Trump And Impeachments Past--The Difference

Daniel McCarthy has a fascinating article at Spectator | USA today that examines the significance of the current Trump impeachment mania of the Dems by comparing it to past impeachments of the modern era. His conclusion is that, as recently as the Clinton impeachment, there was still what he terms a ruling class consensus regarding the fundamental legitimacy of "the system," or as I would say, the constitutional order. We can certainly see that in the attacks from the Left on basic constitutional principles such as the electoral process as it has been know up till now. McCarthy maintains that the consensus has thus vanished and, with it, the legitimacy of the ruling class. The ruling class is going through the forms of legitimate constitutionalism, but in reality they are exposing their own constitutional bankruptcy. What we are seeing now is, thus, tantamount to unthinking "regime suicide."

Impeachment is regime suicideThe ruling class still believes in a consensus that doesn’t exist. Their legitimacy is vanishing

What I present below is the last third or so of the much longer article--read it all. And then compare it with the views of Daniel Greenfield, Patrick Deneen, and Gary Saul Morson that we've examined recently.

To the extent that there was still a skeletal national consensus, it favored Clinton. Impeachment was a circus, but it wasn’t a national trauma. It cast no shadow over the next presidential election two years later. It was a dud that reaffirmed the stability of the American regime. 

With Trump, everything is different. The 2016 election was a referendum on the regime itself. Trump resurrected the populist attacks on the country’s political and economic establishment that Buchanan and Perot had battle-tested in the 1990s. 

Trump was no mere conventional Republican who happened to beat Hillary Clinton. He was a completely unconventional Republican who first beat the party’s own ideological standard-bearers during the primaries, in the course of which he often said things that no Republican had said for a generation or more. Trump’s message in the primaries and general election boiled down to: they screwed you. ‘They’ being the Bushes, the Clintons, the establishment in both parties, the warmongers, the trade-deal architects, the communist Chinese, free-riding allies, and more. 

Trump is no ideologue or political theorist, but he launched a comprehensive attack on the domestic and international liberal order. He campaigned against the system as it has existed since the Cold War ended.​ 

Trump’s enemies are not just the left, they are the ancien regime. Anyone who supports the political and economic dispensation of the post-Cold War era is apt to feel threatened by Trump and even more menaced by what stands behind him — a growing anti-consensus, a force that declares every center of power in this country illegitimate and antithetical to the well-being of the people. 

That’s why this impeachment attempt is radically different from the Nixon or Clinton episodes. There is no consensus to save this time; there is only an anti-consensus waiting to be radicalized. Trump’s enemies have been in denial about this since the day he first declared for the White House — they have wrongly assumed that a healthy, old-fashioned, pro-establishment consensus must emerge out of sheer revulsion at Trump. Hence all the appeals on the part of anti-Trump pundits to Republican decency and conscience. They assume that, deep down, for all that Republicans are racists and deplorables, they still love the regime, and they will support it over Trump. 

In fact, for most Republicans, certainly at the grassroots, the voice of conscience and their sense of decency command them to support Trump, in spite of his sins, against an absolutely illegitimate and malevolent regime. 

Impeachment is a regime counter-attack against a man elected to bring about change. ​And while impeachment is certainly constitutional, it is an elite procedure not a democratic one. The prestige media has passed the first judgment on whether it’s warranted in this case. (It is, they say.) 

The Democratic House will investigate and then — inevitably, if they’re not to lose the faith of their own voters — bring articles of impeachment. Ultimately, the Senate will hold the trial (if Mitch McConnell can’t delay it until the election), and Trump will almost certainly be acquitted on a partisan vote. Instead of showing, as the Nixon and Clinton impeachments did, that party isn’t quite everything and some establishment cohesion remains, the failure of the Trump impeachment will deepen the divisions of 2016 and sharpen the question of regime legitimacy. A mistaken premise — overestimation of support for the ruling class and their rules — will lead to the regime losing rather than gaining credibility. This will be most obvious among the activist wing of the Republican party, but the effects won’t stop there. 

​The old saying is that if you strike at a king, be sure to kill him. In this case, the regime is striking not a king but at the very idea that an elected official can challenge the establishment. This risks revealing just how weak the country’s ruling class really is: if 40 percent of the country remains with Trump through the ordeal of impeachment, that will show that 40 percent is anti-regime — revolutions are made with less. And that 40 percent would be a floor, not a ceiling; a starting point for a future anti-regime movement. 

The moderate path here is the one that eschews impeachment and instead shows that the elite still has faith in elections. Let the voters decide whether they want to defend the ‘norms’ of the regime, and even if they decide not to — by re-electing Trump — the regime will have lost less credibility than it stands to through a failed attempt at impeachment. Legitimacy is bleeding away from American politics and society, and Trump is a symptom not the cause. The cause is the folly of America’s leadership class as a whole. Electing Trump was the public’s way of impeaching that class.