The Trouble with Labor Unions

The conventional wisdom on labor unions is distilled by Steve Siebold in his criticism of the current Chicago teachers union strike.

There was a time when employers abused their power and unions leveled the playing field. They gave the little guy a voice, and it worked.

What really happened is supply and demand. When employers were looking for workers they bid up wages. Workers love that. When their business started to falter they tried to cut costs, including wages. Workers hate that.

Typically, labor unions flourish in adversity, when employers are laying people off and cutting wages in order to try and stay in business. There were numerous strikes in the US in the 1870s. But this was in the Long Depression from 1873 "through the spring of 1879, or 1896, depending on the metrics used." But what caused it? Most probably this, from La Wik.

The primary cause of the price depression in the United States was the tight monetary policy that the United States followed to get back to the gold standard after the Civil War.

When you have "deflation" debtors get sent to the wall: in other words little people. In other words factory workers.

So when you read hundreds of pages in Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States about the workers fighting this or that employer from railroads to mines to steelworks, you are not really reading about evil robber barons out to stick the workers. You are talking about employers trying to stay in business.

When factory workers are facing wage cuts and job cuts (or when their employers are hiring cheap immigrants, as they did in the 1880s and 1890s) they join unions and demand that the employers keep employing them at the old wage and the old conditions.

It's understandable, and it fits with the basic human instinct to join with your brothers to fight the foe. But in the modern market economy?

OK, so suppose you win the strike? Then you are getting paid higher than the market rate. Now you are dependent on either your employer figuring out how to make you more productive, or you are depending on government to enact some law to forbid your employer from hiring non-union employees, or you are depending on the government to shut down the competition. Or reduce immigration. Or something.

The problem with all these solutions is that eventually they will run out of gas. It could be, as with the auto unions, that you have a half-century of good times. But eventually the Japanese car companies, or something, comes along and puts your above-market wages out to lunch.

And this is why I consider the left a Great Reaction and a crime against humanity. The market economy offers and has delivered on an extraordinary Great Enrichment for the common man. But it asks one thing in return. Instead of the old ways of feudalism where you subordinated yourself to a powerful noble, or politics where you submit yourself it asks you to submit to the verdict of the market. And when your employer is cutting wages, he is almost certainly trying to adjust to the verdict of the market.

The crime of the left is that it has taught people, and continues to teach people, AOC, that the market is a vile robber baron that cheats honest workers out of the proceeds of their toil. Sorry lefties: ain't true. What the market economy offers is successive technological and/or market revolutions in which the emergent phenomenon of prices dictates what enterprises will prosper and what enterprises are going to fail. Every worker, every investor, every consumer must understand that the road to prosperity is to submit to the verdict of the market.

It's a hard lesson, to submit to the impersonal verdict of the market, and submitting to the market when it goes against you is the hardest thing in the world. Only, of course, the prices of the market are not really impersonal but the net effect of millions of buy/sell decisions made individually by humans. If the wages in your industry are going down then that is the verdict of the consumers, that your product is not up to snuff, not today, and probably not tomorrow. It's a signal to get out there and find a new job, get new training, move to another city, right now, before you burn through your savings and/or credit.

This is what we should be teaching in the schools, on TV, in politics, in the university, in intellectual circles, everywhere. But we are not. And that is a crime against humanity.

Of course the most egregious case of this Big Lie is in politics, where every politician running for office, from Trump to Warren, is promising to fight for the voters against... someone. It could be the big banks or the big corporations or the evil Russians or the Japanese imports or corrupt politicians. But the politician is always offering to fight for us.

Hey, maybe that politician will win a battle for us. But not the war. Because the market is the One Ring that rules over all. The market will win in the end.

Look, I'm all in favor of labor unions, especially in the old days when they modeled themselves on the whole subculture of mutual-aid societies, Masons, Elks, and Moose, with their fantastical titles. And yes, the KKK modeled itself on the mutual-aid societies with fantastical titles like Kleagle and Grand Exalted Wizard.

