The most astute court watchers are describing a parallel phenomenon. Lawyers are filing briefs that are little more than paeans to a supposedly new regime of authority ushered in by Trump's election––as if an electoral win made actual jurisprudence moot. When these non-briefs win, it reinforces the idea that this is what law is now. And few other voices in the legal profession are bothering to say, "that's actually not what a legal brief is supposed to do."
Sherrilyn Ifill's stinging critique the accommodation by most of the legal profession is worth listening to. As is her bracing reminder that anyone who doesn't want to just surrender has to commit themself to a long-haul process of trying to "seed" the ground for better conditions that might not prevail for a long time to come. (interview with Dahlia Lithwick).
Ifill thinks there is a point, especially when it comes to young people in the profession and what some of them are going to have to do without seeing results for a long time (as with the post-Plessy litigators who had to make legal challenges that did not prevail but eventually became the foundation for successful civil rights jurisprudence). The work of seeding matters even when the harvesting may come much later.
Please don’t. There’s already too few quality attorneys in it for the right reasons. Don’t “surrender in advance” as Timothy Snyder warns and NancyB seems to indicate is already occurring in the legal profession.
We need decent and resolved people to competently uphold our rights and criminal defense attorneys are absolutely a key part of that. The job is more important now than ever before in my life, seems to me
You say here that Trump "successfully broke the system." I think that this is not the best way to think about all of this. I think the better approach is something more along the lines of, "Trump tore the veil right off of the system." The difference is (as you have argued repeatedly (me too) that "the system" has been about oligarchic power and privileging the few all along. Formalistic egalitarianism has served as the cover for this for a couple of centuries now.
All Trump did was to expose the actual nature of our "democratic" capitalist system. What 99.9% of Americans view as democracy is but a formalistic potential precursor to actual democracy. Our egalitarian struggles have carved out a fine modicum of room for those us us lucky enough to be born into privilege or get on the finely tuned and guarded pathways to "success." But our cowboy capitalism rules and always has. It's just been a long time since white men suffered insecurity in the numbers that the Neoliberal version of economic policy wrought over the last 40 years.
Oh, and then there is the original sin, the scourge, of racism along with other populist bigotry triggers that the oligarchs so easily deploy to capture and divert the predictable popular anger and turn it into bigoted resentment.
I think we have to get back to the basics. Our society is built on a quite vicious cowboy capitalism that has always operated under a veil or a series of veils. Mainstream Republican Reaganism Trickle-down economics, eventually signed-off on by us Democrats and ridden for 40+ years, is the first force since the Great Depression to do enough damage to the white working and middle class to threaten some sort of mass rebellion. Trump was able to step into the void of any sort of decent leadership and 'seize the day' for his own purposes. And now the Muskovites of our world are all over the opportunity that Trump has created.
If we adopt the perspective that Trump broke the system, how can we ever begin to formulate a meaningful opposition? What is the project in that perspective? Instead, I think we need to use this "opportunity" to put forth a different narrative and, especially, a vision that is far more than simply 'restorative!" I think FDR did provide an overall guidepost when he is quoted to have said,
“If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”
Democracy needs to move forward as a living force! We need to flesh it out in our thinking and in our actions. Substantive (rather than our current formalistic) democracy is still the answer. It's got to be our vision. The skeleton that we have built can only really come to life when we put real substantive flesh on those bones. Otherwise, even the bare bones of democracy we have put in place to date may soon be reduced to little more than fossil remains.
Yes, he got away with the coup, not impeached, not tried. He will keep going even to the point of seeking a third term. Those already rich and powerful, such as Musk and Bezos, will use him to further their aims for greater domination of their employees, their properties, their country, no longer ours, and the governments of foreign countries.
There is bound to be opposition, but, unfortunately, I don't see a viable movement on the horizon at this time.
In a pseudo-democracy they're hard to separate, but to what extent is it underestimating Mr Trump's skills as a politician and to what extent having too high an opinion of our fellow-citizens?
