It’s Not About the Men, It’s About the System

Pictured: Guys who want to use age as an issue in the election.

A few weeks back, I had an e-mail exchange with a subscriber in response to my article about Donald Trump running for dictator. He was lamenting the terrible choice we have between Trump and Joe Biden, or possibly Kamala Harris, or (he speculated) California Governor Gavin Newsom.

I replied that I don’t regard the Democrats as an equal threat for one big reason. Here’s what I wrote.

“If you get four more years of Biden, or maybe Harris, or maybe Newsom, what you get is a leader with certain policy preferences—who will be constrained by political opposition and the many procedural roadblocks that tend to bog down a president. (Newsom has been worse in California because the Republican Party there ran itself into the ground years ago and has been unable to provide effectual opposition.) That's why Biden has not been all that bad in office. He can't get very much of what he wants. If Trump wins and takes the approach he is promising, you will get him unconstrained by political opposition. That's the whole point of being an authoritarian. So as I see it, the downsides of Biden/Harris/Newsom are significantly less than the potential downsides of Trump.”

I have since turned this into an article for The Bulwark that went up Monday. Here is how I express the point.

If we get four more years of Biden, we will get a leader with certain policy preferences—who will be constrained by political opposition and the many procedural roadblocks that tend to bog down a president. As we have seen on many issues, from guns to stimulus spending to student loans, this means that he won’t be able to get many of the things he wants. Few presidents ever do.

But if Trump wins and takes the approach he is promising, we will get him unconstrained by political opposition. That’s the whole point of being an authoritarian. He will be able to do all the worst things he is promising. But also, having asked for unchecked power in order to do specific things he promised to his supporters, he will have that power to do whatever he wants. This is the bait-and-switch all authoritarians use: Give me unlimited power so I can do the things you want—but once I have it, I’ll do the things I want….

Joe Biden has many flaws, which will be restrained and compensated for by the American system. Donald Trump has many flaws, which will be increasingly unrestrained.

My wider point is that our whole system is designed to limit the damage that can be caused by the flaws of any one man.

The framers of the Constitution anticipated that deeply flawed, immoral, insanely ambitious, and foolish men could rise to positions of political power. (Alexander Hamilton was friends with, and then got shot by, one of them.) This is why they created a constitution that was designed to protect us from the flaws of any particular officeholder by limiting his power and enmeshing him within a system of checks and balances.

Or as I put it more briefly, “it’s not about the men, it’s about the system.”

I should add that the long-term danger in Donald Trump’s attempt to break down the system is not necessarily what he will do with it—but what the next person will do. We have to think like the Founders and project two steps ahead. The limits that prevent a politician from doing things we like also prevent other politicians from doing things we hate.

Read the whole thing.

Agonizing About Biden’s Age Is Worse Than Irrelevant

My Bulwark piece is framed at the beginning as a response to some extended agonizing about Joe Biden’s age, which is only slightly more advanced than Donald Trump’s. But the piece was already a bit dated by the time it went up, because on Thursday, Biden gave a vigorous and spirited delivery for his State of the Union address. As I put it, “In a perverse bit of reverse-reverse psychology, Biden’s political opponents spent so many months building up his diminished capacity that anything but a desiccated corpse would have appeared vigorous compared to the low expectations they established.” He cleared that low bar with plenty of room to spare.

Any remaining problems with Biden cannot be attributed primarily to age. Both he and Trump are, alas, pretty much the same people they have always been.

Woke, But in a Good Way

The speech itself had some great passages at the beginning about the importance of democracy.

In January 1941, Franklin Roosevelt came to this chamber to speak to the nation. And he said, “I address you at a moment unprecedented in the history of the Union”. Hitler was on the march. War was raging in Europe. President Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up Congress and alert the American people that this was no ordinary time. Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world.

Tonight, I come to the same chamber to address the nation. Now it’s we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union. And, yes, my purpose tonight is to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment either. Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today.

What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack both at home and overseas at the very same time.

Overseas, Putin of Russia is on the march, invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond….

It wasn’t long ago when a Republican president named Ronald Reagan thundered, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”Now—now my predecessor, a former Republican president, tells Putin, quote, “Do whatever the hell you want.” A former president actually said that—bowing down to a Russian leader….

My message to President Putin, who I’ve known for a long time, is simple: We will not walk away. We will not bow down. I will not bow down….

My predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth about January 6th. I will not do that. This is a moment to speak the truth and to bury the lies. Here’s the simple truth: You can’t love your country only when you win.

As I’ve done ever since being elected to office, I ask all of you, without regard to party, to join together and defend democracy. Remember your oath of office to defend against all threats foreign and domestic.

Respect free and fair elections, restore trust in our institutions, and make clear political violence has absolutely no place in America.

So Biden is trying to wake us up to the need to defend liberal democracy.

The rest of the speech, as if to counteract this by reminding us what’s not so good about democracy, was an old-fashioned politician’s catalogue of all the government handouts he wants to offer to everyone. But like I said above, Biden will be relatively constrained, so most of these are empty promises. And as bad as this is, it is no departure from the established “normal” for modern presidents.

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The General Election Message

The official Republican response, delivered by Alabama Senator Katie Britt is widely regarded as a disaster because of a shaky-voiced, teary-eyed delivery that can only be described as histrionic. I think her delivery was perfectly on point, because it matched the unhinged hysteria of her message, which describes America as a kind of hellscape where “the American Dream has turned into a nightmare.”

Britt mostly focused on the idea that immigrants coming across the border are rapists and sex traffickers. Her central anecdote is the story of a woman who was forced into prostitution as a teen. But it turns out the senator got all the facts wrong.