The Year of Years
With the near constant sense of outrage and turmoil of the past four years, it’s hard to imagine how things could get any worse in our national life. Unfortunately, 2020 could prove the most tumultuous year yet.
In addition to the start of a long presidential campaign season, we’ve also witnessed the third impeachment trial of a sitting president in our nation’s history. On top of that, we face the prospect of further tensions and hostilities with Iran. In just the first month of the year, the situation escalated to the very brink of war. The speed of each crisis, and the sheer volume of seemingly historic developments, begins to blur them all together. This atmosphere mutes the significance of yesterday’s headlines as we move on to the next piece of breaking news.
Before we find ourselves swept up in the rapids of the year ahead, I think it’s important to take a step back. I want to evaluate three of the biggest sources of anxiety in our country recently, and hopefully gain some perspective on their potential effects in 2020.
No, we are not facing World World III
Following a week of tit-for-tat escalations, the U.S. put the entire world on edge when it killed Iranian Major General Qassim Suleimani on January 3. This was a truly stunning move, a decapitation strike aimed at a military official of a sovereign foreign country.
Former Obama White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the gulf region Robert Malley told the New York Times that “[w]hether President Trump intended it or not, it is, for all practical purposes, a declaration of war.”
Iran’s initial reaction certainly seemed to indicate that war was imminent. U.S. officials, including Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, predicted that Iran would retaliate in some form against U.S. forces or sites. “World War III” began trending on social media and in searches. Web traffic driven by fears of a new military draft were so high that they even crashed the official site of the Selective Service System.
In the end, Iran did retaliate, but in a manner apparently designed to de-escalate the situation. On January 8, they launched more than a dozen ballistic missiles at two bases in Iraq housing U.S. troops. While reports now show that as many as 34 Americans experienced severe concussions, and were subsequently diagnosed with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and evacuated for treatment, the fact that none were killed remains telling. “The attack was clearly designed to cause as few casualties as possible,” according to the BBC’s Defense correspondent Jonathan Marcus. “Both the U.S. and Iran - for all their rhetoric - do not want a wider conflict,” he added.
For the moment, this remains true. We quickly returned to the uneasy standoff of the past 40 years, and conflict with Iran dropped out of the headlines and from most people’s minds. We can’t know what types of covert operations and machinations are currently underway, and Iran may very well find another opportunity to strike at U.S. interests. The killing of Suleimani certainly raised the stakes of the conflict permanently.
Still, his death does not represent a turning point in history like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Why? For one, none of the powers involved sees full-scale war as advancing their interests. In 1914, Austria-Hungary saw war with Serbia, who it blamed for the assassination, as an opportunity to prove its strength to the rest of Europe and to unite its own divided population behind a righteous cause. Instead of turning into a localized Third Balkan War, as they intended, Austria-Hungary’s action set off a chain of events that led to a global war of unprecedented scale and violence.
This happened because each side had the backing of more powerful allies willing to go to war to defend them. In each instance, governments saw moral and material benefits to war. Some believed a general European war inevitable and thought that, if it was, it was better to strike first when the opportunity arose. Franz Ferdinand’s death provided the excuse each of them sought to bring their conflicts out into the open.
In today’s world, no leading government sees a general war between nations as a positive outcome. Thanks in part to the lessons learned from the First and Second World Wars, the international community is designed to prevent such an outcome. Conflict still exists, but is much more likely to take place between proxy forces or through covert operations. Even if America went to war with Iran, as terrible as that would be, neither China nor Russia is so invested in the regime that they would subsequently declare war on the U.S.
A third World War seems more likely, in my mind, to begin in the South China Sea, or on the Korean Peninsula. Of course, this is another region where Trump escalated tensions to the very precipice of war, only to about-face, declare victory, and then careen towards his next crisis. In spite of his bluster, Trump has actually shown a stark aversion to military action and a wish to retreat from US commitments around the world. Not all of these impulses are necessarily wrong, and Suliemani certainly had American blood on his hands, but the fact that they are impulses rather than clearly articulated strategies makes them worrying. His administration’s inconsistencies may make it less likely that that the U.S. will fight in another war in the near-term, but they undermine the very structures and institutions designed to prevent another global conflict.
No, Trump won’t be removed from office by the Senate
As the impeachment trial has unfolded in the Senate, two things remain clear: one, that Trump deserves to be removed from office, and two, that he won’t be. Following Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s declaration to Sean Hannity in December that “Everything I do during this, I’m coordinating with the White House Counsel,” the outcome has never been in doubt. It was a stunning admission of a plan to violate his oath to render impartial justice during the trial, even for Mitch. His willingness to betray our nation’s core principles and to subvert our institutions for power now openly match the president’s. But just because the verdict is predetermined doesn’t mean that the process is without purpose.
Even without the explosive revelations of the past two weeks, the case was already damning.
