Light On Dark Water

“It’s over, folks.”

That is, attempts to fiddle with the rules and create the possibility of picking someone else have been defeated, and Trump is definitely going to be the Republican nominee. 

"Looking to those colleagues, [Iowa committeeman Steve ] Scheffler admonished them to acknowledge their errors and unite around Trump."

Ha. As someone or other said somewhere or other in the past few days, we now have a choice between a candidate who doesn't know anything about the Constitution and one who knows but doesn't care. All in all, I suppose I'd prefer that Trump win, since I think or at least hope that the forces opposed to him would keep him from doing anything too crazy, and perhaps he might not be as actively harmful as Hillary intends to be. 

Also at National Review, Kevin Williamson writes that 1968 Was Worse, and we should all calm down about the state of the country.

Well, yes and no. 1968 was worse in terms of actual disastrous events and threats (many younger people don't realize how tense the Cold War really was, and a lot of older people seem to have forgotten). But the fabric of the nation has deteriorated further since then. It's true that the divisions between young white leftists and the moderate-to-conservative wider culture was just as intense, if not more so, in 1968. Race relations, as tense as they are now, are surely better overall. But after 50 years of cultural and political struggle the sides are much more evenly matched in numbers, and there is much more widespread sense on both sides of being in a struggle to the death. Neither side really feels that it can live with the other in the long run. The anger and frustration are worsened by the continual expansion of the national government's assertion of control in state and local affairs. The national safety valve of federalism–the idea that Nebraska and Connecticut can be allowed to run themselves in different ways–is treated by the left as a right-wing plot, and the left has control of most of the judiciary, which ought to stop the overreach.

Possibly worse: the political system itself is showing signs of severe damage. In 1968, whatever you thought of most politicians, you could suppose that most of them respected the constitutional system, and that the people themselves respected it and expected the politicians to do so. I don't think that's true anymore. Too many of the supporters of both Hillary and Trump simply want what they want and would be perfectly happy to support a monarch who promised to give it to them.

Maclin Horton
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37 responses to ““It’s over, folks.””

  1. Janet

    Hey, nothing the matter with monarchs. At least you don’t have to feel like you were in some way responsible for their being there.
    AMDSG

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  2. Robert Gotcher

    AMDSG?

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  3. Janet

    We maiorem Dei Sanctissimi Gloriam. I did this on my kindle without glasses. Who knows what it’s going to say.
    AMDG

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  4. Mac

    “nothing the matter with monarchs”
    Well, obviously it depends totally on the monarch. How about King Barack? Queen Hillary? I love Queen Elizabeth but she’s not a real monarch.
    I’ve really never been very sympathetic to the traditionalist Catholic sympathy for monarchy, which usually strikes me as frivolous wishful thinking: we’ll have a Catholic monarch who is morally bound by the faith and the authority of the Church. Yeah, sure we will. Not within the next century or two.
    Maybe monarchy is the most natural system, and we’re reverting to it. But I can’t consider that anything but a failure.

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  5. Mac

    By the way: this post was written hastily and I see a couple of things that could be misleading. The title is not meant to say “The republic is over.” That may prove to be true, but it was only a reference to the attempt to dump Trump.

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  6. Art Deco

    Urban disorder was far more severe then than now (a sum of over 700 riots in 7 years, with over 300 in 1968 alone). At least in the northern United States, blacks and whites were more foreign to each other and reserved around each other then than now, but I doubt mundane interaction was much ruder). OTOH, both Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon were mainstream politicians and both had unremarkable domestic lives (the attempt of people like Judith Viorst to make the Nixons look pathological notwithstanding); same deal with the Muskies and the Agnews (though Agnew’s son was a ruin in later years). John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and (in a quite different way) George Wallace were repellant characters, but this was well-concealed in Kennedy’s case and Johnson’s (and the most appalling aspects of Wallace were as well).
    As far as corruption and abuse goes, you’d have to go back to James Blaine or farther to Aaron Burr to locate a national candidate as godawful as Hilligula. The tolerance for the Clintons is an indicator of the degree to which the society has no standards for its public officials.

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  7. Art Deco

    As for the procedural issue that inspired the post, I could never understand why people though delegates recruited by the Trump organization to promote his campaign were all of a sudden going to start taking orders from Ben Sasse and George Will. Tedious contrivances adopted in the last 5 years introduced hurdles would have prevented anyone but Trump or Ted Cruz from having their name placed in nomination. Cruz was, if anything, more disliked by the Capitol Hill / K Street nexus than Trump and fully half of Trump’s pledged delegates would have had to defect to put him over the top.