But wise rulers would write laws that, while understanding the natural instincts of humans to band together against existential perils, people in the present age have to submit to the market. So labor unions should not have special legal exemptions that lead their leaders and members into economic box canyons that have a rock wall at the end.

And really, what would you prefer? To submit to a slave owner? To submit to a feudal lord? To submit to a damn politician? A robber baron?  A union leader? Or to the market?

Now, the trouble with the market is that it isn't perfect. As the joke goes (that I attribute to John Kenneth Galbraith but was maybe said by Paul Samuelson) the stock market has predicted 9 of the last 5 recessions. Har Har!

But that is the point of the market. The emergent phenomenon of prices is always trying to see through the murk of the present into the future. Eventually, it will be right.

And we -- the wise, the educated, the evolved -- need to teach the people how to live with the market, and not to fight it.

We Need Better Beliefs, says Zman

After railing for several hundred words against the left's "enemy of the people" politics, the Zman comes to the point:

The alternative to left-wing belief is not the lack of any belief whatsoever. The alternative is a different, more appealing set of beliefs.

Quite. But it is misleading to say that:

The one universal quality of left-wing politics that is true in every time and place is the need for an external enemy.

No, no. Instead, "the one universal quality of all politics... is the need for an external enemy."

The reason is quite simple. Absent an external enemy, humans will just go about their daily business of wiving and thriving. But, if you are a politician, you want to enlist and mobilize the people into the the rank-and-file of your political project. How do you divert people from their daily existence into your project? You propose a dangerous enemy that, unless defeated, will destroy us all.

Now, the left has the most need of enemies because its agenda is the complete conversion of daily life into the service of the state in which project everyone becomes a foot-soldier in the holy war against the dreadful enemy. Obviously, like a soldier in an army, the state must provide everything so that each soldier has nothing to do except fight the enemy.

This is what makes sense of all the big government programs: pensions, health care, education. For most ordinary people the daily project of working and earning and providing for family, children, education, health care, savings for old age is the meaning of life. But obviously if everyone is to be diverted into a holy project of defeating the evil enemy, then the state must take over all these mundane day-to-day tasks. Otherwise the people will have no time for the ruler's project.

One has to compliment the left on its imaginative cast of enemies. First the enemy was the capitalists and the bourgeoisie: enemies of the working class. Then the enemy was Nazis and in the run-up to WWII FDR was having a heck of a job dealing with the non-interventionist America First Committee. Then the left's enemy was southern segregationists, the monsters that had demoted blacks to second-class citizenship. Then the left's enemies were men, the oppressors of women. Now, of course, the left's enemies are racist-sexist-homophobes: white supremacists, toxic masculinists, and people that dead-name transgenders.

But the enemy doesn't have to be human. It just has to be an existential peril. Because a peril is also something that can rally people to your political standard. And that is how to understand the climate change movement. If you want political power then you have to sell people on an enemy or an existential peril. Because that's how humans are programmed; they will stop doing what they are doing only if there is an enemy threatening the gates, or an existential peril -- like a flood or a famine -- that threatens the existence of the community.

So how do we come up with an alternative, a "more appealing set of beliefs?"

It ain't easy, because the first thing to do is to rally people to our banner that says "people who are always hammering away at 'the enemy:' they are the real enemy." And that gets pretty complicated.

But here is the basic narrative/counter narrative of our age.

About 300 years ago a movement started that proposed to reduce the power of politicians -- at that time called kings. Instead of kings for life, they proposed an elected president for a term. And instead of a government completely at the king's beck and call, they proposed to divide the powers of government up into three branches that would tend to cancel each other's power out by the natural tendency of powerful people to quarrel with each other. Wait, they said. One of the big problems down the ages has been the condominium between political and religious power. So let's not have a state-approved church any more.

The most perfect development of this idea thus far has been The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism by Michael Novak. He proposes what I call a "greater separation of powers" between the three sectors of society: political, economic, and moral/cultural. Totalitarianism is when all these sectors are combined up into the political power. It is The Totalitarian Temptation according to Jean-François Revel. And that is not good.

