NYT: Nothing to See Here, Impeachment Über Alles!

Well, I thought to myself this morning, maybe I should take a look at the on-line version of The New York Times to see their take on the "Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation" by DOJ Inspector General Horowitz. Imagine my surprise: nothing on the report, but a piece about impeachment in the House.

OK, I said. Whatabout the Opinion section? Nothing.

Then I went to my Tuesday yoga class where the instructor, Jim, usually has the day's NYT/Atlantic/New Yorker talking point. I was all ready with my counter points (you have to be ready with the one-liners, because l'esprit d'escalier). But guess what: bupkis from Jim on politics today.

So I realized why the Democrats in the House had to start formal impeachment today. To take the Horowitz report off the front pages.

All in all I think we can take it as read that our Democratic friends are feeling a bit flat-footed today. I think that Instapundit pretty well covered it with this post:

"51 violations and 9 false statements".

So why is Lt. Gen. Flynn being criminally pursued for "false statements?"

"Fusion Co-Founders Glenn Simpson and Jonathan Winer Refused to Talk to IG; James Comey and Former FBI Attorney James Baker Also Avoided Fully Testifying."

Well I Never! What shrinking violets we have these days in the Deep State.

"If you have 17 FBI "mistakes" and 100% of those mistakes favor the party in power against the candidate, those aren't mistakes."

But do 97% of statistics scientists establish a consensus on this?

"IG Report Reveals Comey Did Brief Obama on Trump Campaign Investigation."

But it would be racist to investigate this.

As you may know, I believe that the fundamental problem here is that our ruling-class and its gentry-liberal supporters have forgotten the basic idea of democracy: that parties respect the results of elections, and peaceably leave power when they lose an election after a couple of terms in power.

In other words, it is the job of the defeated presidential candidate to concede defeat, wish the winner well, and tell the supporters "wait until next time." Al Gore did not do this in 2000; Hillary Clinton did not do this in 2016 (but hey, she was probably drunk on election night). When the defeated candidate fails to concede, and fails to tell their supporters to go home, then they are putting the peace of our nation at risk. Yes, "Peace," dear liberals. Because politics is civil war by other means, and a lot better than real civil war.

Look, I get it, that the left represents a Great Reaction against the modern era and its notion to lift and separate -- I mean limit and separate -- political and other powers. And I get that the left represents a religious movement that has raised politics into a holy sacrament. And so we are likely to get, about once a generation, a cult-like prophetic movement out of the left announcing that this time they are going to save the world with their politics.

In the US, the Civil War was one such movement, with the anti-slavery Republican Party determined to teach Democrats and the South a lesson.

Then the New Deal was going to fundamentally transform America, but merely extended the Great Depression until FDR took the fetters off private business in order to fight his two-front war.

Then the Sixties was going to save America from the dull suburban conformism of the Fifties. Only the commoners all voted for Nixon. And then Reagan.

Now we have the Woke Years, with a new enthusiasm for Democratic Socialism, in violation of my Four Laws, that:

1. Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices.
2. Administrative government cannot work because thousands of bureacrats cannot outperform millions of producers and consumers.
3. Regulation cannot work because of "regulatory capture" of the regulators by the regulated.
4. Government programs cannot work because the people will not allow them to be reformed.

Other than that, Democratic Socialism is cool, man.

All this woke and #Resistance nonsense is very annoying, but maybe it is all for the best. The story of the last 200 years is the story of successive gentry enthusiasms, led by educated rich kids. But each time the enthusiasm has run up against a brick wall, usually the brick wall of the commoners. So it was in the Sixties, and so it may be in the Woke Years.

But there is the problem. If educated youth is not running around getting Woke, what other mischief will they get up to?

The Two Centuries of the Great Reaction

Today NRO has a piece on the end of the Soviet empire in 1989: "Reflections on the 'Revolution' of 1989" by A. Wess Mitchell. And how that was the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution in 1789.

Mitchell "is a former assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs and a principal at the Marathon Initiative, an initiative focused on preparing the United States for great-power competition."

But Mitchell asserts that:

However momentous the changes of 1989 may have been in human terms, in constitutional terms they embodied the restoration of a Western legal and civic order to lands from which it had been uprooted.

Or, in my terms, it signaled the end of the Great Reaction of 1789-1989. What was the Great Reaction? Well, Mitchell has a good try by contrasting the American Revolution of 1776 with the French Revoluion of 1789.

The object of 1776 was the preservation of the accumulated rights of Englishmen[.]... By contrast, the object of 1789 was the dismantling of public order in favor of abstract concepts.