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  8. Art Deco

    I’d be pleased to have Elizabeth as the head of state. We’d have to contrive a proper way of choosing the Governor-General, Lieutenant Governors and all, not what they do in Canuckistan. A pure Westminster system would also be an idea which required some modification. Still, the idea of Elizabeth is a pleasant one and the idea of Charles an idea I can digest.

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  9. Art Deco

    you could suppose that most of them respected the constitutional system, a
    The appalling abuse of judicial review was in its childhood then. Gottfried Dietze in particular would have wanted a word with you if he thought you fancied the politicians of 1968 respected the Constitution.

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  10. Janet

    I’m wondering, Maclin, if you thought that there was any chance that the Republicans would be able to find a way to jettison Trump or that that process could have produced a viable candidate. It seems to me that that would have had dreadful consequences–really violent consequences, and the votes that would have been gained by having another candidates would have been offset by the furious exit of Trump supporters from the party.
    That was, by the way, supposed to be a partially humorous comment about monarchy, although I think that monarchy, like democracy can be either good or bad, and when it’s good, I think it has the potential to be better.
    On July 3, our deacon, who was preaching the homily, recited the Gettysburg Address, and when he said, “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” it pulled me up short. I have, of course, heard this all my life, and it sounds good, but hearing it again I thought, “There’s something important missing there.”
    Maybe monarchy is the most natural system, and we’re reverting to it. But I can’t consider that anything but a failure.
    Well, it’s failure, but only the natural end of all governments. It’s not a failure of something that could have endured, because none of them can. The best we can get is period of equilibrium when the government is suited to the times and the people and leaders are just, but that will never last in this world.
    AMDG

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  11. Art Deco

    Well, it’s failure, but only the natural end of all governments. It’s not a failure of something that could have endured, because none of them can.
    This is a peculiar and incoherent statement.

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  12. Janet

    Well then, just ignore it.
    AMDG

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  13. Mac

    Makes perfect sense to me.
    Janet, I know you know the pitfall of monarchy, but since you had said that part, I had to say the other part. 🙂
    To answer your question about the Republicans and Trump, no, I don’t think there was any way to fix things. I don’t pay enough attention to party rules etc. to have had an opinion on whether that aspect of it was even feasible, but I agree that even if it had worked it would have created another bad set of problems.

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  14. Mac

    I don’t know who Gottfried Dietze is but I think I’d disagree with him.
    This is not a constitutional question per se, but it’s related to a general sense of there being limits on what is acceptable for politicians: I think a line was crossed when the Democrats decided to circle the wagons around Bill Clinton when he engaged in gross public dishonesty. The Republicans in the end felt obliged to repudiate Nixon. Clinton and the Democrats just yelled louder and refused to be shamed.
    I mentioned this on Neo-neocon’s blog a few weeks ago, saying that Clinton had committed perjury. She agreed that he was dishonest but says that he didn’t technically commit perjury, and linked to several posts where she had discussed it in detail. I didn’t have time to read them, but I expect she at least has a good case. But a party with integrity would have repudiated him, whether or not he could have been convicted of perjury.

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  15. Robert Gotcher

    “a party with integrity”
    Hm.

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  16. Mac

    Relatively speaking.

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  17. Marianne

    The way I remember Nixon and Watergate is that Republican leaders didn’t withdraw their support until pretty late in the game, when the polls turned decisively against him. I think there was fairly strong public support against impeachment for quite a while. The opposite happened with Clinton, didn’t it? In that public support for him grew rather than diminished as the saga went on.

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  18. Mac

    Yes, I think that’s probably true. You’re saying that it was really the people at large who were responsible, not the parties, who were just following the polls? Maybe so. But then you have to take into account the role of the largely Democratic media in driving public opinion.

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  19. Marianne

    I was thinking more about the “party with integrity” remark, and whether that captures the Republicans with regard to Watergate.

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  20. Mac

    Oh, I didn’t mean to suggest integrity in any absolute terms, only that they had enough to feel ashamed and to recognize a point when they could no longer defend the president. The Republicans (or a group of) told Nixon he no longer had the support of the party and could either resign or be impeached. Nobody put that kind of ultimatum to Clinton. Clinton and the Democrats’ reaction to the threat of impeachment was more like “bring it on.” “Well, then, we just have to win” was Clinton’s famous remark when told that the people would accept adultery but not perjury.