Obviously it is not an accident that humans are programmed to rally to the banner of a leader when threatened by an enemy or an existential peril. This was a real problem in the agricultural age, when it paid to raid the neighboring village for food and/or women. As in the Rape of the Sabine Women by the Romans. You had to be on your toes in those days. And you had to have land to grow food, and you had to defend your land or you would starve.

But now.

Now land is not so important any more, because today real wealth, according to the World Bank, is "intangible capital," or knowledge and skills about how to make things and do things.

Suppose you were a would-be conqueror, jealous of the wealth of your neighbor. You could, like the Soviet Union in 1945, seize all the physical capital of eastern Germany and take it to the Urals. But it doesn't really do you any good. You still collapse in 1989 due to the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism. Today you want your neighbor to be as rich as you. The only thing you want to capture is intellectual property. But you still want the neighbor to be buying your stuff and you want to be able to buy his stuff. Plus, of course, if you attack a country with nuclear weapons, well...

The fact is that we humans have entered upon a new age and it is going to take hundreds of years to figure it all out.

But meanwhile our lefty friends, in a fit of nostaglia for the good old days when enemies were enemies and existential perils were existential perils, have launched what I call a Great Reaction. It is significant that Marx made the offical launch of this project in 1848 at about the moment when a perspicaciou analyst could have seen that a new age, of industrial prosperity for all, had begun. By 1900 at the latest, it was clear that the working class itself was benefiting from the products churned out in the factories at which they worked, and they weren't as Marx prophesied, going to be "immiserated." What is this Great Reaction? My maxim:

Great Reaction: Socialism is neo-slavery; the welfare state is neo-feudalism; identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is neo-vengeance; activism is part neo-knight-errantry and part pro-regime street-thuggery; helpless victims are neo-sacrifice, social justice is neo-plunder.

Do you see how all the neo-whatsits are nostalgic lurches back the past? Slavery, feudalism, tribalism, vengeance, sacrifice, plunder? Oh and Quixotic knight-errantry. Don't forget that.

One of the most remarkable things of the modern era, in my opinion, is the rise of sports. It is perfectly obvious to me that sports, sports teams, stadiums, and sports championships are a magnificent replacement for the old road to male glory: war.

What we need, I think, is the equivalent of sports in politics. Some harmless way in which people bitten by the political bug can display their talents and their accomplishments in a perfectly harmless way. So, political aficionados could discuss the latest "game" on TV the way that sports fans discuss the latest professional sports game.

Of course, it may be that modern domestic politics is already a harmless enaction of the old business of dynastic war. But I think that we need a further sportification of politics. To make it less lethal.

Of course, I have lots of other ideas. But this is a start.

Why the Enthusiastic Trump Rally Crowds?

How many people were at President Trump's rally in Dallas last week? Apart from the 20,000 in the American Airlines Arena? Was there another 20,000 outside watching the big screens? Or just 5,000?

Why are the Trump rallies such a success? Because Trump is a great showman? Because he is rallying all the white supremacists with "dog whistles?"

My guess is that Trump energizes the non-college white middle and working class because those folks believe he is fighting for them.

This is a basic thing is politics. Politicians are always announcing how they "are fighting for" this or that group or sub-group or special interest. It's not surprising, since today's politicians are the descendents of the tribal leaders who were the military leaders that actually fought in battles.

Republican politicians have been queasy about rallying the white middle class, because racism -- or rather the accusation of racism. And, since Reagan, they never could figure out how to rally the white working class. But Trump has squared this circle with his Make America Great Again meme. Racist? Heck no. All he is doing is appealing to Americans as Americans.

But, of course, the people that identify most as American patriots are people from the non-college white community. Of course they do. They cannot identify as globalist evolved educated people, because they don't have the requisite parchment. They cannot identify as white people, because racism. They are no longer the oppressed workers of the industrial age, because they no longer work in factories where they can be organized into class-based labor unions.