As someone who suffered, literally, for ten years of being a very good,autistic, student at a public school, I assumed that Mr Trump would win again because I had seen how much many people love bullies, respect bullying and brutality, and aren't themselves so more from timidity or inability than from rejecting that moral system that sees them as _deserving_ the apex of social groups.
I think it was under-estinating Trump in 2016 and over-estimating our fellow citizens this time around.
Speaking for myself only, I really didn't think Trump had the juice this time. He has really noticeably declined in the past 8 years. In 2016 I'd see clips of him that I found funny, or could see how others would be entertained or riled-up, but just didn't get that this time. On top of that, he didn't deliver on much the first time.
So your point about people respecting bullies and brutality makes a lot of sense to me, and totally tracks with how the maga types on Twitter all root for Putin&Assad
For most of human history we lived in social groups that, I suspect, were more like secondary school than anything else, maybe selecting for more norms to cathect and divert the worst of it to keep the group going…but still, cruelty and force, to some extent, _work_. I can't shake the feeling that many Republican politicians fear for their safety and their family's, as fanatics are seemingly always even more devoted to punishing 'traitors' than explicit opponents.
Yes, Trump’s talent as a politician is often vastly under appreciated on the left side of the aisle. But must say, seems to me this was Biden admins failure to uphold the law much more than Republicans messaging that allowed for this. They just needed to competently prosecute Trump in timely fashion and the narrative would not have gotten so out of Biden’s control.
When you don’t prosecute the coup attempt, its rather easy to message that it was justified or not particularly serious. And here we are.
…but also, the “Let’s Go Brandon” stuff was incredibly effective at undermining Biden’s legitimacy and rebuilding Trump as a legitimate alternative to a comically broken status quo
Meanwhile, Biden’s giving medals to billionaire Democratic donor Soros and Hillary…So thoroughly out of touch with middle America in this moment.
Yesterday afternoon, here in rural TN, there was even more shooting (at targets) than usual. One neighbor was using some sort of firearm that must have a bump stock or something on it, because he could fire 10-12 rounds in a few seconds. It was also very loud. This went on for about an hour, as it was getting dark. It was also raining. But these men went outside and shot at their human silhouettes that they staple to a wooden pallet and prop up against a hay bale. That's their backstop.
Although shooting is not unusual on the weekends here, there was more than the usual amount, so I wondered if something bad had happened to Trump and they were angry or something. Then I remembered: "Oh yeah. Jan 6 is tomorrow." I think it was celebratory gunfire. Like Jan 6 is a kind of sacred holiday to them. Presumably the gunfire is also in support of the "political prisoners" that Trump intends to pardon.
What will THAT mean? A green light to overthrow governments, kill legally elected representatives, and stay in power as long as you like? It's going to happen soon I think. All those guys will get out of prison. They are already heroes, and they got more radicalized and unified in their special prison neighborhood that was just for them, where they sang the national anthem together every night. What will they do when they get home?
Thanks for this. I recently read Leonardo Sciascia's book on the killing of Aldo Moro and for whatever reason this piece put a few things in place for me. What was striking about the response to Moro's kidnapping in the book (btw, in no way am I an expert on any of this) was the seemingly broad acceptance that whatever the stated values of the system, the government was either unable or unwilling to act on them. Basically that the system as generally conceptualized didn't work.
Trump / Jan 6 seems to have revealed something similar. Obviously cynicism about the American system is nothing new (in many ways it's been the project of various right wing politicians for decades), but in the leadup to the election that cynicism became more public and more general. This is exemplified in Larry Fink's pre-election claim that the election doesn't matter. He was speaking about markets but it seems to have been seized on in some circles as a more general point. Some of this was probably cope (I think it's hard to overstate the feeling of powerlessness the electoral college has bred in some of us in NY/ other hard blue states). At the same time, I think it represented a real shift or ceding to the idea that the American government is fully broken.
