We must destroy democracy in order to save it

I swear to Christ that this — written by a law professor with a Harvard JD — is not a joke:

In the fading days of the Biden administration, Democrats have proposed a flurry of pardons: for House committee members who investigated the Jan. 6 insurrection, everyone who entered the United States illegally, and anyone who might be prosecuted under the Comstock Act. President Joe Biden has already commuted the sentences of most federal death row inmates.

These proposals are driven by fear of what President-elect Donald Trump might do: prosecutions, deportations, executions. But there’s another thing Trump promised: to pardon the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. To stop him — and start healing our nation — Biden should pardon them instead.

Pardoning these traitorous enemies of democracy is morally repellent — which is exactly why a pardon is necessary.

The term “galaxy brained” seems grossly inadequate to that last sentence.

Waters proceeds to explain that Biden has the formal power to pardon 1/6 insurrectionists convicted on federal charges, which is both true and beside the point. Biden has the power to posthumously pardon Bernie Maddoff; it doesn’t make it a good idea. The explanation for why Biden would want to pardon the seditionists does not advance beyond the “words next to each other” stage:

The Democrats’ pardon proposals serve several goals: correcting or preventing injustice, helping friends, advancing a political agenda. But all are also partisan, and none does the other thing pardons can: promote social peace. A general pardon for Jan. 6 insurrectionists, by Biden, would.

Biden has been criticized, rightly, for pardoning his own son. But imagine if Trump had pardoned Hunter Biden — it matters who pardons whom. Trump pardoning Jan. 6 patriots means further division. Biden pardoning Jan. 6 insurrectionists cuts across partisan expectations, an offer of radical reconciliation.

I do not, in fact, believe that there should be “social peace” and “reconciliation” with respect to the question of whether it is acceptable to try to violently disrupt the outcome of an election. Politics is not about the elimination of all conflict; the defusing of conflict around 1/6 is the problem,

This is an attractive-sounding non-sequitur that completely ignores the actual political context:

We are not the only modern country that has experienced division and had to make choices about how to overcome it, and many have had to do it after much worse violence than we faced. Those choices often recognize the priority of social reconciliation alongside, even instead of, formal retributive justice. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission could give amnesties to individuals who acknowledged their participation in crimes during apartheid. Rwanda processed most participants of the genocide through local, village-level meetings called gacaca. And after the death of Francisco Franco, Spain grounded its transition to democracy on a pacto del olvido — a pact of forgetting. Every model is different; every model has its failings, its costs and tradeoffs.

The very obvious problem here is that a Truth and Reconciliation commission requires the guilty party to acknowledge that their actions were wrong. Not only are Republicans not going to be willing to do that, the rare influential Republican public official who says that 1/6 was wrong is persona non grata within the party. Pardoning the 1/6 insurrectionists would not lead to a mutual recognition that the autogolope was wrong; it would be a further confirmation that Trump totally got away with it.