Lawfare‘s founder Benjamin Wittes begins a series examining the aftermath of the upcoming election – no matter who wins:
The fundamental division in the United States today is not between Left and Right but between, on the one hand, a populist mob enraged by elites and fundamentally seeking to blow up Washington and, on the other hand, all of those people who—whether liberal or conservative in orientation—aren’t willing to throw out our fundamental values, ally ourselves with dictators abroad, demonize whole ethnic or religious groupings, and indulge the notion that things like expertise don’t actually matter in government. The breakdown of basic democratic norms seems to be spreading; over the weekend, a local GOP office in North Carolina was firebombed and vandalized with anti-Republican messages. The essential question we face as a political society right now is not whether we are or should be a liberal or conservative nation. It is whether we believe in rule of law institutions or mob rule led by demagogues. It’s not a whole lot more complicated than that.
And then the point which I think will be controversial – especially to the left wing of the Democrats – and interesting:
This coalition most emphatically includes every conservative, however much she may loath Clinton, who did not seriously consider voting for Trump and never let political expediency or social pressure sway her. It has pride of place for current officer holders like Sens. Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse and Lindsay Graham, who have refused to try to thread the needle, the threading of which has so deprived men like Paul Ryan and Ted Cruz of their public honor. And it particularly includes the world of conservative intellectuals and former officials—and there are a lot of them—who have never blinked at the need to reject Trump and Trumpism, whether they have endorsed Clinton or insisted on a vote of conscience. It is Clinton’s peculiar duty to represent these people, whether they accept her representation or not.
The immediate task of this broad pre-political coalition will and should be different depending on the outcome on November 8. In the event of a Clinton win, the need to sustain this pre-political coalition while the Republican Party recovers should fundamentally change our expectations of a Clinton presidency. As I’ll argue in the next installment of this series, it should push Clinton to run something far more like a government of national unity than a conventional Democratic administration.
The strength of this requirement will be in direct correlation of the percentage of the votes won by Trump, in my view – the fewer votes Trump wins, the less strong this requirement. But as she may find she needs to run a unity government, we need to keep in mind that there are two chambers of Congress that will have their own ideas as well. While the Executive remains deeply influential and important, it’s Congress that makes the laws.