First came Trump’s historic defiance of Congress, when he declared in April 2019 that his administration would not comply with any and all subpoenas related to investigations of his administration. “We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” he said, before adding “These aren’t, like, impartial people. The Democrats are trying to win 2020.” He then ordered all current and former administration officials to defy any requests to testify before Congress. Claiming that he had “been investigated enough,” Trump essentially sought to throw a wet blanket of executive privilege over any smoldering questions related to his presidency.
Things remained muddled until the fall, when an anonymous whistle-blower brought Trump’s dealings with Ukraine to light.
Trump and his allies have already admitted, on the record, that they sought to use funds allocated by Congress as leverage in order to gain domestic political help from a foreign country. They even released a rough transcript of the call, in which Trump responded to a question about American defense aid to Ukraine with the immortal words “I would like you to do us a favor though.”
In October, acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney gave a press briefing in which he confidently declared that military aid to Ukraine was of course held up for domestic political reasons. Referring to Trump’s obsession with the debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, actually hacked the DNC servers in 2016, Mulvaney said “Did he also mention to me in pass[ing] the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely. No question about that. But that’s it. And that’s why we held up the money.”
When a reporter pressed him further, Mulvaney replied “We do that all the time with foreign policy.” He then made it as explicit as he could, announcing “I have news for everybody: Get over it. There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy.” Mulvaney quickly tried to walk back his statements the next week, but those sentiments are hard to forget.
Since then we’ve heard consistently alarming testimony from diplomats, aides, and experts that Trump’s handling of foreign policy, specifically regarding Ukraine, was reckless, corrupt, and dangerous.
Now, in the midst of the impeachment trial itself, two new revelations continue to cast the president’s actions in a corrupt light.
The first bombshell was an audio recording of Trump angrily telling aides to “Get rid of” the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, months before she was recalled without reason. It also took place before he promised Ukraine’s president in the July phone call that “she’s going to go through some things.” That the president would treat career diplomatic staff like low-level mob lackeys should alarm the citizens those diplomats represent to the world.
The next revelation was National Security Advisor John Bolton’s claim in a leaked book manuscript that Trump told him in August 2019 that he wanted to continue freezing aid to Ukraine until they announced investigations into the Bidens and the DNC hacks. This, of course, directly contradicts the White House’s defense that the matters were unrelated.
Trump’s defense of the episodes in question has shifted with each new piece of evidence. From “that never happened and I don’t know those people” to “it was a perfect call and I did nothing wrong” to “so what if I did?” Attempts to keep their story straight were still unresolved in the impeachment trial in the Senate, with the president’s defense team contradicting their own arguments that president Trump both acted well within the powers of the executive branch during his “perfect” phone call in July, and that his behavior, even if inappropriate, does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense.
The greatest absurdity, appropriately, came from Alan Dershowitz, the celebrity lawyer famous for his role in the O.J. Simpson trial. During the first day of questioning by senators on January 29, Dershowitz made what I believe to be the most forthright explanation of the president’s views on his role and relationship to Congress. “If the president does something which he believes will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment,” Dershowitz asserted with a straight face. This is an almost direct parallel of President Nixon’s claim to interviewer David Frost that “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”
The House impeachment managers offered an appropriately robust rebuttal of this claim, but it’s worth teasing out the implications of Dershowitz’s view of executive power. If any and all actions taken by the president are inherently legitimate as long as they attribute them to being in “the public interest,” then we all live at the mercy of what is considered to be the public’s interest by a given president. And if all presidents, presumably, view their re-election as in the public’s interest, then there are no feasible limits upon what a president can do in the pursuit of reelection.
Suppressing a rival political rally would probably help a president’s election chances. So, deploying armed troops or federal law enforcement to shut down another candidate’s campaign event would be in the public interest and, therefore, totally fine.
A strong economy usually helps a president get re-elected. So, they could ask major corporations and businesses in the country and abroad to release artificially inflated numbers to temporarily boost economic data in exchange for tax cuts.
Sowing doubts about a rival politician’s personal conduct or finances can often help a president win an election, especially if it distracts from their own wrongdoing. So, a president could use the United States’ official foreign policy apparatus to exert leverage over a country’s leader to entice them to dig up political dirt on a rival. Outsourcing your campaigns’ opposition research to the intelligence and law enforcement agencies of foreign countries would just be acting in the public interest. Oh wait….
I’m not naive enough to think that the conduct and outcome of any impeachment trial turns on the facts of the case alone. Politics played a role in 1868, 1974, and 1999. And the Democrats are not without their own flaws and blind spots. They, too, have made mistakes in this process. But the level of partisan cynicism that this administration and the Republicans in Congress are asking us to accept are unprecedented and unconscionable.