Now, if I were one of those people I would feel mighty angry. Because the current lefty thing about "white privilege" and "toxic masculinity" is a lie. White privilege might apply to legacy students at selective colleges, or rich kids that get into college through minor sports like lacrosse and rowing. Or it might apply to this white Cubana that is making a nice career out of attacking whiteness. Or to me, whose father was college educated, although I don't think any of my grandparents had a college education.

But hey, what kind of privilege are we talking about when my father was an electrical engineer, my grandfathers were clerks and small businessmen, and my great grandfathers were dairymen and maltsters? "Very small beer" is what they were.

Certainly I'm privileged compared to the average white middle-class guy or gal that is mid way between a factory job and a corporate Dilbert.

The important thing to know about the Trump supporters is that they, the white middle and working class, are the people that were made to pay for Affirmative Action and Diversity and Inclusion. "White privilege" is the privilege of well-connected youngsters that get to jump the queue. If you think that applies to the average Trumpster, I gotta bridge to sell you. In fact the Trumpsters are the people who did not get those police and fireman jobs when the ruling class decided that the racial profile of the work force in individual occupations had to "look like America." Not to mention the government bureaucrat jobs. This sort of thing tends to make people angry when they find themselves on the receiving end.

Given that few of those white folks at Trump rallies are anything more than the descendants of the 1900 immigrant surge, they might easily feel just a little resentful about all this. Especially because their fathers and mothers were told by Democratic politicians that they, the workers that made this country work, were the very salt of the Earth and had been viciously exploited since... well, since whenever.

Look, I get it. Modern democratic politics is all about marshalling people into fake tribes and then setting them against each other, because "politics is division." So you promise to fight for them, as exploited workers, as discriminated-against minorities, as women victims of the patriarchy. Poor "Litte Darlings," helpless victims of slaveholders, feudal lords, patriarchs, capitalists, colonialists, white supremacists down the ages.

But the thing to remember, when any politician promises to "fight for you" is that the politician doesn't really care about you. He just wants to get elected. And that goes for Trump too.

Best way to understand the modern world is through my reductive Three Peoples theory. Are you from the People of the Subordinate Self, a helpless worker or victim rallied by ambitious politicians and promised a safe and just future? Are you from the People of the Creative Class, looking for a way to be relevant and tempted by the siren call of "activism" to make a difference by rallying the helpless victims for justice? Or are you from the People of the Responsible Self that just wants to build a life by following the rules, going to work, and obeying the law?

The basic thing to understand is that, in the Three Peoples concept, it makes sense that the People of the Creative Self would try to organize the People of the Subordinate Self against the People of the Responsible Self. Why? Because politics is division. And since the People of the Subordinate Self are most easily led because they are actually looking for a leader to lead thm, it makes sense to set them against the middle-class People of the Reponsible Self. So the most-privileged organize a political coalition with the least-privileged against the middling sort of people.

My feeling is that the current global populist movement is a movement against this over-under coalition organized by the progressive "creatives." Really, it only makes sense that at some point the ordinary middle class would discover an identity and find itself an enemy in the college-educated ruling class that has despoiled them for the last 100 years.

And it only makes sense that the college-educated ruling class would be doing everything in its power to strangle the populist movement in its cradle. Because the populist movement is a threat to the power of the educated ruling class. And that cannot stand.

Meanwhile the ordinary white middle and working class goes to Trump rallies to be told that Trump will fight for them.

When the Scientists Disagree, Don't Panic

There's a piece in Quillette about the problems with straight Darwinian evolution. It seems that, based on the assumptions of "random mutation and natural selection" as a complete explanation of the evolution of living things, supposed events like the Cambrian Explosion, when tons of new species evolved in a few million years, could not have happened. But if simple Darwinian evolution doesn't explain the Cambrian Explosion -- or the relatively rapid development of any new species -- then there is a problem.

