A favourite quotation for this blog can be roughly translated as follows:
“History is a box of tricks we play upon the dead.”
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In other words: those alive at the time of certain events may be bemused or bewildered by what later historians – and public opinion – make of those events. For it did not seem like that at the time.
None of us have any idea what historians – and public opinion – will one day make of what is currently happening in the United States.
(If we survive that long, types a reply-guy.)
We may have views on what we would like historians – and public opinion – to one day make of what was happening, not least to assure us that we and not our opponents are on the “right side of history”.
But it may well be that our descendants will form very different views about their ancestors.
That said, there is merit on putting down markers as to what things seemed like at the time, for what is happening in the United States is extraordinary and many of us are watching events unfold from afar with fascination or horror or both.
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The United States is now in a full constitutional crisis. There is no doubt about that, just like there should be no doubt that Marley is dead to begin with.
There was a moment at the start of the second Donald Trump presidency when it seemed there was constitutional drama but not (yet) a crisis, but that soon passed. Indeed, a perhaps better view is that the United States has been in a constitutional crisis since the failure to convict Trump on impeachment after the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol. Some would say that the crisis started before then.
A crisis is a volatile situation the outcome of which cannot be confidently forecast. If you can predict what will happen next – or even the range of what events may happen next – then it is not a crisis.
But in the United States it is now difficult to even keep up with the constitutional trespasses and contradictions.
You have a President using – or seeking to use – emergency legislation to change the world trading system and to send individuals to foreign gulags. He is now even mobilising troops against United States citizens. So-called executive orders are being used to dismantle entire rafts of Congressionally approved spending and activities. Court orders are being flouted. Individuals and firms are being targeted. Masked federal agents are kidnapping people on the streets.
A martian looking down on the United States would assume one possible outcome of all this could be a civil war. That martian may well be right.
Perhaps Congress and the Courts will assert themselves and put Trump back in his box. After all little of what Trump is doing is based on the inherent powers of the presidency, but his misuse and abuse of legislation and the exploitation of the latitude that he has been given by the courts.
Perhaps it will keep getting slowly worse, with no flashpoints of rebellion or opposition, until there is nothing but the tyranny of whatever Trump (and his circle) want to do. Like the urban myth of the boiled frogs, nobody is going to do any jumping to stop it.
Nobody knows what will happen next. It may well be something we cannot even imagine.
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Yet almost nothing of what Trump is doing is unpreventable. Congress and the courts could stop him, if they wanted to do so.
So the real problem is not so much Trump – there are always Trumps of one kind or another – but the failure of the gatekeepers.
And there is the unwelcome and inconvenient fact that, regardless of all Trump’s antics and misdemeanours, a solid bloc of the electorate support him now and will always support him.
This means that until and unless the opponents of Trump can put together a broader coalition of support and/or break down the bloc supporting him, then this is a situation that can only continue, either under Trump or someone like him.
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One thing which is noticeable in this crisis is the lack of drama – each move by Trump now seems normalised, hardly a news item for more than a few hours. Some may think crises must be dramatic, but this is humdrum.
Many are getting used to the United States government purporting to rely on emergency legislation regarding economic affairs, migration and (soon) “insurrection”. Any sensible legal analysis points to this emergency legislation not providing a sound basis at all, but that does not matter. Many are also getting used to court orders being ignored and federal agents acting without legal authority.
The constitution of the United States is in crisis, and there are shrugs rather than pitchforks.
Maybe in a few weeks or months or years there will be events which no pundit can now confidently predict, but which the same pundits will then opine were inevitable all along.
For that is the nature of much punditry: a box of tricks you play upon their readers.
But from the perspective of this blog, the outcome of what is now happening in the United States is not certain.
Only the future historians will know what, if anything, happens next.
(If we survive that long, types a reply-guy.)
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Trump has grabbed America by the Posse Comitatus, will they let him?
