I hate that Donald Trump undermined the results of the 2020 election and hence paved the way for the January 6 riot.
There is a case to be made that electoral changes made in the run-up to that election gave Democrats an unfair advantage, but there is no case to be made that votes illegally cast determined the election.
I hate that Trump commuted the sentences of people who engaged in more serious crimes than trespassing on January 6.
If Trump selectively pardoned and commuted January 6 perpetrators rather than mass pardoning 1500 or so people, that would have been easier to accept and defend. Trump’s mass pardons here are massively unpopular. On the other hand, the January 6 riot made no difference in the quality of life of 99.999% of Americans (aside from how they feel about it).
I want the people who assaulted law enforcement on January 6 or who damaged the capitol, or who helped to organize the riot, to be punished according to law just as I want the antifa who burned Washington D.C. at Trump’s 2017 inauguration to be punished according to law. The lefties weren’t punished however while the Trump supporters were punished because Washington D.C. is run by the left.
“F–k it: Release ’em all”: Why Trump embraced broad Jan. 6 pardons
President Trump’s sweeping pardons for 1,500 Jan. 6 criminals and defendants were a last-minute, rip-the-bandage-off decision to try to move past the issue quickly, White House advisers familiar with the Trump team’s discussions tell Axios.
Why it matters: Trump’s move to “go big” on the pardons sheds light on his unpredictable decision-making process, and shows his determination to fulfill a campaign promise to his MAGA base — regardless of political fallout.
How it happened: Eight days before the inauguration, Vice President-to-be JD Vance — channeling what he believed to be Trump’s thinking — said on “Fox News Sunday” that Jan. 6 convicts who assaulted police ought not get clemency: “If you committed violence that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”
Trump vacillated during an internal debate over targeted clemency vs. a blanket decision according to two insiders.
But as Trump’s team wrestled with the issue, and planned a shock-and-awe batch of executive orders Day 1, “Trump just said: ‘F -k it: Release ’em all,'” an adviser familiar with the discussions said.
Catch up quick: Trump’s decision was a surprise to some Republicans in Congress, who grimaced at the appearance of the new president condoning violence against police officers.
Just like Gerald Ford’s Richard Nixon pardon, perhaps these pardons are the best way to get past January 6.
Respect for the rule of law is important, but it is not the most important part of living or of citizenship. A rule-follower who doesn’t otherwise contribute to his country is not as valuable a citizen as the occasional rule-breaker who makes enormous contributions to his country.
On a scale of 1-10, I view the seriousness of January 6 in the neighborhood of a 2 (while 9-11, by contrast, was 10/10 in my books).
Under Governor Scott Walker, Wisconsin rioters tried to disrupt the smooth operation of government in that state for months. I don’t believe they were sufficiently punished.
BLM riots led to thousands of unnecessary deaths (the Ferguson Effect). Many of the rioters were not sufficiently punished.
I wish that Donald Trump had followed the norms of the transition of power in January 2021. The Democrats were more gracious to Trump after the 2024 election than Republicans were to Democrats following the 2020 election.
The United States is a nation of laws, but is the United States primarily a nation of laws, or are there other considerations? I don’t love America because of the Constitution nor because of its laws nor because of its procedures nor because of its primary documents nor because of its institutions. I don’t love America because of its democracy. I love America because it is my home and my fellow Americans are my people.
People who are still angry about January 6 must believe that we are primarily a nation of laws, protocols, procedures and institutions. I believe that we are primarily a nation of people who conceive of themselves as an extended family. Anything that reduces trust and cohesion in the family is an assault on the nation, including the January 6 riot and the BLM riots, as well as out of control immigration, judges who invalidate the referenda of the people (such as Californians voting for Proposition 187 in 1996 to deny some welfare benefits to people in the country illegally, and then the California Supreme Court made up a reason why this referendum was unconstitutional), and laws that violate my hero system.
My hero system largely comes from Orthodox Judaism. Any laws that mess around with the male-female sexual distinction bother me. Same-sex marriage revolts me. Celebrating transsexual identity revolts me. Not punishing murderers with capitol punishment revolts me. Not bestowing severe punishment on people who commit violent crime revolts me. Using lawfare against your political opponents (some of the prosecutions of Donald Trump, particularly the one in New York under DA Alvin Bragg) revolts me. Engaging in useless forever wars such as our recent adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq revolts me. Provoking Russia over Ukraine revolts me (it is a needless fight over something that does not affect America).
On a scale of 1-10 (with 10 being the ultimate in importance), here is my list of the important developments in American life over the past five years.
Biden foreign policy: 10
Biden immigration policy: 7
Violent crime: 6
BLM (aka the Ferguson Effect): 6
Biden economic policy (including his responsibility for inflation): 5
Conspiracy to hide Biden’s senility: 3
Biden’s pre-emptive pardons: 3
Donald Trump’s failure to follow important norms (including his 2020 election denial): 3
Celebrating trans: 3
January 6: 2
Covid: 2
Boys playing in girls sports: 2
Anti-semitism in America: 1
Fat acceptance: 1
Conservatives who won’t vote for Trump because of his violation of norms, such as accepting election results, don’t see the big picture. They don’t have an appropriate sense of proportion.
