Short-Circuiting the System
When systemic protections against populism inadvertently facilitate it
New Old Perspectives
Have you ever had a slightly misaligned perspective on something that suddenly locked into place and made much more sense?
This is a little esoteric, but for years I thought the second verse to U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” was I want to feel / Some blood on my face / I see the dust cloud disappear / Without a trace / I want to touch a tongue / To the poison rain / Where the streets have no name.
It never made sense to me why Bono would want blood on his face, or why he wanted to ingest rain that he just admitted was poison; but who am I to question an eccentric Irishman who makes platinum records?
It wasn’t until much later that I saw the lyrics are actually I want to feel / Sunlight on my face / I see the dust cloud disappear / Without a trace / I want to take shelter / From the the poison rain / Where the streets have no name.
Well that’s much less psychotic.
I had a similar realization over the weekend while listening to a podcast about American political history. (Because that’s the sort of thing I do for fun. I am very popular and have many friends.) It’s one of those things where I knew two things separately, but it never occurred to me that they went together.
First, I know that the American political system has various mechanisms to prevent rank majoritarianism. That’s why things like the Electoral College exist, and why each state gets two senators regardless of population — to counter the popular representation in the House. That always made sense to me. It’s important to protect political minorities; and — my white maleness notwithstanding — I am a minority in other aspects, so I wouldn’t want to live in a country where 50.1% of the electorate can do whatever they want to the other 49.9%. Nor would we want to live in a country where a presidential candidate could, say, run up the score in the most populated states at the expense of smaller states.
Separately, I know that the Founding Fathers were concerned with tempering populist sentiment because they knew that populist passions were often antithetical to things like, y’know, minority rights and good governance.
But it had never occurred to me before that the Founding Fathers weren’t envisioning a semi-byzantine system of governance to guard against mere majoritarianism; but to guard against populism itself. Then I realized, however, that the systems in place to protect against populism were ironically being used instead to facilitate populism.
It’s perfectly reasonable to me that we would inflate the political power of smaller groups as a bulwark against the populist passions of the mob. It should surprise none of you that I have utter contempt for the very concept of populism, and believe it to be a scourge upon our political culture (and any culture in which it is present). In all of human history, I don’t believe there has been a single populist movement that improved the society in which it gained power. And yet these days it’s the populist mob that’s harnessing their inflated political power to impose outsized influence on American politics. And the results have been not great.
I take a backseat to no one in my respect for the foresight and ingenuity of the Founding Fathers; but I think they suffered from a failure of imagination in certain regards. It apparently never occurred to them, for example, that the legislature would not jealously guard its own authority and willingly cede many of its functions to the executive. Nor did they apparently envision a scenario where the systemic protections against populism would be used by populists against the majority.
Which is another level of irony — the Founders set out to protect against populism that was actually, y’know, popular. The current strain of populism afflicting American politics (chiefly in the Republican party) is not, numerically speaking, popular. It’s a sentiment held by somewhere between a third and 40% of the electorate. So it’s not so popular that it triggers the various protections against populism; but instead it’s just popular enough to take advantage of the inflated power granted to political minorities.
Frustratingly and unsatisfyingly, I don’t think there’s anything to be done about our current predicament. For one thing, the government can’t be better than the people who elect it, the people get the government they deserve, etc. But changing the mechanisms of our government often requires widespread agreement that simply does not exist under the current circumstances. And even if such widespread agreement did exist, the processes to change such things are so glacial that by the time any changes were implemented, the problem they sought to remedy would like have resolved itself. Not to mention the fact that if such widespread agreement existed there would be no need to make the changes in the first place.
So basically we have to wait for enough people to get tired of populist nonsense that they vote against it in large enough numbers that it’s relegated to a true minority faction. The problem there is that the party that stands to benefit most from this anti-populist sentiment is repeatedly choosing to make itself less popular. I worry things are going to get worse before they get better.
It’s Always the Ones You Most Suspect
Late last week, a trove of text messages between Utah Senator [and self-described constitutionalist] Mike Lee and then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows were released showing Lee’s willingness to participate in efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
To give Lee the bare minimum credit, he thought Sidney Powell’s “kraken” nonsense was detrimental to the cause; but his realization came less than two weeks after advocating for Powell to get an audience with the president after hearing that she was being kept out of contact.