On Friday, January 31, the Senate voted to block any new witnesses from testifying, making the outcome inevitable. Under Trump and McConnell, we now face a political process stripped of even the veneer of integrity or fairness. Our country is increasingly an arena of struggles for power that demand victory at any cost. We treat the opposing side as a dangerous faction to be suppressed, instead of fellow citizens with differing yet legitimate viewpoints.
Trump will not be convicted in the Senate. But I believe it is still important that his violations of our country’s founding principles and his blatant disregard for his oath of office are recorded in the official history of our country. If Trump’s actions were not registered as impeachable offenses, then the presidency becomes a monarchy. By formally impeaching this president in the House, future generations will at least know that he did not act in the public interest of us all.
No, there is not going to be another civil war
The third major anxiety I’ve heard expressed by Americans is that, given the divisions and anger in the country, we are headed towards a second civil war. This has long been a fantasy of certain right-wing extremists, doomsday preppers, and Confederate apologists. The idea remained quarantined among other fringe conspiracy theories, like chemtrails and Big Foot, at least until Trump took office. Now, along with so many other vestigial political ideologies he has resurrected, the idea has infected our political bloodstream.
In June 2018, a Rasmussen poll created a sensation by showing that roughly one third of Americans surveyed believed another civil war could break out in the next five years. A Georgetown University poll released in October 2019 revealed that, on average, voters believe the U.S. is already two-thirds of the way to the edge of a civil war.
The scenes of mayhem at Charlottesville in 2017 and the continued chest-thumping at Trump’s never-ending campaign rallies make these fears understandable. The President himself consistently amplifies the idea of political violence. Last March, during an interview with Breitbart, Trump claimed that “I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.” In September he even invoked the notion of a civil war outright, quoting a pastor in a tweet who claimed on Fox News that if Trump were removed from office “it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our country will never heal.”
Some of Trump’s supporters have taken the hint. In December, CBS News interviewed people attending a Trump rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania. They asked about the possibility of the president being removed from office by the Senate. One man stated that “He is not going to be removed… My .357 Magnum is comfortable with that. End of story.” Another said that, if he were removed, “It would cause physical violence in this country that we haven’t seen … since the first Civil War. I think it would become the second Civil War.”
Are we facing a moment like the 1850’s, when conflict became inevitable? Are we so irreconcilably divided that a majority of Americans would take up arms against their political opponents? No, we are not.
This is certainly the most divided moment of American politics in my lifetime, but it is by no means without precedent. The 1960’s saw more overt political violence than anything we’ve witnessed in the past four years. The 1930’s was far more violent than that, with political terrorism and lynchings a monstrous reality of everyday life in many southern states. To reach the levels of chaos and bloodshed of the 1860’s that eventually led to outright civil war would require a collapse of civil society and everyday life on a continental scale that I simply do not believe possible.
And I believe that the vast majority of Americans do not want that either. How many of us would be willing to trade the safety and security of our homes and careers for warfare? Would we really trade family dinners and streaming TV, and even mundane things like laundry and homework, for life in a muddy ditch all winter, watching our friends and neighbors dying from hunger, sickness and gunshot wounds? It would be a collective embrace of madness I don’t see happening.
But that may not be the point. According to Charlie Warzel of the Times:
It doesn’t matter that we’re not on the brink of a civil war; the threat as outlined by right-wing media is intended to inspire fear in liberals and conservatives alike. For conservatives, it’s the notion that Democrats will stop at nothing to get rid of Mr. Trump and will marshal the forces of the “deep state” to right the wrongs of the 2016 election. For liberals, it is a warning: Don’t push churchgoing, gun-loving conservatives too far, or there’ll be dangerous consequences.
Invoking the idea of a civil war is meant to intimidate the other side to stay home. It was a tactic of the far-right during the Obama years, and it similarly never came to fruition. While we very well could witness isolated acts of political violence in 2020, we should never let our fears prevent us from speaking up and voting for the America we truly believe in.
There’s a quotation that’s gotten me through much of the strife of the last few years. In March 2017, David Frum of The Atlantic wrote a piece called “How to Build an Autocracy.” It’s proved an incredibly prescient forecast of the Trump years overall, sadly, but his conclusion remains a source of hope and strength nearly three years on. Frum wrote:
Those citizens who fantasize about defying tyranny from within fortified compounds have never understood how liberty is actually threatened in a modern bureaucratic state: not by diktat and violence, but by the slow, demoralizing process of corruption and deceit. And the way that liberty must be defended is not with amateur firearms, but with an unwearying insistence upon the honesty, integrity, and professionalism of American institutions and those who lead them. We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered. What happens next is up to you and me. Don’t be afraid. This moment of danger can also be your finest hour as a citizen and an American.
2020 will be a year of division and anger, yes. But it can also be the year that we Americans prove, once again, that we are still capable of greatness.