I don’t have an opinion about whether or not America needs to become more democratic. Some expressions of increased democracy would be good while others would be bad.
Ross Douthat wrote in the New York Times Feb. 2, 2022:
First, there’s a sense in which conservatism has always had a fraught relationship to mass democracy. The fear of mob rule, of demagogues rallying the masses to destroy a fragile social order, is a common theme in many different right-wing schools of thought, showing up among traditionalist defenders of aristocracy and libertarians alike.
To these general tendencies, we can add two specifically American forms of conservative anxiety about the franchise: the fear of corrupt urban-machine politics that runs back through the 1960 presidential election to the age of Tammany Hall and the racist fear of African American political power that stamped the segregation-era South.
Because all these influences touch the modern G.O.P., conservative skepticism about mass democracy was a somewhat normal part of American politics long before Donald Trump came along — and some of what’s changed in the Trump era is just an events-driven accentuation of existing tendencies.
Republicans have long feared voter fraud and noncitizen voting, for instance, but the fear — and for liberals, the oft-discussed hope — that demographic change could deliver permanent Democratic power has raised the salience of these anxieties. Likewise, Republicans have long been more likely to portray America as a republic, not a democracy, and to defend our system’s countermajoritarian mechanisms. But today this philosophical tendency is increasingly self-interested, because shifts in party coalitions mean that those mechanisms, the Senate and Electoral College especially, advantage Republicans somewhat more than in the recent past.
But then things get complicated, because the modern Republican Party is also the heir to a strong pro-democracy impulse, forged in the years when Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon won crushing presidential-level majorities but conservatives felt themselves constantly balked by unelected powers, bureaucrats and judges especially.
This experience left the right deeply invested in the idea that it represents the true American majority — moral, silent, what have you — while liberalism stands for elite power, anti-democratic forms of government, the bureaucracy and the juristocracy and the Ivy League.
And that idea and self-image have remained a potent aspect of the right-wing imagination even as the old Nixon and Reagan majorities have diminished and disappeared: With every new age of grass-roots activism, from the Tea Party to the local-education revolts of today, the right reliably casts itself as small-d democrats, standing boldly athwart liberal technocracy singing “Yankee Doodle.”
Against this complicated backdrop, Trump’s stolen-election narratives should be understood as a way to reconcile the two competing tendencies within conservatism, the intellectual right’s skepticism of mass democracy and comfort with countermajoritarian institutions with the populist right’s small-d democratic self-image. In Trump’s toxic dreampolitik there’s actually no tension there: The right-wing coalition is justified in governing from a minoritarian position because it deserves to be a true electoral majority, and would be if only the liberal enemy weren’t so good at cheating.
So seen from within the right, the challenge of getting out from under Trump’s deceptions isn’t just a simple matter of reviving a conservative commitment to democracy. Trump has succeeded precisely because he has exploited the right’s more democratic impulses, speaking to them and co-opting them and claiming them for himself…
the present Democratic Party is absolutely in favor of letting as many people vote as possible. There are no doubts about the mass franchise among liberals, no fears of voter fraud and fewer anxieties than on the right about the pernicious influence of low-information voters.
But when it comes to the work of government, the actual decisions that determine law and policy, liberalism is the heir to its own not exactly democratic tradition — the progressive vision of disinterested experts claiming large swaths of policymaking for their own and walling them off from the vagaries of public opinion, the whims of mere majorities.
This vision — what my colleague Nate Cohn recently called “undemocratic liberalism” — is a pervasive aspect of establishment politics not only in the United States but across the Western world. On question after controverted question, its answer to “Who votes?” is different from its answer to “Who decides?” In one case, the people; in the other, the credentialed experts, the high-level stakeholders and activist groups, the bureaucratic process.
Who should lead pandemic decision making? Obviously Anthony Fauci and the relevant public-health bureaucracies; we can’t have people playing politics with complex scientific matters. Who decides what your local school teaches your kids? Obviously teachers and administrators and education schools; we don’t want parents demanding some sort of veto power over syllabuses. Who decides the future of the European Union? The important stakeholders in Brussels and Berlin, the people who know what they’re doing, not the shortsighted voters in France or Ireland or wherever. Who makes important U.S. foreign policy decisions? Well, you have the interagency process, the permanent regional specialists and the military experts, not the mere whims of the elected president.
Or to pick a small but telling example recently featured in this newspaper, who decides whether an upstate New York school district gets to retain the Indian as its high school mascot? The state’s education commissioner, apparently, who said the state could cut funds to the school board that voted to keep it unless the board reverses course.
Whereas the recent wave of right-wing populism, even when it doesn’t command governing majorities, still tends to champion the basic idea of popular power — the belief that more areas of Western life should be subject to popular control and fewer removed into the purview of unelected mandarins. And even if this is not a wise idea in every case, it is a democratic idea, whose widespread appeal reflects the fact that modern liberalism really does suffer from a democratic deficit.
Which is a serious problem, to put it mildly, for a movement that aspires to fight and win a struggle on behalf of democratic values.