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  21. Art Deco

    The way I remember Nixon and Watergate is that Republican leaders didn’t withdraw their support until pretty late in the game, when the polls turned decisively against him.
    Nixon’s approval ratings careered downhill in a straight line between February 1973 and November 1973. They did not get much worse after that.
    The Watergate burglars were arrested in June of 1972 and it was known within 5 days that one among them was the chief of security at the Committee to Re-elect the President. It took a number of months (IIRC, until March of 1973) for the U.S. Attorney’s office in DC to conclude that someone north of Gordon Liddy in the hierarchy of the CRP and the Administration had been in the know about the capers he and his staff were running. Liddy was formally the general counsel to the CRP. It’s amazing in retrospect that the Nixon campaign was not more tainted than it was by the whole business. It was in July of 1973 that John Dean testified in front of the Senate Watergate committee. It was at that point that someone went on the record with testimony that Nixon had engaged in obstruction of justice.
    The impeachment hearings were held between February and August of 1974. It was in June of 1974 that the chairman of the House Republican Conference, having riffled through the released transcripts of Nixon’s taping system, said that Nixon must resign. The House Minority Leader said at the time that he would be content if Nixon resigned. In August of 1974, the 4th ranking member of the House Republican leadership announced he would vote for at least one article of impeachment. About six Republicans on the Judiciary Committee voted for at least one article of impeachment. The Republican caucus leaders were responding to evidence as it was released, not polls.
    Keep in mind, this IRS mess has been a matter of public record for 3 years and the administration has lied and stonewalled its way through it. I’m not aware of a single Democrat anywhere who has called for the Administration to come clean.

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  22. Art Deco

    One concern at the time was that Spiro Agnew was also under investigation by the U.S. Attorney in Baltimore. Richard Nixon’s preferred replacement for Agnew, John Connolly, was facing an investigation as well. One contrarian student of Watergate (Nicholas von Hoffman) has said that Nixon’s fate was sealed when Gerald Ford was sworn in as VP in December 1973.
    John Dean thought Nixon had selected Ford as an insurance policy, offering that everyone knew Ford was dopey. Dean himself was the least accomplished man to be appointed to the position of White House counsel in the last 50 years. (His career in private practice was quite brief, ending in February 1966 when he was fired for cause by a communications law firm in Washington; he landed a staff job on the House Judiciary committee shortly after and attached himself like a remora to Richard Kleindienst, one of Barry Goldwater’s camarilla).

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  23. Art Deco

    Re Nixon, he was (now and again, not consistently) a vindictive man with a lawyer’s shiftiness and his time in politics was a study in pointless ambition. There’s no indication from any other part of his life that he was a pathological figure. Also, I think he was the last retired President (other than Jimmy Carter, perhaps) to refrain from industrial scale buckraking when he left office.

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  24. Mac

    “Keep in mind, this IRS mess has been a matter of public record for 3 years and the administration has lied and stonewalled its way through it. I’m not aware of a single Democrat anywhere who has called for the Administration to come clean.”
    Yes, exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about.
    Going back to something else I posted about recently: Nixon was in many ways a bad president (degree of badness I leave as a matter of opinion). But I think he loved his country in a way that Obama does not.
    The picture of Nixon in Whittaker Chambers’ Witness is btw strikingly different from the one we’re used to. Chambers admired him greatly.

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  25. Art Deco

    The picture of Nixon in Whittaker Chambers’ Witness is btw strikingly different from the one we’re used to. Chambers admired him greatly.
    Chambers died in 1960. David Broder offered the opinion at the time of Nixon’s resignation that the previous 20 years had made Nixon a convoluted character to a degree he hadn’t been in 1955.
    Another person acquainted with Nixon said he was about 5 different men, not an integral whole. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Arthur Burns met one person, H.R. Haldeman another, his wife another. Woodward and Bernstein (not the most reliable sources) reported that Fred Buzhardt (White House counsel) had been struck dumb listening to some of Nixon’s office diaries (which were kept on period “Dictabelt” technology; he felt it was a side of Richard Nixon no one ever saw and that even though Nixon had given him the Dictabelts to listen to, it was invasive listening to them. Some had to be turned over to Judge Sirica for him to make a ruling on their evidentiary value. Sirica listened to a few and then returned them, saying he would not require their submission.
    I think the problem re Nixon is that various parties (e.g. Judith Viorst, Woodward and Bernstein, Fawn Brodie) peddled a mess of dubious theses about the man or about his wife. His brother was motivated to write a family history because he was disgusted with ‘all the psychobabble’. At the same time, people fond of Nixon personally (Wm. Safire) who had his interests in mind (Wm. Safire, Henry Kissinger, Fred Malek) have said his temper was disconcerting. Kissinger supposedly held to the view that Watergate was the work of flat-footed subordinates who hadn’t figured out that the man vented quite a bit and you weren’t supposed to take his rants literally. Kissinger did say on the record that it was a dance with Nixon. He blows up, you go back to your office, he recalls you and retracts it all and tells you to do something reasonable. Safire has said that nutty memos were routine and even 3d echelon people like him received them.