I thought that it was a mistake to prosecute harshly the useful idiots like the guys with the viking helmet. I thought prosecution should be focused on the top organizers and most violent. I felt lumping the cosplayers in with the real thugs gives the thugs cover and muddies the message. Anybody have thoughts on this?
“The line on January 6th is that even if it was a coup or insurrection attempt, it was a farce and a failure.”
My immediate reaction to reading this was ‘how is /this/ the line??? Are you joking? He obviously won! Obviously!!!!’ But that’s /also/ how you know that, right? It would never in a million years be the take if the trial were allowed to run its course and he had lost. Which is basically what you said in the rest of the post here, but man, what a thing to realize.
I think what he's talking about is that January 6th was like the most extreme example of Trumpism's being simultaneously ridiculous and laughable at the same time it's also (sometimes) extremely real and dangerous. Looking at the event 4 years ago it was easy to focus on the ridiculous aspects of it like Q Anon shaman guy and that picture of that grandma and see it as just a disorganized spasm of Trumpist stupidity. And in the most literal immediate terms January 6th did fail. They didn't stop the vote to certify the election from happening. In fact when it did happen there were MORE pro-certification votes than there were before (something that everyone seems to have forgotten) And once the rioters/insurrectioners/whatever actually did get into the Capitol building most of them couldn't think of anything better to do than take selfies, sit in Nancy Pelosi's chair etc. This contributed to the sense that it was mostly a farcical event. The argument he's making is that what made it a successful coup was how it was dealt with after the fact not the facts of what actually happened on that day
What a sad thing, that this cynicism is such a strong undercurrent in our politics (and maybe? in all politics?). Ironically the sincere but totally off-base concern—relative to the urgency of holding Trump accountable, I mean—about ‘how it would look’ just ended up solidifying the same cynicism instead of dispelling it. This constant ‘trying not to look’ looks like a loser’s game, wrongheaded if well-intentioned, especially if it comes at the expense of fighting resolutely, swiftly, and plainly against a dire threat like a Trump.
Please don’t. I have seen how important a good public defender is to their clients. The justice system is often anything but just, but every person working in it can make a difference to the folks they work with. This is especially true for public defenders--using the power that comes with a law degree on behalf of people otherwise powerless in the face of the criminal justice machine is one of the few genuinely good things you can do as a lawyer.
Every judge is not Trump or a Trump lackey or trying to appeal to either, and being a public defender is very tough and involves a lot (a lot) of losing regardless. It is not a pointless fight at all, but a genuine chance to do good, and maybe put a bit of a dent in the cynicism that seems to be gripping so many people, too.
Interestingly I received this morning by email a fundraising pitch from my Democratic congressman's campaign people foregrounding the view of Jan. 26 that's being expressed here. So I wrote him a note this morning saying why are you sending this to people who are already committed when you are not waging a public campaign on the issue. Mind you, this fellow is a good, decently progressive Democrat, not some smart aleck jerk.
The enduring legacy of the failure of the US state to protect the very people and institutions a state is minimally designed to protect, will be further democratic erosion, cynicism and a wretched kind of ‘political realism’ beloved by centrists. Once again the powerful get away with a high crime and the foot soldiers are pursued. Not that the mob shouldn’t be prosecuted, but this is precisely the kind of crime where one starts at the top.
Trenchant points here as always. My only hope is that the most powerful force in politics now is bitter resentment. And it’s a January 6 with the coup leader coming back that allows the opposition to add to that bitter resentment bank.
The most astute court watchers are describing a parallel phenomenon. Lawyers are filing briefs that are little more than paeans to a supposedly new regime of authority ushered in by Trump's election––as if an electoral win made actual jurisprudence moot. When these non-briefs win, it reinforces the idea that this is what law is now. And few other voices in the legal profession are bothering to say, "that's actually not what a legal brief is supposed to do."
