, was never able to become a taste treat. The commentators are just trying to be objective and so all they can talk about is the horse race or, to use a different metaphor, all the carrom shots needed to get anointed a nominee, but all they do is show their preferences, Christie just a bully and not a serious person, given his poor performance as Governor of New Jersey and a whiff of the Bridgegate scandal, Underlying their political analyses is an assessment of the worth of the candidates.

 I want to pose the same question in a different vocabulary: who should someone vote for, given the dynamics on the ground, and my answer is that people should vote for the one who would make the best president regardless of the dynamics and so not a calculation of handicapping a winner however sophisticated they might think by second guessing who will emerge triumphant, Christie being intelligent and willing to work  across the two parties and sensing he would not take down the temple, whether through an insurrection or Pence’s evangelicalism, however sincere that belief might be, should be the same issue. My ideal is that both general nominees will be reputable enough that a voter can rest easy whichever one is  elected in that they both would manage respectably, aware of the stakes foreign policy and appreciating various ethnic and other status communities, even if, inevitably, a Republican president will cut taxes for the rich and cut services from the poor.

My mandate to support the candidate you believe in rather than play the horserace of who might win and how to strategically interpose in the process is moral rather than prudential because you can feel satisfied if you voted the way you believed in even if you lost. You had fought the good fight but might rue the day if you had miscalculated what your influence might inadvertently cause. That moral principle even applies in  spirit to those people who think that a Democrat should want Trump to be nominated because he was more likely to be defeated by Biden, my favorite, however much that mental experiment is ineffectual in that I do not vote in a Republican primary though people do switch allegiances in  political parties so as to make the worst candidate the nominee. I want the better person to win and I don’t want to bring into the tent a monster who might perchance prevail. Worry what you wish for. Look what happened in 2016 when people voted for Trump as a protest vote or Britishers had second thoughts about voting for Brexit as also a protest vote, not really expecting it would win. 

My view of being honest rather than scheming is very different from the usual Conservative patter, which is to say that Trump is unelectable, a three time loser and so people should move beyond his baggage. That is  too much of a calculation which is different from recognizing him for what he is, which is a fomenter of rebellion and people honest enough to admit that even if they prefer him still because they claim the election in 2020 was stolen. Be honest rather than obfuscate. Marjorie Taylor Green says what she thinks, which is to free the insurrectionists rather than just avoid that unpleasant issue. It may be that it does not bring peace to the dinner table to confront the Trump supporters but that at is not the goal of the political market, to hash things out, even if it results in having a wishy-washy moderate so as to avoid absolute opposition which is not an admirable or long term solution, as was clearly the case when the last few pre civil war presidents  obfuscated. Rather than dismiss Trumpites as mean spirited and largely ignorant, as mostly they are, tell them to tell the truth about why they like him, and clips of film interviews show them to tell the truth and want to go back before women got the vote or maybe to the Fifties except that segregation was indeed bad, though transgender people are now bad, Mega voters against any new ideas or practices as being unnatural. In that case, Trumpists are honest even if reactionary in that they posit a golden age of an ancient regime and so expound what Karl Mannheim said in 1929 was an ideology rather than a utopia, and I prefer otherwise, society becoming in the future increasingly enlightened as that is demonstrated in legislation and an increasingly humane spirit.

Here is what seems to be an exception to my rule to vote for the candidate you most prefer, offering yourself to the honest truth. What if there is a three contest race and you prefer the small third party candidate who is bound to lose. That is what happened when people voted for Ralph Nader rather than Al Gore and Nader’s absence in the race would have given Gore the election. Should you have held your nose and voted for Gore as the lesser of the two devils? My answer is “no” and vote for Nader anyway but only if you are really sure that there is no difference between the two major candidates, both unacceptable, rather than just claiming that is the case. Really no different? Really and honestly?  In that case, go with Nader but the case seems to me a stretch. 

Democrats also face the problem of being honest with themselves. What about Biden? The Times said a few days ago that although he is showing his age, he still remains alert, clear on the issues, still mastering the details, and in charge of his administration, and I also think articulate even if his voice is weaker, and that his administration is the furthest left one since FDR, Biden having managed to turn narrow majorities and recently a minority in the House to major achievements though not all of them as I had hoped. But what happens if he starts drooling, which is a shorthand for significantly diminished powers that remain short of the requirements that could occur so as to evoke the 25th Amendment? Will Democrats just cover it up? It would be their turn to deal with a presidential embarrassment, something they have carried with Trump ever since he announced his candidacy and found themselves not able to unhorse him, or worse, find themselves unable to become unamored with him.

Here is a different scenario. One thing that might happen if Biden’s capacity diminished was to become a figurehead for the Presidency whereby the president reigned but did not rule, Biden heavily relying on a strong and able White House and cabinet. He might remain affable and give set speeches and smooch with the crowd and that would be all, his basic point of view continuing on. In fact that is the way Republican administrations often do their business, picking a candidate for name recognition, Reagan and George W. Bush clear examples, who delegated powers to a strong cabinet with Reagan and a strong vice president with George  W. The alternative party, the Democrats, had followed a very different course in that the candidates duked it out between  one another on different policies and personalities and if the Democratic nominee became the winner of the Presidency took over kit and caboodle and set up his own administration.  That is the substance of saying that Democrats  make “strong” Presidencies. It isn’t that Democratic administrations are more intrusive in society than are Republican administrations. Trump got three Supreme Court justices who would overthrow Roe v. Wade and that is plenty intrusive. But Democratic Presidents are strong in that they run their own administrations. Having a Democrat resign himself to doing what Republicans do would be a loss because Democratic Presidential leadership is less elusive but the alternative is nonetheless legitimate.

We don't have to consider this succession or rather “de-cession" for very long because what will happen if Biden falters all depends on when and how he deteriorates. If it happens early enough, there will be a scramble for who will replace him as the party nomination. If he falters close to Election Day then the focus will be on the Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harrris who I hope will be up to the task. If Biden is elected and then deteriorates, the American government can change over into the Republican model, a good question about who in the Biden circle would come to significant  power. Biden, however, might also deteriorate slowly and so last longer than he should have and become like Hindenburg or Biden might know enough and be brave enough to do what De Gaulle did, which was to resign over a minor matter because he knew he was failing because he could no longer memorize the long speeches he delivered and decided on his own that it was time to go.

Democrats will have to watch these developments carefully, deciding honestly when it is time for pressure to invoke the 25th Amendment, and disregarding the Republicans who already claim that Biden is on drugs that keep him barely functioning. As usual, there is a heavy duty on the citizenry to use their moral honesty to keep the nation afloat.