Now I read that there the a problem in cosmology. Back in the day scientists used "the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) -- the microwave radiation leftover from the first moments after the Big Bang" -- to compute the Hubble Constant, the measure of the rate of the expansion of the universe. But more recently scientists started computing the Hubble Constant from "supernovas and flashing stars in nearby galaxies, known as Cepheids." And the value of the Hubble Constant using this method is different from the value obtained from the CMB. So that's a problem.

As they say in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: Don't Panic!

This is the way of all advances in science, or rather, all human knowledge. It starts with a problem, that current knowledge can't explain everything. The "problem" is always experienced as a scandal by the supporters of the current theory, whether we are talking about biology or cosmology or philosophy or the welfare state.

And, of course, this reaction is central to the argument of Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Kuhn saw the sciences as going through alternating periods of normal science, when an existing model of reality dominates a protracted period of puzzle-solving, and revolution, when the model of reality itself undergoes sudden drastic change. 

Kuhn argues that science is a social undertaking, and that supporters of various theories form communities of knowledge, and that the members of such communities resist any change in the status quo, and thus the only way that the paradigm changes is when the old generation dies off.

Now I think it is pretty obvious that there is something at work in the evolution of species that is not understood by Darwin's theory. Hey kids! That's OK. When we resolve the problem with new knowledge it will be amazing! The problem, of course, is that Darwinism is the basis for modern atheism, so our atheist friends are desperately afraid that a revision of Darwin's theory would undermine their world view and throw them on the waste-heap of history. I understand their fear.

Again, I argue for people to relax. That's because my understanding of "god" is that God is the extremely cunning human resolution of the knowledge problem. We humans need to know the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" in order to give meaning to our lives and create moral frameworks for our societies. But we don't know "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything" because our knowledge of the universe is incomplete. Therefore we have to compensate for our ignorance by creating a likely story about God and the Creation and so forth. When new knowledge comes along we have to revise our likely story. No Problem!

On this view the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe is just another likely story that extends our current knowledge back as far as we dare. If we have to change that likely story when we create new knowledge to resolve the two different Hubble Constants, No Problem! Chances are that the new theory will not throw existing science in the wastebasket but limit its application in time and space. And the new theory will doubtless open exciting new vistas unimaginable today.

If we have to change the likely story about the evolution of life to accommodate problems like rapid creation of species and their evolution, No Problem. I'm sure that some sort of evolution will persist, but it will not be quite as simple as we thought. And the new theory will likely suggest that living things are more amazing and remarkable that we could ever think in the old days.

But there always is a Problem, because people hate to have to change their religion and their understanding of reality and the meaning of life. That's because people invest their whole human identity in their religion, their faith, and the position in society that they have obtained through the practice of their faith.

Oh Well. Just Don't Panic!

The Left Was Never About Optimism

Richard Fernandez has taken to the Wall Street Journal to suggest that the secular humanists are having an existential crisis. Used to be that the left "tended to define progress in terms of material goods," but now the "optimism is gone" and the left is saying that we have to renounce material goods and "think about death."

In other words, things are going to hell in a handbasket, unless we act now.

Actually, I think that the left has always been about the end times, and how we must surrender to the Prophets of Left or suffer and die at the end of the world.

That was what Marx was all about in the second half of the 19th century. Here we had the most remarkable material enrichment in human history -- at least that we know of -- and Marx was saying that it was all a mirage. In fact, unless we acted now, and surrendered to the dictatorship of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie and the capitalists were going to enslave and immiserate us all.

What really is different about the current notion, The Green New Deal?

"Every one of the world's major polluting countries," writes Jonathan Franzen in the New Yorker, must "institute draconian conservation measures, shut down most of its energy and transportation infrastructure, and completely retool its economy..."

Used to be that we educated sophisticates would laugh at millennarian religious cults prophesying the end of the world. Har, har, we would laugh, and sneer at the uneducated fundamentalist Christian cults prophesying the end of the world, unless we repent.

