created by theatlantic on 27/01/2025 at 18:22 UTC
20 upvotes, 3 top-level comments (showing 3)
Eliot A. Cohen: “Sometimes politics resembles one of the weirder branches of modern physics or a fantasy version of biology. Time may seem to run backwards; solid things turn out to be insubstantial; black holes swallow up the light; the dead may walk the Earth, ghouls crawl out of cleft rocks, velociraptors not only reappear but learn to speak and, alarmingly, open doors. https://theatln.tc/6Ph6eJIg[1][2]
1: https://theatln.tc/6Ph6eJIg
2: https://theatln.tc/6Ph6eJIg
“That is how American politics feels at the moment. By and large, however, Newtonian physics and traditional biology still apply, and that is worth remembering as we watch the Trump administration’s circus of transgression, vindictiveness, and sometimes mere folly.
“Like most administrations, including those of considerably more sedate chief executives, that of the 47th president has decided to way overinterpret its mandate. The brute facts remain: Donald Trump received a plurality of votes (albeit a decisive majority in the Electoral College); the Republican Party is holding on to the House of Representatives by a hair and has a slim majority in the Senate. The administration may hate civil servants and seek to undermine their job security, but it will discover that it needs them to keep airplanes flying safely, the financial system functioning, drugs safe for use, and food fit for consumption.
“Gravity still works—if somewhat unreliably. Politicians who overinterpret narrow wins in a divided country get pulled back to Earth, usually by the midterms. But not just that—the federal system of government gives a lot of power to the states, and although Congress has become anemic and irresponsible, most state governments have not. And so the governor of Florida has declined to appoint the president’s daughter-in-law to a vacant Senate seat, and the governor of Ohio has passed on one of the president’s more socially awkward tech billionaires for another. These are small but interesting indications of gravity reasserting itself.
“Lawyers, by the thousand, in and out of state governments, create their own gravitational field. The poorly paid lawyers of the Justice Department can sue only so much, and the Supreme Court will turn out to be—as it did during the previous Trump administration—less reliably Trumpist than the president would wish. (The most pro-Trump justices are Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, two of the conservatives he did not appoint.) Even the appalling sweeping pardons of the January 6 rioters and insurrectionists have their limits. If any of those people attempt violence in Maryland or Virginia or anywhere else outside of D.C., they will discover that assault and other crimes there are tried in state, not federal, courts. And the presidential-pardon power does not reach state prisons, which means that some ghouls will go back to their cleft rocks if they go out looking for revenge.
“Newtonian physics also has it that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Precisely so. Pardon every criminal who clubbed a police officer, and police unions will be unamused. Impose high tariffs, and working-class voters will encounter higher prices and possibly unemployment. Blow up the national debt to cut taxes, and sooner or later the markets will react. Give way to vaccine skepticism, and epidemics will break out. Turn the intelligence community and military upside down by purging women and other undesirables, and you will produce not only big, embarrassing, consequential failures but also pushback from those large populations, their families, and those politicians who still care about national defense.”
Read more here: https://theatln.tc/6Ph6eJIg[3][4]
3: https://theatln.tc/6Ph6eJIg
4: https://theatln.tc/6Ph6eJIg
Comment by Crazy_Cheesecake142 at 27/01/2025 at 20:04 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
*as we watch the Trump administration’s circus of transgression, vindictiveness, and sometimes mere folly.*
This is one of those lines, that a lot of people are going to skim. And yet this is about justice. Every action can impact one person, or it can just as easily impact 1,000,000. The framers of the U.S. constitution, didn't want a passive document to sit by and watch this happen.
They wanted intrepid businessmen, they wanted lawyers and unions, they wanted academics and journalists, to tackle the big problems, and the small ones. They wanted the counterforce - and it's possible that the system itself, of government and society in general, can only remain legitimate so long as we have this in place.
And when you keep.....keep going.....keep, stretching it out....eventually we *have to ask*, do we owe something to the rural Ukrainian and Russian cities who resent authoritarianism, or embrace the stability and common-sense things which can possibly come from their governments? Or to Guam and Puerto Rico, who hardly ever participate in U.S. politics? What about to a paper mill in China, or their board of directors who are debating moving operations to Africa or the Philippines?
As an American, people everywhere, can do the dumbest things. I don't think this right extends liberally to the Office of the President of the United States, his/her/their administration, nor do I believe it extends so adamantly, towards the American people....
We are required, when we see this, to think more instinctually. Perhaps we don't decide on a single course with a single action, but if we aren't arduous about the path we've chosen, and equally arduous about the onerous task of accepting responsibility for a global key-holder toward liberal democracies, and the merger of civilizations with the greatest purpose an individual can know - then small forms of decisions, lose all context.
Comment by SaulsAll at 28/01/2025 at 00:00 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Newtonian physics
What a strange and apt metaphor, because we very explicitly KNOW Newtonian Physics is wrong and only an approximation. And people have a bad time and gets things wrong if they forget about the cases that dont follow Newtonian Physics.
Comment by piamonte91 at 28/01/2025 at 00:24 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Wow You got downvoted, is this reddit pro Trump or something?.