I think that Mitchell misses the point. Hey, if you want to talk about "abstract concepts" how about the "Separation of Powers?" That's about the most abstract convoluted pie-in-the-sky notion ever conceived! The difference in the Revolutions is that, following the procession of political theorists culminating in Montesquieu, the American Revolutionary Founders were trying to found the modern era on a limitation of political power. The French Revolution enacted the vision of people like Rousseau that believed in a transformation of society by political power.

The piece also has a lot of conventional wisdom that I have learned over the years to discount. FIrst of all, the German Question, which, according to Mitchell was also decided in 1989. For the conventional wisdom, the creation of a unified Germany in 1871 ended the benefits of a divided Germany for the rest of Europe, and heralded a century of war until Germany was put back in its place: united but tamed.

My line is that 1871 opened up a possibility, a Europe of equal nation states that, with wise leaders, could have all lived in equanimity. Only the leaders were fools. Kaiser Bill, the revanchist French humiliated by the Franco-Prussian War, the stupid generation of British leaders like Balfour and Asquith. The stupidity of WWI; the stupidity of the Treaty of Versailles; the stumbling bumbling new US Federal Reserve System that bumbled into the Great Depression, and thus prepared the way for a frustrated German people to follow Hitler.

What all these fools and knaves did was assume that politics and power is the answer to most questions about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

Yes, maybe it was in the agricultural age, where you needed rough tough leaders to defend your patch of food-growing land against pirates and predators. Because in those days, land was the source of wealth and survival.

But not any more.

The transition in western life, I believe, must have happened around 1700. If you look at Spain in the New World, the purpose post 1492 is simply conquest and exploitation of the gold and silver. But what good did it do Spain, which by 1650 needed all the gold and silver from the New World just to pay the interest on their loans. If you look at Britain in the 1600s, you see the simple conquest of North America, as the various trash people spread out from the coastal colonies into the interior.

But when the Brits went to India in the 1700s, their purpose was trade. They were not particularly interested in conquering India. They wanted to trade. But in the event they ended up conquering most of India because they always had a frontier with native princes for whom loot and plunder was the name of the game, in particular the Maratha Confederacy. The Brits in India would also get antsy when they were in a war with the French, or getting worried about the Russkies.

Then there was the Brit in 1685 that could see the future:

Already at the time of the British Glorious Revolution in 1688 people were beginning to appreciate that the new manufacturing offered an economy of limitless wealth that contrasted with the obvious limits of an agricultural economy. Wrote Carew Reynell in 1685: “Though we are a nation already pretty substantial... yet it is easy for us to be ten times richer.”

Do you see the point? If you are doing manufacturing, then agriculture is no longer the name of the game: nor is the conquest of land the royal road to riches. Now, in fact, Reynell was too pessimistic. We are in fact today 30 times richer than back in 1685. And we got here not by politics, not by conquest, not by land, but by manufacturing, trading, and the various technological revolutions on the way.

That is why, if you read the World Bank's study of the wealth of nations in 2000, the wealth of rich nations like us is 80% "intangible capital," or the capital between peoples' ears.

Notice the staggering changes in conventional wisdom: In 1700 conquest becomes passé. In 1800 slavery becomes a scandal. In 1900 the subjugation of any human becomes a scandal.

And yet, nobody was directing these changes; they occurred "organically."

Now I maintain that humans actually yearn to know that "someone is in charge." I think that the staggering changes that were already well in train by the mid 1700s is at the bottom of the Great Reaction, the great faith in politics as the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

If there was not to be a monarchical will of the warrior king that protected us from all perils, then there needed to be a General Will of the people.

If there was not to be the eternal hierarchy of nobles lording it over peasants, then look out for a something that was bound to be worse, a hierarchy of capitalists over proletarians.

And if that weren't bad enough, what about the oppressive horror of whites over blacks, men over women, straights over gays!

Thus we have had a Great Reaction for the last 200 years that has believed that the only way to save the world is with political power.

But I say it has sown misery wherever it was tried, as in my maxim:

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, part pro-regime street-thuggery, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a play; helpless victims are neo-sacrifice, social justice is neo-plunder.

 I am not really angry about this. My Hegelian instinct says that we should have expected that, when the need for political power went away we would expect a last ditch effort to build a shrine to political power and to make it into a golden idol and worship it.

But I say that humans are a hierarchical species, so how does hierarchy work in a post-political age? And humans are religious animals, lusting after the meaning of life, the universe and everything. So how do we do religion without it turning into an apocalyptic cult like Communism or Climate Change?

The truth is: I don't know. And I don't think anyone else does either.

Which Is Worse: Trump's Insults or The Racist Canard?