Really, educated sophisticates, are you really so unsophisticated not to see the exact parallel between the millennial cults of yesteryear and the current millennial cult of climate change, that it is going to be too late to save the world, unless we act now, or at least within 12 years?

Let us repair to my Maxim, that "the only warrant for government power is existential peril."

The more you think about it the more sensible the idea becomes. Obviously, from time to time, a human community is confronted by an existential peril. Most probably it is the tribe next door that has an appetite for our food stores and our nubile women. But it could be a devastating flood, or a devastating famine. In the face of such a disaster, human communities tend to come together, forget their petty animosities, and work in astonishing unity and community to face the peril.

But look at the situation from the point of view of a religious or a political leader. Almost certainly, you must have a feeling that the community desperately needs to follow your leadership, otherwise the community will wither and die. But if you merely tell people that, hey, looks like we could have a minor problem here, they are going to pat you on the head and say: hey, Bob, maybe next year we should take a look at this. So, in order to get the community to accept your leadership and follow you, you are going to have to amp up the urgency of the problem and the consequent need to follow your inspired leadership.

So if you are a religious leader you are going to be tempted to tell your followers that unless they repent and follow God they are going to rot in Hell. If you are a political leader you are going to say that unless everyone rallies to your banner the community is going to be obliterated -- by enemies (the white supremacists), or by flood (the rising oceans), or by death (runaway global warming). Of course you are.

But what about the rest of us? How do we tell the fake prophets from the true prophets?

I have an idea, that comes to us from all the major religions. If the prophet is a man on a white horse that promises to lead us to glory (and his power), then he is probably a fake prophet. If the prophet is a Sacrificial Hero that dies so that others may live, then it may well be that he is a true prophet.

But you never know, and that is why it seems that with the current arrangement of humans into hundreds, even thousands of communities, the foolish errors of the leaders of one community are unlikely to lead to the death of everyone. So if the community down the road makes a mistake and ruins itself in a fake panic, life goes on for us.

So, back in the day, when Lenin and then Stalin was leading 200 million Russians up a box canyon, the rest of us, happily, did not follow. And when Mao led 500 million Chinese people into the horrific folly of the Great Leap Forward, which was to transform China's rural economy magically into an industrial economy, and then into an evil Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, it was only the hapless Chinese people that were killed and starved. The rest of us went on as usual.

Just as well, because we had just finished killing each other in a couple of World Wars. And what were those wars, about, exactly?

Imagine if our rulers and betters organized the human race into a single global political community under some Great Ruler, and started doing a Lenin or a Mao on us.

Yeah. It wouldn't be easy to escape the criminal, murderous folly.

Thing is: when there is a real crisis, humans are pretty good at rushing to the sound of the guns and helping out. Think Cajun Navy.

So it may be that the best thing to do about existential perils is: Nothing. Because I will bet my nickel that almost always the political or religious cure will turn out to be worse than the disease.

And here is the real ugly truth. If my community is obliterated by murderous thugs, the rest of the world will likely survive. If my community is wiped out in a flood, the folks on higher ground will likely survive. And if my community perishes in a famine, it is likely that elsewhere in the world the food supply will be abundant.

Yes, what is the meaning of life? That I should survive? That my family should survive? That my community should survive? That my country should survive? That humans should survive? That life on Earth should survive?

It's a good question, and I am not sure that anyone has come up with a final answer yet.

Impeachment: What is a High Crime and Misdemeanor?

One thing about the three impeachments of the last 50 years. They were all about niggling little things. The Constitution says, in Article II, Section 4.

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

What about Nixon? What did they threaten to impeach him for? For covering up the Watergate break-in, a foolish effort by overenthusiastic minions to figure out what the Democrats were up to? For that you name and shame and defenestrate a president? Sounds to me that Nixon was just doing politics-as-usual.