Lee seemed to at least be trying to keep a toe on the ground in reality, supporting Trump’s right to exhaust all legal options while not actually indulging the fantastical claims being made by people like Sidney Powell; but he also showed a willingness to go along with whatever scheme Trump floated, telling Meadows over the course of multiple text messages in the weeks immediately following the election: “Please give me something to work with. I just need to know what I should be saying.” “Please tell me what I should be saying.” “There are a few of us in the Senate who want to be helpful (although I sense that number might be dwindling).”
Then in January of 2021, when it was apparent to anyone who hadn’t fallen down the QAnon rabbit hole that Trump didn’t have the goods, texting to Meadows: “I don’t think the president is grasping the distinction between what we can do and what he would like us to do. Nor do I think he’s grasping the distinction between what certain members are saying that sound like they could help him, but would really hurt him. He’s got a very real opportunity for a win in 2024. That opportunity could be harmed in multiple ways this effort.” And then later: “I don’t purport to know who fits into which category. I know only that this will end badly for the president unless we have the Constitution on our side. And unless these states submit new slates of Trump electors pursuant to state law, we do not.”
And then it gets pretty pathetic, with Lee texting to Meadows after Trump publicly criticized Lee: “I’ve been spending 14 hours a day for the last week trying to unravel this for him. To have him take a shot at me like that in such a public setting without even asking me about it is pretty discouraging.”
And then later: “I’ve been calling state legislators for hours today, and am going to spend hours doing the same tomorrow. I’m trying to figure out a path that I can persuasively defend, and this won’t make it any easier, especially if others now think I’m doing this because he went after me. This just makes it a lot more complicated. And it was complicated already. We need something from state legislatures to make this legitimate and to have any hope of winning. Even if they can’t convene, it might be enough if a majority of them are willing to sign a statement indicating how they would vote. And I've been working on doing that all day today. But now, my ability to do that with credibility is impaired.”
That was on January 4th, two days before things got…decidedly worse.
When I first read this story, I’ll admit to feeling quite a bit of schadenfreude. How could Mike Lee, Mr. Constitution, ever hope to show his face in conservative legal circles ever again? But my schadenfreude quickly melted into depression at the realization that no one gives a shit. The voters of Utah certainly don’t give a shit. They’re more likely to toss Mitt Romney out on his ear for failing to support Donald Trump’s extra-constitutional effort to stay in power than they are to punish Lee for attempting to go along with it.
Mike Lee knows where his bread is buttered. It’s easy to talk a good game about the Constitution and a reverence for founding principles; but when push comes to shove, the people keeping him in office don’t care about any of that. They just want to win.
The tragedy in all of this is that we claim to want our elected leaders to stand up for what’s right regardless of the consequences; but then there’s no incentive to do so. People like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney are unlikely to survive a primary in their next cycle; and they will be replaced by candidates who toe the Trumpian line. Meanwhile, Mike Lee will have a place in the Senate as long as he wants one now that he’s shown a willingness to lick boots when the faced with the choice.
I hate to keep repeating myself on this, but Congress can’t be better than the people that elect them. The reason principled people like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney are unpopular is because they’re not what voters actually want. They want craven invertebrates like, as it happens, Mike Lee.
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: WWI
Clue: Early leadership of an all-black regiment earned him the nickname “Black Jack.”
John J. Pershing
Today’s clue:
Category: Food
Clue: The thymus and pancreas of young calves are sources of this meat.
Dispatches from the Homefront
I was holding my younger daughter yesterday when I noticed a reddish, semi-shiny bump on the top of her head. So I asked my wife “What’s this thing on her head?”
“It’s scab. I have no idea what she could’ve done.”
So I take a closer look, and I notice that this “scab” has little legs and feet.
“…um, I think, uh, I think this is a tick.”
“WHAT.”
So I fetched the tweezers and yanked the little bastard out before it could fatten itself on my daughter’s sweet sweet baby blood, and we sterilized the spot as best we could.
Our daughter didn’t seem to mind; in fact she thought the whole thing was pretty funny.
I’m mostly just annoyed because I thought we lived in the suburbs. I didn’t realize I was supposed to be checking my children for woodland parasites, like some sort of Laura Ingalls Wilder story.