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  26. Louise

    Maclin, was there a comment I made on this thread that maybe ended up in the spam?

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  27. Mac

    No, sorry, there’s nothing in the spam folder. Hasn’t been for a long time, actually. I guess it’s all being caught before it gets to this point.
    Right, Art, I know Chambers’s experience of Nixon was very early in the latter’s career. Don’t know if that indicates Chambers was wrong, or everybody later was wrong, or if Nixon changed. Chambers did not have a deep personal acquaintance, though, as far as I can remember. Nixon of course supported Chambers in the Hiss business.
    What kind of stuff are you suggesting was on the Dictabelt recordings>?

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  28. Marianne

    Again, I’m recalling from (perhaps faulty) memory, but Watergate dragged on and on, in the same way the Lewinsky thing did, and when in both instances the president was guilty. That was corrosive of the body politic. Waiting until the most damning piece of evidence arrives to tell him to go doesn’t look like shining integrity to me.

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  29. Mac

    No, it doesn’t, but like I said, it’s relative. In the end, they did the right thing, while the Democrats with Clinton just decided to brazen it out. Successfully, which set a bad precedent.
    Part of the reason is the polarization, which was in its early stages in Nixon’s time. By Clinton’s time, the Dems felt that losing to the Republicans was a danger to all life.

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  30. Grumpy

    When was it that the lights went out in New York? The power failed. 1967 or 68? People just set around and burned candles. I remember it being quite fun, though I was seven all right and that kind of thing is fun to a seven-year-old. The power failed again in New York in about 77. Whole psrts of Manhattan wiere burn down – especially in the South Bronx of course. My father and my stepmother drove around and they said it was like a war zone in some areas.
    Another question I have in mind in response to Maclins post
    Is what would happen if the power fails in summer 2016?
    My guess would be more like 68 than 78

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  31. Grumpy

    Its not a rhetorical question, even though I have a guess about NYC.
    I would not like to be in Baltimore if the power failed for 48 hr
    My experience in Manhatten over the past year is that race relations are indescribably better than in the 60s or 70s. The walls are gone

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  32. Mac

    Of course Alabama in 2016 is night-and-day different from Alabama in 1968, when people were still trying to figure out how to do desegregation. As I’ve said before in this context, I keep reminding myself of the level of ordinary day-to-day civil and unexceptional interaction that goes on. There are problems but it’s just not even on the same map as 1968.
    I would not be at all alarmed by the power going off for days here. I would be very uncomfortable but not afraid. Since we’re in hurricane country that sort of thing happens from time to time anyway. I live in a small town but even across the bay in the medium-sized city of Mobile I don’t think most people would feel endangered.

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  33. Mac

    South Bronx, late ’70s–it’s what was going on then that caused someone to say despairingly that “New York has become a third-world city and will never recover.”

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  34. Art Deco

    Per Woodward and Bernstein, Buzhardt (or was it Leonard Garment) said that the Dictabelts were ‘Nixon with his defenses peeled away’, reflecting on this and that. My father once admitted to crying at the end of the Bond flick, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and one might see why if you knew the man. As a rule, the only emotions he expressed were amusement and irritation at various decibel levels. I assume the Dictabelts displayed Richard Nixon in many such moments.

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  35. Art Deco

    My experience in Manhatten over the past year is that race relations are indescribably better than in the 60s or 70s. The walls are gone
    Not seeing that, the places I’ve lived. The black population is more diffused and blends in where it blends in.

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  36. Art Deco

    Waiting until the most damning piece of evidence arrives to tell him to go doesn’t look like shining integrity to me.
    Neither Messrs. Anderson, Rhodes, or Conable waited for the ‘smoking gun’ tape (which was less incriminating than commonly bruited about). Nor did the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. There were nine diehards among the Republican caucus who voted against all 5 resolutions.
    Again, the impeachment proceedings did not begin until February 1974. Not sure why you’d expect Congress to impeach Nixon on the word of John Dean. (BTW, for 35 years Gordon Liddy has been contending that John Dean’s account of the Watergate caper was shot through with lies attempting to cover-up his antecedent complicity).

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  37. Art Deco

    South Bronx, late ’70s–it’s what was going on then that caused someone to say despairingly that “New York has become a third-world city and will never recover.”
    The Bronx as a whole is the least affluent county in the state with income levels about 40% below state means. The half dozen community districts in the southern part of the Bronx are still poor and shabby. They’re just a great deal safer (the homicide rate is 8.5 per 100,000, no worse than it is in Utica and about 30% lower than the metropolitan average of 1980).

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