What about Clinton? He lied about Monica Lewinsky, sex in the Oval Orifice, as Rush Limbaugh likes to say. Well, of course. As the Democrats said at the time, everyone lies about sex. Especially politicians. That is what makes the "Well I Never" response to the Access Hollywood tape so amusing. Really? Women were allowing themselves to be felt up by Trump? Of course they were. That is what hypergamy is all about: women using their bodies to climb the greasy pole.

Now we have Trump. He is accused of colluding with the Russians to win the 2016 election. Wait, he didn't, although he certainly was using the power of office to blunt the investigation against him. No kidding! But now he's asking the Ukrainians to take a look at all the 2016 shenanigans, including Crowdstrike, the chaps that took a look at the DNC's computers and said the Russians did it. No kidding! He's trying to find out what kind of shenanigans -- collusion to you aficionados -- was going on in 2016 to cause trouble for the Trump campaign. How dare he!

Do any of these things amount to "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors?" I don't think so. They all sound, to me, like politicians committing politics.

Now you may say that politics-in-itself is nothing less than the comission of Treason, Bribery (and how) and all kinds of other High Crimes and Misdemeanors that damage and divide a country. And I would agree with you. It is monstrous how politics and government eat away at the body politics like meat-eating maggots. But the fact is that We the People put up with it. We regard everything the Other Party does as virtual treason. We demand that the politicians bribe us with our own money. And as for high Crimes and Misdemeanors? Well, what would that be? Probably not hiding the criminal antics of some low-level campaign aides. Probably not doing cigar things with Monica Lewinsky. Probably not requesting a bit of help from the Ukrainians.

What about the other famous impeachment, that of President Andrew Johnson? La Wik:

The primary charge against Johnson was violation of the Tenure of Office Act, passed by Congress in March 1867, over his veto. Specifically, he had removed from office Edwin M. Stanton, the Secretary of War—whom the Act was largely designed to protect—and attempted to replace him with Brevet Major General Lorenzo Thomas.

Well, who's a naughty boy then? Congress was trying to prevent Johnson from firing a Cabinet officer. Wouldn't that be a violation of the Separation of Powers, meddling with a president's right to staff his own administration? Sounds like a put-up job.

So the point is that Impeachment in these United States has always been used as a purely political weapon, a manifestation of severe partisan discord and the attempt to stick it to the other guys. It is a reflection of high partisan feeling. So that's all right.

My guess is that a president that did something really wrong would never get impeached. After all, if there is one thing that politicians are pretty good at it is knowing how far they can go. And the whole point of partisan politics is to whitewash what Our Guys do and blacken what the Other Guys do. Our Guy is the best president since sliced bread. The Other Guy is the worst president since slavery was invented.

So here is my analysis.

Reading the background to Andrew Johnson it seems that he was a Democrat opposed to secession and opposed to the punishment of the South demanded by the Radical Republicans. So he was not vengeful enough for the radicals.

In the Nixon impeachment the Democrats were beside themselves that a sleazy guy like him could be elected president -- the guy that accused Jerry Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas of being pinkos: the Nerve! And then he got reelected! How could that happen in 1970s America? So he had to go.

In the Clinton impeachment the Republicans were just saying: sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander as they got a Republican Congress for the first time in 40 years. You impeach Nixon; we impeach Clinton. Get used to it.

In the Trump impeachment the Democrats are saying that it is inconceivable that Americans could vote in a guy like Trump. There must be something sleazy going on. Nobody like Trump could be elected in a proper election, not after America had elected its First Black President.

See what I mean? Impeachment is always and everywhere a put-up job, reflecting the particular and poisonous rage of the partisans at the time.

The question is: could we ever impeach and remove a president that really had committed "high Crimes and Misdemeanors?" Frankly, I doubt it.

But there is always the next election.

Suppose Nancy and Co Have to Do Impeachment?

Suppose the Democrats dropped the impeachment thingy. What would happen?

Obviously, one of two things. Or maybe both, arising from the sense of betrayal in the Democratic base. 