We all know that all educated suburban women are disgusted with -- cannot believe! -- the crudities of President Trump, the Twitter Insult Dog.

But I have a question for you educated suburban women. What do you think about the lefties in our land that think nothing of calling anyone with an opinion they don't like of being a "racist?"

Which is worse? A presidential insult? Or the admission that when you are a billionaire, women will let you pet them in the crotch?

Or being accused of being a "racist" the Summum Bonum of the Pejorative Culture?

Now, I would think that there is no contest. A few insults on Twitter, about Slow Joe Biden or Pencil Head Schiff, are just joshing among the guys, the kind of thing that is normal and natural on, say, the locker room and the golf course.

But I realize that among women such insults are experienced in a conversation at the coffee shops as "I can't believe he said that." An abomination!

Whatabout the accusation of "racism?" Isn't that much, much worse? Particularly if it means that your husband loses his tech industry job because some woke HR woman had it in for him?

OK, ladies, I'm waiting for your answer.

I was thinking about this, as one does when you have had an idea for a blog and haven't yet written it.

And then I thought, OMG. Yes, even I say OMG from time to time.

Because I realized that the question of honor among men, and honor among women, as developed by James Bowman in Honor: A History applies here. And how!

Bowman's simple dictum is that honor among men is the reputation for courage; among women honor is the reputation for chastity. Or, to quote Bowman directly:

[T]he basic honor of the savage -- bravery for men, chastity for women -- is still recognizable beneath the surfaces of the popular culture that has done so much to efface it. If you doubt it, try calling a man a wimp or a woman a slut.

Now, Bowman develops the idea that the institutionalization of society leads to a situation where the honor culture of bravery among men gets diluted by the presence of women and the substituting of police and courts for the revenge culture of the tribesman or the gang member.

In fact, following Nietzsche, we could say that Christianity and "the priests" have switched entirely the bravery culture among men for the good vs. evil culture among women. And what, says Nietzsche, would happen if good finally triumphed over evil, so there was no evil in the world, but only good? What then?

So here is what I think. I think that, indeed, it has been necessary and appropriate to diminish the honor-as-bravery culture among men and dilute it with the chastity culture among women, so that men become good little boys in the peaceful market economy.

But whatabout women? And here I return to the prophecy of Georg Simmel from a century ago, who understood that things were going to change, what with women emerging out of the home.

Obviously, Simmel wrote, the public sphere, the world outside the home, in the short term would still be defined by men for men, but in the long term women would transform the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility." 

But do you know, I am coming to think that the opposite is true, and that women in the public aquare will have to adapt to a more masculine sensibility. In other words, following Nietzsche, they will have to acquire something of the culture of the Übermensch, the "free spirit:"

Who will prove to be the strongest in the course of this? The most moderate; those who do not require any extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede, but love a fair amount of accidents and nonsense… human beings who are sure of their power and represent the attained strength of humanity with conscious pride. 

I don't think you can thrive in the public square unless you are a person "sure of their power" and someone that can not just endure but "love a fair degree of accidents and nonsense."

Now, it seems to me that the women's culture of chastity demands absolute purity. You are not allowed to make mistakes; you are not allowed to push against the community of women that define what "good" is in your community. In this sort of culture it makes perfect sense to name, shame, and shun people who are not perfectly chaste in all their actions. That's all very well in the private women-only culture of the tribe, where men live in a different world of war and hunting.

But the modern public square cannot be a perfect moment of chastity maintained to eternity. It is a roiling mess of accidents and nonsense, and that's just on a normal day. Why is this? Because the public square is the old world of tribal warfare and defending the border that has been civilized into the market economy and democratic politics.

So I say to educated suburban women: if you don't like the male honor culture of Trump, and insist of enforcing the name and shame and shun culture of "she's a racist-sexist-homophobe" then you had better retreat from the public square and live in a male-provided safe space.

And one thing is for sure. You are not a liberated woman.

Suppose a Failed Impeachment is Part of Nancy's Cunning Plan?

Last week we had the "striped pants boys" (and a girl) telling the Schiff committee that President Trump had been acting against the "interagency consensus."

This week we had four Democrat-voting law professors before the Nadler committee voting 3-1 to impeach Trump. Because democracy. What they were really saying was, yeah, go ahead and impeach the guy. He deserves it.

OK. This is getting a bit too much for me. "I can't believe they are doing this." Surely they can't be that dumb.

Unless.

Unless Dem Central figures, hey, this election is a bye. It's pretty difficult to depose a president running for reelection when the economy is good.

But, they tell each other, we gotta problem.

(Now we switch to a transcript of a conversation between two well-know Deep Staters.)