Sherrilyn Ifill's stinging critique the accommodation by most of the legal profession is worth listening to. As is her bracing reminder that anyone who doesn't want to just surrender has to commit themself to a long-haul process of trying to "seed" the ground for better conditions that might not prevail for a long time to come. (interview with Dahlia Lithwick).
im in law school to be a criminal defense lawyer-sometimes i feel like i should drop out. whats the point
Ifill thinks there is a point, especially when it comes to young people in the profession and what some of them are going to have to do without seeing results for a long time (as with the post-Plessy litigators who had to make legal challenges that did not prevail but eventually became the foundation for successful civil rights jurisprudence). The work of seeding matters even when the harvesting may come much later.
Please don’t. There’s already too few quality attorneys in it for the right reasons. Don’t “surrender in advance” as Timothy Snyder warns and NancyB seems to indicate is already occurring in the legal profession.
We need decent and resolved people to competently uphold our rights and criminal defense attorneys are absolutely a key part of that. The job is more important now than ever before in my life, seems to me
I tell people not to go to law school unless they know exactly what they want to do afterwards - but it sounds like you do, and it's a worthy goal.
You say here that Trump "successfully broke the system." I think that this is not the best way to think about all of this. I think the better approach is something more along the lines of, "Trump tore the veil right off of the system." The difference is (as you have argued repeatedly (me too) that "the system" has been about oligarchic power and privileging the few all along. Formalistic egalitarianism has served as the cover for this for a couple of centuries now.
All Trump did was to expose the actual nature of our "democratic" capitalist system. What 99.9% of Americans view as democracy is but a formalistic potential precursor to actual democracy. Our egalitarian struggles have carved out a fine modicum of room for those us us lucky enough to be born into privilege or get on the finely tuned and guarded pathways to "success." But our cowboy capitalism rules and always has. It's just been a long time since white men suffered insecurity in the numbers that the Neoliberal version of economic policy wrought over the last 40 years.
Oh, and then there is the original sin, the scourge, of racism along with other populist bigotry triggers that the oligarchs so easily deploy to capture and divert the predictable popular anger and turn it into bigoted resentment.
I think we have to get back to the basics. Our society is built on a quite vicious cowboy capitalism that has always operated under a veil or a series of veils. Mainstream Republican Reaganism Trickle-down economics, eventually signed-off on by us Democrats and ridden for 40+ years, is the first force since the Great Depression to do enough damage to the white working and middle class to threaten some sort of mass rebellion. Trump was able to step into the void of any sort of decent leadership and 'seize the day' for his own purposes. And now the Muskovites of our world are all over the opportunity that Trump has created.
If we adopt the perspective that Trump broke the system, how can we ever begin to formulate a meaningful opposition? What is the project in that perspective? Instead, I think we need to use this "opportunity" to put forth a different narrative and, especially, a vision that is far more than simply 'restorative!" I think FDR did provide an overall guidepost when he is quoted to have said,
“If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”
Democracy needs to move forward as a living force! We need to flesh it out in our thinking and in our actions. Substantive (rather than our current formalistic) democracy is still the answer. It's got to be our vision. The skeleton that we have built can only really come to life when we put real substantive flesh on those bones. Otherwise, even the bare bones of democracy we have put in place to date may soon be reduced to little more than fossil remains.
Yes, he got away with the coup, not impeached, not tried. He will keep going even to the point of seeking a third term. Those already rich and powerful, such as Musk and Bezos, will use him to further their aims for greater domination of their employees, their properties, their country, no longer ours, and the governments of foreign countries.
There is bound to be opposition, but, unfortunately, I don't see a viable movement on the horizon at this time.
In a pseudo-democracy they're hard to separate, but to what extent is it underestimating Mr Trump's skills as a politician and to what extent having too high an opinion of our fellow-citizens?
