Are we sure it's not too late?

The impeachment inquiry has now moved from the House Intelligence committee to the Judiciary committee, and Nancy Pelosi has said that Judiciary will in fact be drafting articles of impeachment. Judiciary will then vote on which measures to send to the full House, and given Democrats’ majority in the House it seems likely that there will be a vote to impeach the president. At that point the matter moves to the Senate which, it is almost certain, will not vote to remove Donald Trump from office. The reason for that, of course, is that Republicans hold 53 Senate seats, removal requires a two-thirds majority, and there have been no defections from the Republican camp so far.

I increasingly find myself wondering whether that’s it, it’s over: American democracy, I mean. That’s a wild thing to even contemplate, I realize, but consider the facts. Trump’s victory in 2016 was an incredibly narrow one. He lost the popular vote by nearly 3m ballots, and had 100,000 or so votes across three states (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) gone the other way, he would have lost in the electoral college as well. Those 100,000 or so decisive votes represent less than 0.1% of the total cast. That’s a razor-thin margin: so close that one of any number of factors in the election could have meant the difference between one outcome and another.

Of those potentially decisive factors, one looms particularly large. It is the unanimous opinion of America’s intelligence community that Russia mounted a campaign of interference in the 2016 election in an effort to help Trump win the presidency. That was also the conclusion of the special investigation led by Robert Mueller. We can’t prove that Russian interference is the reason that Trump is president rather than Hillary Clinton, and we can certainly suppose that had the race not been so close to begin with that Russia’s operation would not have changed the outcome. But particularly when one looks back at the nature of the race, the narratives that followed the campaigns in the last months of the election, and the narrowness of the final tally, it seems clear that Russia’s effort to undermine the integrity of America’s elections made a difference, and quite possibly a decisive one. 

That, in itself, is an extraordinary thing. If you could somehow transport yourself back into the time before the Current Madness and then tell yourself that an intelligence operation by a hostile foreign power may well have changed the outcome of a presidential election, you’d probably tell yourself to get the fuck out of town, because that’s crazy spy-thriller stuff. If you then went on to note that America’s response to this was to do...basically nothing to keep it from happening again, you’d rightly question your future self’s grip on reality. America is the world’s model democracy! It’s the richest and most powerful country in history! There’s simply no way things could go down like that.

And yet they have. Trump, having won his presidency with considerable help from a foreign intelligence operation, has been utterly unrepentant about this fact. He has not taken adequate steps to prevent Russia, or any other power, from interfering in the 2020 election. On the contrary, the articles of impeachment on which the Judiciary committee is now at work are a response to a direct effort by the president to invite another country to interfere in the 2020 election. There isn’t really any question as to whether or not this occurred: the president has admitted as much, as has his chief of staff, as have a number of highly respected government officials in testimony under oath before the House Intelligence committee. We know, as much as anyone can know anything, that a president who rose to the highest office in the land with help from foreign interference is now seeking to solicit foreign interference on his behalf in order to win a second term. 

What should Congressional Democrats have done in the face of this extraordinary behavior? One could argue that the right thing to do was nothing. After all, they knew what the partisan balance in the Senate was and could have anticipated that Trump would not be removed. Moreover, there’s another election a year away, so why not let the voters hold the president to account? But Trump clearly wasn’t chastened enough by the Mueller investigation to refrain from taking new actions to undermine the integrity of America’s elections. If he were also given a pass on his strongarming of Ukraine, there would be every reason to believe that he would be more emboldened still, and there would be every reason to doubt that the 2020 elections would be fair ones. If the idea is to allow voters to hold the president to account, the election has to be a credible one. But the very act that Congress had to decide whether to investigate or not was one intended to undermine the election!

Was it right, then, to move forward with impeachment? There were a few ways in which the gambit might have paid off. Democrats might have had the faintest of hopes that as the facts of the Ukraine matter came out—as diplomats and service members of the greatest integrity explained under oath how the president sought to undermine American elections—Republicans would begin to feel pangs of conscience and would ultimately break with the president. That was what happened in 1974, after all, when a number of Republican members of the Judiciary committee voted with Democrats to send articles of impeachment to the full House: votes which prompted Nixon to resign. I’ll admit, readers, I thought there was a chance that this could happen.