Yeah, we sure do, Nance. Our radical #Resistance is doing a replay of the Sixties.

And we know where that ended up, Chuckie. Two Nixon terms -- which our chaps managed to abort nicely in '74 -- and then two Reagan terms and one Bush term. A national nightmore.

And don't forget, Nance, that even when we finally got Clinton in for two terms, the first thing that happened was a Republican Congress.

Right, Chuck. We can't do that again.

Hey, I know, Nance. Let's run the impeachment all the way, infuriating the GOP base. And then let Trump win reelection and probably get the House back.

Exactly, Chuck. And that's when you and I start to work on the contributors. We'll tell them that this crazy-lefty stuff has got to stop. And the best way is to starve it for money.

And, Nance, we should remind our friends that we can't do any favors for them if the crazy left is taking all the oxygen out of the room.

OK. Agreed, Chuck. But what about the moderate Class of 2018? We gotta give those guys an out, so they don't have to commit political suicide by voting for impeachment.

Yeah, Nance. I guess that's your baby. Incidentally, congratulations once again on your 2018 results.  But I wonder if those educated suburban women will really be down for a trial in the Senate?

Good point, Chuck. I think that Job One is to protect Jerry Nadler until it's too late for the Justice Democrats to run a lefty in his district. Once we are past the deadline for candidate sign-up we can take another look at it.

True. But Nance. Do we really care what happens to Jerry? I mean, as soon as he leaves office I'd say his district is bound to be won by some "woke" activist type. So whether the district goes left in 2020 or 2024, what's the difference?

I know, Chuck, but I owe Jerry one. He's been a good supporter, and I can't throw him overboard. Anyway, the strategy is to expose the #Resistance as well-intentioned people that are just not going to help us get the job done, of winning elections up and down the ballot. And whether we sacrifice Jerry or the Class of 2018, the strategic necessity is to put the blame on the Trump reelection where it belongs, on the DSA and the Justice Democrats and the rest of the over-enthusiastic activist community.

OK, Nance. Your call. But we don't want too much of a trainwreck in 2020. I'd say the important thing is to be setting up for Trump's second midterm in 2022 and make sure we win back the House and maybe the Senate. 2022 will be a good opportunity for us, as there will be 20 Republicans up for reelection and only 10 of ours: 12 if you count the independents.

Exactly, Chuck. 2022 is the key, to set up for the next presidential change election in 2024. I'd say we'll eat the GOP's lunch in 2024 if we can keep our left down to a dull roar.

OK, Nance. See you at the fundraiser tomorrow night.

On Race, Is It All Over Bar Shouting?

In a piece in American Greatness Pedro Gonzales paints a picture of all ethnic groups voting Democrat. For instance in Orange County, California, in the 2018 mid-terms:

analysis of the midterm vote by the Pew Research Center showed that 77 percent of Asians went for the Democratic candidate on the ballot, compared to 69 percent of Latinos and 90 percent of blacks.

Whatabout Texas?

Robert Francis (Beto) O’Rourke received support from 84 percent of blacks, 74 percent of Latinos, along with 66 percent of Asians and Pacific Islanders. Come the midterms, 73 percent of all “people of color” voted for O’Rourke, compared to just 31 percent of whites.

Hmm. Looks like whites are starting to vote by race...

Gonazales recommends a diet of a 40-year immigration pause plus a bunch of other options for halting the immigration invasion.

But I wonder if that won't merely confirm recent immigrants in their pro-Democrat voting habits. After all, if the news media and their own ethnic leaders are teaching them that the white majority is a bunch of racist sexist homophobes that hate them, who are they to disagree when the Trumpists are preventing their family members from joining the chorus?

Do you notice something about President Trump, the notorious racist? He doesn't push back at all on race, and is very careful to do major outreach to blacks and Hispanics. Maybe Trump is not the crazy undisciplined fool we are carefully taught to believe in.

But I think that the time has come to end the Culture of Pejoratives.

Look, I don't blame our Democratic friends. Back in the day they taught us to believe that being a racist was the worst thing in the world, and so goodwhites all supported Civil Rights. Then we could all pat ourselves on the back and go back to business as usual. Only, of course, that didn't happen. Because the left discovered that the best cudgel in the world was to accuse someone of racism. Hey, and if that worked, why not call people who opposed the feminist agenda "sexists!" And when that worked, why not call anyone that didn't bake cakes for gay weddings "homophobes?"

Yeah, and why not go on doing it and canceling people decades after the rights in question had been codified into law and/or Supreme Court decisions! Because? Because it is such fun to humiliate the Other.