It seems that this crisis has been designed not by Trump but by a political movement that has been working on it for years. Milestones include ‘Citizens United’ and the capture of the SCOTUS by right leaning nominees. Over this period the opposition to this movement has been intermittent and underpowered, with occasional emergence of individuals (some presidents) who make a difference in the rate of change, but not its direction. So Trump may be a footnote in history, or a minor character in the cast-list of a contemporary Shakespeare.
Trump is trying to create a crisis in LA by sending in the National Guard and a Marines unit uninvited by the Governor of California. He did the same in his previous term when largely peaceful protests spawned violence.
People are shrugging their shoulders because of the absurd conspiracy theories behind Trump’s actions. It’s almost unbelievable that the President is so gullible or deluded. No one in his circle, or the Republican Party in Congress are opposing his resulting actions. So either they also believe the conspiracy theories, or they like the outcomes.
The comments about Future Historians makes me think of two types of SFnal story – Time Travel and Alternate Histories.
Future Historians so convinced of the correctness of their post-event observations that they might travel back to change something, confident it will be for the better, but it’s not – cf Desmond Wurzel’s excellent short story “Wikihistory”
https://www.abyssapexzine.com/wikihistory/
There are many ways that we could try to capture the essence of what is happening in the United States right now. For me, one of the simplest, clearest and most eloquent observations would be to note that Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University, has taken indefinite leave from that body and has transferred to work at the University of Toronto.
He did not make this move immediately after President Trump was sworn in, but when it became apparent that our worst collective fears were manifest.
Routinely misattributed to Edmund Burke, it was John Stuart Mill, who said in 1867: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”
I wonder what this means for the union.
The less that is actioned at federal level in the collective interest, the weaker the ties that bind the 50 states together.
There have long been secessionist rumblings, for example, in Texas. Might we begin to see meaningful secessionist arguments being put forward in traditionally Democrat states, the majority of whose citizens no longer share the values of MAGA Republicans?
Anything seems possible.
The perennial history-chewing topic here on Germany of course most commonly concerns the 1930s – didn’t my grandparents and their parents see what was happening, especially after the Enabling Act? Did they see but feel powerless, or assume that someone else would take the action, or was the zone so flooded with shit that they gave up trying to synthesise a world view at all? Until recently it felt like a pure “what-if” but now we see it playing out in the USA, not a repeat but a definite rhyme.
In Germany it took crushing defeat and destruction, and yet more, it took the disgust and despair of radicals of the next generation at the smug willful blindness of the scarcely-denazified postwar society, the anger that propelled the murderous RAF. And as we can see all to clearly the poison was never truly drained.
I wish I could see the path now for the USA to return to “those better angels of our nature” but where is their Lincoln today? If the history book is soon written that cooly fingers the then-obvious answer, it will be the most marvellous outcome.
Two points.
One, I think you underestimate the extent of public opposition in US to the Trump regime, compared to the supine position of the senate and congress. Much of this opposition is of necessity underground but there are protests planned national wide on the day of the birthday parade. One is to simply withdraw from DC, so there is silence where Trump expects loud adulation.
Two, you say that Trump will always have supporters. This is true but he extent of his support doesn’t explain the extraordinary turnaround in the swing states in the election. You have to embrace your inner conspiracy theorist and look to Musk and the technology to explain this.
This coordinated crisis is an emerging flashpoint, but one born of a very long term plan to shunt US politics in a certain direction that has faced almost no opposition. Partly because it is so bold, but also because of shameful complacency.
The commonalities between how this is being reported in the US and the internal news environment of Putin’s Russia is chilling, but the failure of opposition to someone like Trump in US politics is a substantially older illness than Trump himself, or arguably Putin’s own hegemony.
Perhaps most egregious here is the Democrats own blindness to even recognising the real threat posed by the American Right Wing – the question being is it now too late?
Much of this is already ‘history’ based upon practical timelines, but I think future historians will be even less kind: The historical assumption by some that the rise of the right wing within the Republicans – and the chaos it created – would tactically result in electoral success for the Democrats, is an example of gross naivety. The creation of a gerontocracy within the party has further aided this, and encouraged pointless sniping and conflict rather than the development of a clear vision or message of any kind.