It still might, I suppose. But what we have seen from Republicans in hearings so far isn’t merely a scepticism that the actions the president committed are worrying enough to demand impeachment, but the creation of a false alternative narrative: a conspiracy theory with no basis in fact. Now, it is absolutely true that politicians on the whole are pretty slippery and will occasionally be caught in an outright lie. You don’t go to a politician to get the unvarnished truth. But I was not prepared for the shameless up-is-down, black-is-white bullshit that has been the Republican narrative about the Ukraine matter. It is staggering to be lied to so remorselessly, by people who clearly understand that they will face no negative consequences whatsoever for their statements. 

And they won’t. American civil society simply is not able to cope with a situation in which leaders feel no obligation to be truthful and in which there is no effective social sanction when leaders lie. It’s interesting to think about how we’ve gotten to this point, but that’s a discussion for another time. The point is, as a top public official you are now able to lie repeatedly and obviously, even invent whole alternate realities, and face no professional consequences. And if you’ve been following the impeachment saga on right-wing media, it is entirely possible that you believe that the Democrats are the ones promoting the lie. That’s not true—there is, after all, an actual series of events which actually unfolded and which is reflected in large amounts of tangible evidence. But we, as a society, have found ourselves with no mechanism to adjudicate which of two conflicting accounts is the more truthful, and so now any number of realities can exist alongside each other.

And that is why the other way in which impeachment might have been effective—by persuading a large enough number of voters that Trump should not be president to either force Republicans to change their tune out of political self-interest, or to create the conditions for a 2020 landslide big enough to overcome interventions by foreign powers or others looking to undermine the election—isn’t going to pan out either. Instead, public opinion has essentially flatlined, with just under 50% of Americans (and only about 12% of Republicans) believing that Trump should be impeached and removed.

Now we’re in a real pickle. Because if Congress moves forward with impeachment but the president, thanks to rock-solid support from Republicans, is not removed, then Trump is likely to learn two lessons. First, the only way he can be held accountable for interference in American elections is if Republicans lose those elections badly, and so there is every reason to interfere in American elections as heavy-handedly as is necessary to prevent that outcome. And secondly, and perhaps more worryingly, that so long as he has enough Republicans on his side in the Senate to prevent a vote to remove he can do whatever he wants. A failed impeachment not only casts a dark shadow of illegitimacy over the 2020 elections, but effectively removes the legislative branch as a check on the executive. If those pillars of our democracy are gone, then what’s left?

You might say that outcome is bad enough that Democrats should have just done their best to win in 2020. But I don’t think that’s right. I think this outcome was more or less baked into the cake once it became clear what happened in 2016 and Republicans chose partisan solidarity over the integrity of American democracy. They’ve had their opportunities to accept a loss of face and power as the acceptable price to maintain America’s democracy, and they’ve made their collective choice as clearly and decisively as can be. And that’s why part of me thinks: maybe it’s already over. Maybe it’s already too late.

It isn’t, quite. Democrats did just enjoy meaningful gains in the midterm elections: though of course Trump wasn’t on the ballot then and neither was there the slightest risk of Republicans losing enough seats to make removal in the Senate a real possibility. (And, furthermore, there were real questions about the integrity of some 2018 outcomes, like the Georgia gubernatorial race.) There’s still time for the ghosts of democracies past, present and future to visit Mitch McConnell and frighten him into preventing America from entering the ranks of democracies-in-name-only. There’s still time for a landslide electoral victory in 2020, sufficient to overcome interference in the election of any sort and, hopefully, to persuade Trump to leave the office. There’s still time for Americans to show the same courage as Hong Kongers, who are willing to leave their comfy homes and demonstrate, at risk of life and limb, that they are willing to stand up and fight for their democracy. 

But, but, but. But Republicans haven’t flinched yet. But the 2020 campaign will most likely be another close one: close enough for interference to matter, and for unscrupulous behavior in the closest of states to change the outcome. But Americans aren’t filling the streets, and maybe they simply lack the passion and zeal for democracy to do so, plus think of all the new streamable prestige TV offerings.

You think about a 230-year-old democracy, a proud and powerful country that considers itself exceptional, and you assume that if representative government were truly in danger, well, there would be unmissable signs. There would be sound and fury, shouts in the streets, time to recognize the threat and respond. There would be no mistaking the fact that a thing of precious value was about to be lost, no risk that we’d somehow miss the whole thing between shopping trips and Fleabag. You’d think.

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I managed to set my gloom aside for long enough this week to write a column, which considers the state of the Japanese economy. Please read and enjoy.