What's happening in America today is like a slow motion train wreck when the engineer is drunk, the brakes fail, and the cars head toward a bridge that has just collapsed into a lake. When so much goes wrong at once, if we try to understand what happened, the blow by blow of the cars collapsing on one another as they plunge into the lake does not help us understand.
Much of our current political analysis goes into detail about the awfulness of the current situation, but separating the key elements of the continuing tragedy from other significant factors is difficult, now that so much has gone wrong. Some commentators finish their essays with "This will not end well." But a fair question to that would be - "What makes you so sure this will end?".
Amanda Carpenter writes in Politico "I'm a Republican. Why is My Party Gaslighting America?" OK, but a better question might be, "What Took You So Long to Notice?". Carpenter was communications director for Ted Cruz and wrote speeches for Jim DeMint.
One problem is the title of the piece. Saying "I'm a Republican" is supposed to lend greater credibility to Carpenter than we should afford any person who is a Democrat because she is supposedly going against an established bias. But that logic fails in several ways. The same logic argues that she worked for Ted Cruz, who was the last man standing in the Republican presidential primaries against Trump. The article even notes Trump's attack on Cruz's father, but could also note the attacks on Cruz' wife. If "I am a Republican" is supposed to signify credibility, then similar logic can be employed to counter argue "I am a Ted Cruz operative and therefore any of my criticisms of Trump can not be believed." So credibility needs to be based on a record of, well, credibility, not membership in a particular group.
And, to take this same point, further - ad nauseum - then Rod Rosenstein can be called a "Democrat from Baltimore", which is false on both counts and lifelong Republican Mueller can be accused of favoring the Democrats. Anyone who challenges those claims is suspect. Which leads to anyone who challenges the current occupant of the White House is suspect. Which is how we lose the rule of law and ultimately end up with an autocracy.
If we want to take note of membership in a particular group, we might better pay attention instead to the fact that Amanda Carpenter is only the latest in a growing list of conservative Republican political operatives and former officeholders who are willing to call out Trump for the horror that he represents. These people are to be believed not because they are Republicans, but because their arguments, supported by the facts, make sense!
False balance got us into this mess. Not because balance as a starting point is bad, but balance has its limits. When bad actors are willing to stretch the rules and norms of behavior and behave indecently, efforts at balance become strained. Political reporters ignore known facts and prior and current patterns of behavior. What if this time, everything that is happening is unlike anything that has ever happened in the past? Assuming that is possible - how could that be impossible? - assuming that is possible, forcing balance becomes false and provides support for deliberately false narratives. The false narrative is taken seriously, sucking energy away from truthful narratives, effectively equating a web of lies with a carefully developed honest story.
Nevertheless the Carpenter article is helpful because it adds to the growing chorus of Republican operatives who are quite conservative, complaining about the Republican-led Congress that is ditching democratic institutions in order to buttress the looming Trumpian autocracy. And Carpenter makes a valuable contribution to public understanding by noting Trump's use of vagueness as a weapon in his arsenal - referring to Trump's penchant throughout his career of "casting vague aspersions". Vague accusations are tougher to rebut precisely due to their vagueness.
And finally she highlights the use of the false narrative as a weapon. When the truth is your enemy, only false narrative can save you. In the case of Trump, there is no detailed story that is any way believable and supported by evidence that can depict him as an innocent party. The only way to buttress his story is to avoid telling it completely and distract with lengthy conspiracy theories about anyone who opposes him. Obama. Clinton. That worked for a while, but is being stretched thin. So it became Comey and McCabe. But that is not enough. Rosenstein is at risk and, of course, Mueller. For anyone who has not himself committed crimes, supporting Trump through all of this requires an observer to ignore this Trumpian pattern of behavior that has extended to Republicans in Congress.
This is not going well.
Next up: Suspending the 2018 elections as a "temporary" measure.
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