Don’t follow leaders

A law professor friend was in a group chat with other law professors, who revealed that on the morning after the election they were told by administrators that:

(1) They were not permitted to discuss the election in class; and

(2) If they normally cold called students, i.e., if they called on students without warning to answer questions, they were required to continue to do so, because to give a respite from this potential source of stress would imply that something was wrong.

This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest, as I expect that University Leadership at many schools is already rushing to obey in advance, or better yet to actively work toward the Donald, at the dawn of an American fascist presidency.

Speaking of Leaders, the always essential Timothy Snyder points out that the Italian and German translations of that word are Duce and Fuhrer respectively, and that fascism is always first and foremost about the Leader, and his ever-shifting versions of reality. And here we need to come to terms with the possibility — indeed the strong probability — that Donald Trump got re-elected not despite January 6, 2021, but because of it:

A fascist marries conspiracy and necessity. Not everyone can tell a spontaneous Big Lie, as Trump did, when he lost the 2020 election. And the Republicans around him did not challenge him. The Big Lie came to life when his followers stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Crucially, he paid no price for that. That made the Big Lie true, in a fascist sense. His de-facto impunity and then de-jure immunity also generated a sense of the untouchable, the heroic.

Donald Trump tried to overthrow the government, and paid no price for that. He very well may have gotten re-elected as a result, because the entire fiasco of the government’s executive and judicial branches subsequent reaction to his attempted autogolpe created an aura of destiny and invincibility around our Reality TV Duce, and helped bind his followers ever-more closely to him.

I think Joe Biden was on the whole a very good president, in almost exactly the same way Lyndon Baines Johnson was a very good president. Both would have been great presidents if they had not each made one truly catastrophic mistake.

In both cases, it’s not difficult to sympathize with them for making it, since the mistake (escalation in Vietnam; failing to make Donald Trump pay for trying to overthrow the government) had at the time something of an air of inevitability about it. Johnson knew Vietnam was very likely to be a disaster, but he truly felt he had no real options, because al the best and the brightest people around him were telling him he had no real options.

I suspect something rather analogous happened to Joe Biden when he grappled with the question of what to do about Donald Trump, and was surely told by oh so many brilliant lawyers and institutionalists, and in particular institutionalist lawyers, that he had no real options, because of a thousand good reasons — and there are always a thousand good reasons — to do nothing, or at least something very much closer to nothing than to something.

That is his tragedy, and it will be ours as well.