As someone who suffered, literally, for ten years of being a very good,autistic, student at a public school, I assumed that Mr Trump would win again because I had seen how much many people love bullies, respect bullying and brutality, and aren't themselves so more from timidity or inability than from rejecting that moral system that sees them as _deserving_ the apex of social groups.
I think it was under-estinating Trump in 2016 and over-estimating our fellow citizens this time around.
Speaking for myself only, I really didn't think Trump had the juice this time. He has really noticeably declined in the past 8 years. In 2016 I'd see clips of him that I found funny, or could see how others would be entertained or riled-up, but just didn't get that this time. On top of that, he didn't deliver on much the first time.
So your point about people respecting bullies and brutality makes a lot of sense to me, and totally tracks with how the maga types on Twitter all root for Putin&Assad
For most of human history we lived in social groups that, I suspect, were more like secondary school than anything else, maybe selecting for more norms to cathect and divert the worst of it to keep the group going…but still, cruelty and force, to some extent, _work_. I can't shake the feeling that many Republican politicians fear for their safety and their family's, as fanatics are seemingly always even more devoted to punishing 'traitors' than explicit opponents.
there's a photo of alt-right chuds brandishing giant *kekistan flags* from the steps of the capitol during the posters' putsch
the lesson: the internet is real life; cyberspace and meatspace are one; we are all extremely online now
Yes, Trump’s talent as a politician is often vastly under appreciated on the left side of the aisle. But must say, seems to me this was Biden admins failure to uphold the law much more than Republicans messaging that allowed for this. They just needed to competently prosecute Trump in timely fashion and the narrative would not have gotten so out of Biden’s control.
When you don’t prosecute the coup attempt, its rather easy to message that it was justified or not particularly serious. And here we are.
…but also, the “Let’s Go Brandon” stuff was incredibly effective at undermining Biden’s legitimacy and rebuilding Trump as a legitimate alternative to a comically broken status quo
Meanwhile, Biden’s giving medals to billionaire Democratic donor Soros and Hillary…So thoroughly out of touch with middle America in this moment.
Yesterday afternoon, here in rural TN, there was even more shooting (at targets) than usual. One neighbor was using some sort of firearm that must have a bump stock or something on it, because he could fire 10-12 rounds in a few seconds. It was also very loud. This went on for about an hour, as it was getting dark. It was also raining. But these men went outside and shot at their human silhouettes that they staple to a wooden pallet and prop up against a hay bale. That's their backstop.
Although shooting is not unusual on the weekends here, there was more than the usual amount, so I wondered if something bad had happened to Trump and they were angry or something. Then I remembered: "Oh yeah. Jan 6 is tomorrow." I think it was celebratory gunfire. Like Jan 6 is a kind of sacred holiday to them. Presumably the gunfire is also in support of the "political prisoners" that Trump intends to pardon.
What will THAT mean? A green light to overthrow governments, kill legally elected representatives, and stay in power as long as you like? It's going to happen soon I think. All those guys will get out of prison. They are already heroes, and they got more radicalized and unified in their special prison neighborhood that was just for them, where they sang the national anthem together every night. What will they do when they get home?
Thanks for this. I recently read Leonardo Sciascia's book on the killing of Aldo Moro and for whatever reason this piece put a few things in place for me. What was striking about the response to Moro's kidnapping in the book (btw, in no way am I an expert on any of this) was the seemingly broad acceptance that whatever the stated values of the system, the government was either unable or unwilling to act on them. Basically that the system as generally conceptualized didn't work.
Trump / Jan 6 seems to have revealed something similar. Obviously cynicism about the American system is nothing new (in many ways it's been the project of various right wing politicians for decades), but in the leadup to the election that cynicism became more public and more general. This is exemplified in Larry Fink's pre-election claim that the election doesn't matter. He was speaking about markets but it seems to have been seized on in some circles as a more general point. Some of this was probably cope (I think it's hard to overstate the feeling of powerlessness the electoral college has bred in some of us in NY/ other hard blue states). At the same time, I think it represented a real shift or ceding to the idea that the American government is fully broken.
