Continuing this thread, Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare discloses a fascinating discussion he had with some national security professionals with respect to the current election:
Over drinks the other evening, I played a parlor game with several of my companions: I asked each to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how nervous he or she was about a Donald Trump presidency, figuring into the calculation both the likelihood of the event and the magnitude of the disaster it would pose. The mean was around 7 or 8—with most people rating the event completely terrifying but the probability low. The complacent outlier rated the matter only a 4. The alarmed outlier, however, was a career Justice Department lawyer, who insisted—against the rules—of rating the matter a 14.
His explanation, which has two distinct elements, bears some reflection.
First off, he argued, the mere fact that Trump has come this far shows something deep and ugly. Even if he now loses and loses big, he has already shown that something very like a Trump presidency is possible. Even with all his craziness, his malevolence, and his self-destructive narcissism, Trump is polling around 40 percent of the electorate. That means that someone a little more polished, a little less evidently unhinged, and a little less committed to offending large swaths of the electorate could plausibly win a federal presidential election. That was something we didn’t know about America as recently as last year. As my interlocutor put it, even if Trump loses, “the sheen is off America for me.”
Well worth a read. It goes on to address some of the issues having to do with separation of powers and how the two party system, until recently, has acted as a filter on the unfit gaining high office. While some might argue the point with regard to Nixon and Reagan, in the former case Nixon certainly had accomplishments to his name, such as opening up China and terminating the Vietnam War, while Reagan had a lot of supporting actors and a temperament not prone to crazed violence.
But I wish Benjamin had addressed another possible restraint on a lunatic in power: civil disobedience by those who implement operationality. The Executive, while unitary in concept and ideal, is really composed of a collection of men and women obeying the lawful orders of the person at the top. The key here is the word lawful.
What if the lunatic issues unlawful orders? Former CIA Directory Michael Hayden has already suggested that the military won’t obey unlawful orders. But the military is different from the general Executive branch in that, while it’s under the orders of the Executive, it is not replaced by new Administrations, while the personnel of the Executive branch is always, if only in part, replaced with new people as selected by the President and his surrogates. If a lunatic President selects other lunatics – and by lunatic I really simply mean “someone whose views are substantially different from ours concerning the nature of reality” – that share the outre views, then how will illegal orders be resisted?
Benjamin comes to a rather gloomy conclusion:
But I fear that the explanation may turn out to lie in that broader weathering and atrophying of our systems of restraint on power. We have a legislature that no longer functions in basic areas, after all. Congress chooses not to make immigration policy or pass budgets on time or authorize uses of force overseas. All of this serves, in the aggregate, to lessen restraints on the power to the president, who ends up acting on his own as a result. That migration of power from the legislature to the executive puts an ever-greater premium on the wisdom and judgment of the President, whoever he or she may be. Yet it also now seems to coincide with—at least in this instance—failures of party institutions to control the gateways to that ever-increasing power. In other words, we may be seeing a simultaneous degradation of our political institutions in which the failures of the legislature increase the power of the presidency, while the failures of the parties increase its susceptibility to stupidity, demagoguery, even insanity.
The drone of the Evils of Big Government may have brought us to this cliff, and pointing at high tax rates and curbs on the ability to pollute will hold little water when people begin to arbitrarily disappear – and the atmospheric radiation levels skyrocket because the Great Leader chose to shoot off a few nuclear weapons just to teach the world a lesson.
This, perhaps, may turn out to be the great failure of the Republic. Remember, for all that we call the USA a democracy, the United States is actually a Republic, in which we choose representatives to manage and implement our government wisely, and by which we insulate the vast majority of the population from the puzzlements of government, and, to the obverse, insulate the government from the degrading forces of the insular, parochial, and tribal. Perhaps even Republics will fail under the determined assaults of those who find thinking in the large too tiring, those who embrace ideologies, rather than reality; they’d rather pollute the landscape as did their forefathers; destroy their enemies as did their forefathers; and hate as did their forefathers.
Ignoring the problem that the new, terrible forces at hands are boomerangs – the energies are so great that we can destroy ourselves by continuing our old ways.