I am trying to write a few notes for my 10 year old grandson on bits of history. I am towards the end of Pt 3 of 3 2,000 word essays on the War of the Roses. Overmighty citizens (in wealth terms) are there in Trump’s USA (himself included). Nominally a democracy; but increasingly enfeebled. And now rumblings of civil war (cf Cade’s Rebellion where even London was briefly almost taken over). Aspects of history echo every period. Can we learn from earlier excesses of overmighty thugs?
What has happened to the Democrats? There has been no fight back to these series of weird, absurd and mostly illogical actions taken by Trump, now some 5 months on and almost daily, other than to appease a so-called MAGA base?
One distraction, closely following on the heels of the last, changing the narrative, and so the press moves on eagerly reporting on this would-be-king. A almost daily TV spectacle, mostly in the now overly adorned and gilded Oval Office, surrounded by his sycophants or courtiers singing his praises.
The self declared “peace maker”, reluctant to call out his friend Putin too harshly, but while hammering the victim, or to turn off the taps to the Netanyahu genocide occurring daily in Occupied Palestine, and to which he too is now fully complicit, as a partner in the Israeli “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” feeding scheme of food scraps and killings, and all the while threatening Iran to unleash the full might of the USA and its wagging tail, Israel, on them.
At last, Gavin Newsom, the Democratic California Governor, is calling Trump out, for unnecessarily unleashing military might on California, a so-called Blue state.
The rest of the mealy-mouthed Western political world is too scared to criticize Trump or stray too far from what is his accepted line, as he may turn his wrath on them.
I am honestly not sure if this is a competent answer to your very first question, but I had been considering the same and the observation I came to [not quite strong enough to be a conclusion] was that the organisational structure of the democratic institutions in the US are in fact dangerously asymmetrical.
Specifically – and unlike the UK as an example – the structure of the government doesn’t really have the role of “Leader of the Opposition”. This is because the US is a Republic and anyone can run for President, so there is no natural counterpoint to the occupant of the White House.
However, I must also concede that whilst all the above is true, the response of the Democrats to the actions of this administration is absolutely pathetic. There is clearly no coordination, those elected members who speak clearly aren’t coordinating their messages, and, to be blunt, the leadership of the party appears to be increasingly out of touch with those they purport to represent.
Throw in the petty rivalries – for example Nancy Pelosi briefing against AOC to deprive the latter of the ranking slot on the House Oversight Committee – and it is quite apparent that the Democrats’ Octogenarian Old Guard has led the party to irrelevance. Far more so than in the UK, the US system of government requires a much, much more coordinated and concerted opposition to a President like Donald Trump… Meanwhile the Democrats are shooting at each other…
Brace, Brace!
“a solid bloc of the electorate support him now and will always support him” and unfortunately the basis on which they support him, many of them, is religious: the problem is not so much that it’s not amenable to reason, more that it’s antithetical to reason. Certainly it’s not amenable to argument based on the immediate evidence of changing political circumstances. We might do well to remember that the concept of ‘cognitive dissonance’, a psychological phenomenon, was first formulated in an attempt to understand members of a religious cult whose faith was actually confirmed, not shaken, by the failure of the predicted apocalypse to happen on the appointed date.
I’m not making a point against religious faith here (I’m a believer myself) so much as a point about the nature of Trump’s political-religious constituency. It’s a constituency that’s been cultivated for over half a century by a rather strange set of figures, many well known in the Christian world (such as Billy Graham) but whose (barely) covert agenda has been less well known.
It’s a strange state of affairs when to make sense of political affairs and contemporary constitutional law we need to take account of historical theology but, God help us, that is where we seem to be. And just because this is new intellectual territory for most of us, that doesn’t mean it isn’t critical (as in contributing to the outcome of crisis, that word understood as in DAG’s pertinent comment on it).