I thought that it was a mistake to prosecute harshly the useful idiots like the guys with the viking helmet. I thought prosecution should be focused on the top organizers and most violent. I felt lumping the cosplayers in with the real thugs gives the thugs cover and muddies the message. Anybody have thoughts on this?
"Gleichschaltung" has a sch after the ch. looks terrible, I know, but it's correct. that's my only quibble with this
“The line on January 6th is that even if it was a coup or insurrection attempt, it was a farce and a failure.”
My immediate reaction to reading this was ‘how is /this/ the line??? Are you joking? He obviously won! Obviously!!!!’ But that’s /also/ how you know that, right? It would never in a million years be the take if the trial were allowed to run its course and he had lost. Which is basically what you said in the rest of the post here, but man, what a thing to realize.
I think what he's talking about is that January 6th was like the most extreme example of Trumpism's being simultaneously ridiculous and laughable at the same time it's also (sometimes) extremely real and dangerous. Looking at the event 4 years ago it was easy to focus on the ridiculous aspects of it like Q Anon shaman guy and that picture of that grandma and see it as just a disorganized spasm of Trumpist stupidity. And in the most literal immediate terms January 6th did fail. They didn't stop the vote to certify the election from happening. In fact when it did happen there were MORE pro-certification votes than there were before (something that everyone seems to have forgotten) And once the rioters/insurrectioners/whatever actually did get into the Capitol building most of them couldn't think of anything better to do than take selfies, sit in Nancy Pelosi's chair etc. This contributed to the sense that it was mostly a farcical event. The argument he's making is that what made it a successful coup was how it was dealt with after the fact not the facts of what actually happened on that day
What a sad thing, that this cynicism is such a strong undercurrent in our politics (and maybe? in all politics?). Ironically the sincere but totally off-base concern—relative to the urgency of holding Trump accountable, I mean—about ‘how it would look’ just ended up solidifying the same cynicism instead of dispelling it. This constant ‘trying not to look’ looks like a loser’s game, wrongheaded if well-intentioned, especially if it comes at the expense of fighting resolutely, swiftly, and plainly against a dire threat like a Trump.
reading all this: should i drop out of law school? i want to be a public defender but whats the point
Please don’t. I have seen how important a good public defender is to their clients. The justice system is often anything but just, but every person working in it can make a difference to the folks they work with. This is especially true for public defenders--using the power that comes with a law degree on behalf of people otherwise powerless in the face of the criminal justice machine is one of the few genuinely good things you can do as a lawyer.
Every judge is not Trump or a Trump lackey or trying to appeal to either, and being a public defender is very tough and involves a lot (a lot) of losing regardless. It is not a pointless fight at all, but a genuine chance to do good, and maybe put a bit of a dent in the cynicism that seems to be gripping so many people, too.
Interestingly I received this morning by email a fundraising pitch from my Democratic congressman's campaign people foregrounding the view of Jan. 26 that's being expressed here. So I wrote him a note this morning saying why are you sending this to people who are already committed when you are not waging a public campaign on the issue. Mind you, this fellow is a good, decently progressive Democrat, not some smart aleck jerk.
The enduring legacy of the failure of the US state to protect the very people and institutions a state is minimally designed to protect, will be further democratic erosion, cynicism and a wretched kind of ‘political realism’ beloved by centrists. Once again the powerful get away with a high crime and the foot soldiers are pursued. Not that the mob shouldn’t be prosecuted, but this is precisely the kind of crime where one starts at the top.
Too clever by half. Trump is a thug and let's not forget it.
Where am I saying he's not a thug?
Watching in appreciative wonder at the style is not good enough.
You totally misread my tone.
Accept that I may be wrong.
Trenchant points here as always. My only hope is that the most powerful force in politics now is bitter resentment. And it’s a January 6 with the coup leader coming back that allows the opposition to add to that bitter resentment bank.