Monday, December 09, 2024

YES, SOMETHING MATTERS, BUT NOTHING SEEMS TO WORK

I generally like Jamelle Bouie, but this is privileged arrogance:

i have plenty of thoughts on why it matters that this is an illegal order but here i’ll just comment that i think liberals who throw their hands up and say “it doesn’t matter” have self lobotomized themselves into thinking that trump is god king of america

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— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) December 8, 2024 at 11:17 AM

main thing i have to say to a lot of you is that if you truly believe that nothing matters then you should delete your account, log off, cancel your voting registration and stop paying attention to anything political at all

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) December 8, 2024 at 11:28 AM

go get a real hobby

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) December 8, 2024 at 11:29 AM

As I told Bouie on Bluesky, in this particular case I don't believe Donald Trump is the god-king of America -- I believe Leonard Leo is the god-king of America. It doesn't matter that courts have ruled for nearly two hundred years that anyone born here is a citizen. It doesn't matter that the Fourteenth Amendment says, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." If Leonard Leo's Supreme Court justices and lower-court judges conclude that "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" is an escape clause from automatic birthright citizenship -- as groups like the Heritage Foundation argue -- and conclude that there's some advantage to the Republican Party in eliminating birthright citizenship, then it'll be gone soon.

When I say that, I'm not saying that "nothing matters." This matters a lot. I'm saying that there probably isn't a damn thing I can do about it. I don't see groups I could potentially join massing to defend birthright citizenship in any way that scares Republicans or effectively challenges their power, and I absolutely don't see Democratic officeholders fighting to defend the principle.

Those of us who remain engaged in politics despite our gloom are looking for rays of hope -- good polls for Kamala Harris a few months ago, pockets of resistance now. We were happy when Matt Gaetz had to fall on his sword, though it appears now that Pete Hegseth, Robert Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and other lowlife scum could win Senate approval, possibly with some votes from the Democratic caucus. At this point, we're rooting for incompetence and infighting in Trump World, or surprises. On birthright citizenship and other migration matters, maybe the Leo courts won't side with the hard-liners because business interests don't.

Bouie is a New York Times columnist. He has a powerful platform and so do many of the people he knows. I don't think he understands that what many of us are feeling isn't "nothing matters" but "nothing I do seems to matter." Here are some responses to Bouie:

It's more fun to watch you yell at people about why they should go do something but never tell anyone what to do or how to help or what things might actually make stuff better. Because seriously, literally nothing we have done so far has done anything so I don't know what the fuck

— mav (@mav.wtf) December 8, 2024 at 10:00 PM

feds: Republican states: half Republican, mostly pointless press: largely responsible for this mess courts: you're kidding, right? protests: we've seen where that goes, in 2020 at this point we're pretty well down to hiding people in crawlspaces and prayer

— mav (@mav.wtf) December 8, 2024 at 10:05 PM

At least when Tim Miller recently wrote a column along similar lines at the Bulwark, he seemed to be criticizing people with some clout -- Republicans first:
In the chapter of Why We Did It in which I sketched out the different phenotypes of Trumpian enablers, I described these Republicans this way:
Then you had the LOL Nothing Matters Republicans. This cadre gained steam over the years, especially among my former peers in the campaign set. It is a comforting ethos if you are professionally obligated to defend the indefensible day in and day out. Their arguments no longer needed to have merit or be consistent because, LOL, nothing matters. . . . The LOLNMRs had decided that if someone like Trump could win, then everything that everyone does in politics is meaningless. So they became nihilists.
Miller then turned his focus on Democratic defenders of President Biden's pardon of his son, favorably quoting his colleague Will Saletan, who wrote, contemptuously:
“America elected a convicted felon in 2024 and I no longer care about ‘norms,” one commenter shrugged. “The voters have spoken and integrity is passé,” said another. A third asked: “Why should he [Biden] sacrifice a single thing more for ideals the populace no longer believe in?”
I have no patience for critics of this pardon. Is it a rejection of the rule of law? Literally every presidential pardon is a rejection of the rule of law, because every pardon overturns the judgment of the legal system. At the same time, every presidential pardon is entirely consistent with the law, even the bad ones, because the president's pardon power is effectively absolute and it's right there in the Constitution.

In this specific case, before you tell me that the pardon is morally indefensible, you need to apply your imagination to what might have happened to the president's son in a Trump presidency. I'm not just referring to additional prosecution. I'm saying the Trump administration could have looked the other way while Hunter Biden was murdered in prison. It could have arranged to have him hooded, flown to Gitmo, and waterboarded, citing "national security" because of his international business dealings. Do you really think there are limits? Even if a court declared it unlawful, couldn't the abduction and torture of Hunter Biden happen before the court ruled? Can you say with absolute certainty that this wouldn't have happened?

Public expressions of despair are not compliance. They're not "obeying in advance." In fact, they're the opposite -- they're attempts to send a message to people like Bouie and Miller: What's happening is very, very bad. It's possible that fighting it the normal way won't work -- and besides, the people with the power to fight it the normal way aren't fighting very hard, or at all. Desperate times call for desperate measures, but you don't appear to believe we're in desperate times. Maybe you're right, but maybe you shouldn't be so complacent. Maybe you and everyone else with real power should be ready to fight dirty and not just assume that fighting fair has a good chance of working.

The realtive lack of alarm among certain pundits (and nearly all office-holding Democrats) seems much more of a threat than ordinary anti-Trumpers' gloom.

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