How could you, dear leaders, after all this time, just throw up your hands about the eevil Trump? For nearly three years, Democrats have assured their base that tomorrow -- well, next week at the latest -- we will have the "bombshell" that proves that... Yes what exactly? So, if the Democrats folded their tents and went home, the base would be saying: "well, if there's nothing to see here, why did you recruit us and train us, and send us into battle?"

It's the same problem that a nation state faces in the middle of a war. Can the nation's leaders tell their people that, well, OK, we thought this war was a good idea at the time, but now it looks like it's a mistake, so we are going to stop the war and send the soldiers home. You can see that very few political leaders would ever dare to do that. Except Donald Trump who just decided to pack up the Syria thing and go home.

First, the Democratic base might lose heart. That would be bad for Democrats, because half the game of winning elections is turning out your supporters. For that the supporters either have to be enthused about their leadership, or angry at the opposition, or both. Without enthusiasm, without anger, bye bye winning the election.

Second, the Democrat base might get angry -- at the Democratic leadership. What would the base do? Well, I imagine they would up their support for e.g., the Democratic Socialists of America. This would not be good for Speaker Nancy Pelosi's successful strategy of recruiting moderate candidates to run in Trump-supporting districts. It's a delicate business, running nice moderate candidates in moderate districts and making sure that voters don't associate their moderate candidate with the fire-breathers of the "Squad" and the climate change extremists and the racist Revs. and the LGBT advocates. So the Democratic base might start primarying moderate Democrats with lefty extremists. OK, they already are. But obviously, if they feel betrayed by the Democrat leadership they will do more of it.

Either way, I'd say the Democrats are batting on a bit of a sticky wicket. What they should have doné, back on November 8, 2016, is concede the election to Donald Trump. That's the way things are supposed to work in a democracy, especially in a normal change election. It is very rare for a party to win three presidential elections in a row: get used to it! Then, after a season in which the seasoned elders of the party analyze the election you put the pot on the stove again and slowly bring up the heat in time to get the base really worked up for the next election.

Actually, I think that the Democrats are batting on a bit of a sticky wicket all around. That's because the whole welfare state is reaching its sell-by date. Look, I get that all elections are about offering free stuff, loot and plunder. But the problem is that once you have done the easy stuff, like free education and pensions and health care for the aged and poor and you have already sucked up 40 percent of GDP, what do you do for an encore? What the left has been doing for an encore is riling up the educated with religious frenzies like climate change and riling up small but motivated minorities like blacks, feminists, and gays with the fear that the white supremacists are out to get them. Notice that this is a bit different from riling up the vast majority of voters back in the day when the working class was a majority of voters.

I'd say that the majority of voters today are ordinary wage-earning middle class people that are not moved by the religious frenzies of the educated elite and not particularly moved by identity politics. Obviously, these are the people that Donald Trump has targeted in his campaign and his presidency: to encourage everyone to think of themselves as proud Americans. This strategy beckons to minorities to venture forth out of their ethnic enclaves into the broad American mainstream. And it cocks a snook at the educated elite that thinks of themselves as above the crude culture of nationalism, darling.

Putting this in terms of my reductive Three Peoples theory, I would say that People of the Creative Self need something more that a responsible life to give meaning to their lives, so they tend towards moral movements that insist there is something to life beyond the mere material. People of the Responsible Self are people for whom ordinary wiving and thriving is enough of a challenge, thank you very much. And People of the Subordinate Self are people barely making it in their lives, looking for any rock to hang onto.

In my view, it is fine for People of the Creative Self to yearn for a deeper meaning in life, but not on my dime, pal. And it is fine for People of the Responsible Self to focus on the basics of obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules, but I would gently suggest to them to raise their eyes occasionally to the horizon. And it is understandable for the People of the Subordinate Self to grab any sort of free stuff that is going, but maybe there is something more stable and less desperate than grabbing out at whatever is going.

Yeah, what a concept: raise you gaze a little!

But meanwhile the Democrats have laid their bed with the scratchy, flea-infested rug of impeachment, and they have nothing else to keep them warm at night.