I know. Let's elect the First Black President, and then we can say: been there, done that, and get back to America the melting pot.

Only that didn't happen. And the reason is perfectly obvious. There is nothing, nothing in the world, more satisfying that shutting up a deplorable by calling him a racist. And any other pejorative that left-wing activists can come up with next week.

You would think that our liberal friends would be grateful to us ordinary folks for going along with their civil rights movement. You would think they would be understanding towards the working-class white guys that didn't get fireman and policeman jobs because affirmative action. You would think they would be over the moon that we voted for America's First Black President.

You would think.

So I say that it is time for old guys like me, that don't have a job, don't have a public position, and really can't be canceled, to Do Something About It.

And as I wrote last week that Do Something About It is, when accused of racism, to say: "Yes, I'm a racist. How about you?"

In other words, we have to defuse the racist bomb, and de-energize the third rail. We have to make it clear to our lefty friends and the woke-ologists that We Don't Care what they call us.

Because, we will say, lefties have been insulting and canceling and humiliating ordinary people for over a century. Quite apart from what that says about lefties, the fact is that we are not going to take it any more. Got it lefties?

After all, if 90 percent of blacks are all voting for the same party, what does it tell us? It tells that in spite of the civil rights acts of 50 years ago, blacks identify with people of their race and vote that way. Why! What would you call that? I'd call it racism. If 77 percent of Asians all vote Democrat, what does it tell us about Asians? If a mere 69 percent of Latinos vote Democrat, doesn't it tell us that Latinos have a slightly less racist attitude towards politics than Asians and blacks?

What I say is, as I wrote yesterday, that we need to be changing the race argument to a class argument. We need to be selling the non-white racists on the argument that the gentry liberals are nose-in-the-air snobs that don't care about people like them. We need to encourage the "clients" that have been taught to be loyal serfs of the "gentry" to start thinking like "commoners" who realize that the gentry doesn't really care about people like them, but is just out to use them as serfs and clients to advance their own agenda, and that agenda has nothing to do with what ordinary Americans want for themselves and their families.

But first we have to slay the racist dragon. Or, as the mice ask in The Tailor of Gloucester, who will bell the cat?

Well, it obviously ain't gonna be politicians and people in the public eye. So it's up to us, the commoners and deplorables. We have to march towards the sound of the guns and demolish the "raacisss" argument.

And we all know how you do that. You do it with sarcasm and scorn. That's why God invented sarcasm and scorn. As in:

"Yes, I'm a racist. How about you? What? You are deputy assistant director of diversity and inclusion at Podunk Community College? Really? Why, that's racism straight up."

Of course, if you are a woman, talking expressively to your friend over coffee, then you would say something like this:

"Did you hear about Emma? That She told Sophia she was a racist? I can't believe She said that!"

Hey kids! There is nothing to lose but dignity. And as we have known every since Singin' in the Rain, life is about "dignity, always dignity."

Suppose Blacks are Now Becoming "Commoners"

Everyone has been shocked, shocked, in recent days by three polls that indicate about 33% support for President Trump among blacks.

What is going on here?

If you are a believer in the Emerging Democratic Majority faith prophesied by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, that America is going Democrat because blacks, Hispanics, women, young people, educated people, it doesn't make sense.

But suppose, despite what your earnest woke college professors taught you, you are open to other explanations of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

Suppose, indeed, like Marx, you explain everything by class. You might try my reductive Three Peoples theory and the notion in my Road to the Middle Class that people move out of the peasant-and-worker class along the four cultural roads of faith, education, mutual aid, and law. My point in Road is that people become middle-class responsibles as they practice enthusiastic Christianity, as they get educated, as they practice mutual aid in fraternal societies, and as they learn to adjudicate disputes through law rather than revenge culture.

But just in the past week I have encountered Curtis Yarvin's theory enunciated in his "Clear Pill" series. Yarvin proposes a three people world, as I do. He calls the three classes: gentry, commoners, and clients.

The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious; the commoners are suburbanites, educated and independent; the clients are Marx’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, uneducated and/or dependent.

Usually, there is a class war, and "The natural conflict pits commoners against gentry plus clients." Now, pretty obviously, blacks have been "clients" in recent times, and our liberal gentry have bribed blacks with loot and plunder through its racist policies of affirmative action, quotas, and now diversity and inclusion. And the gentry class has anathematized the commoners as deplorable racist-sexist-homophobes.

But that would work only so long as blacks experienced themselves as dependent victims.

Now the story I like to tell about the modern era is that, in successive waves, the old peasant class has slowly worked its way up from being "clients" of the gentry to being "commoners." The quintessential commoners, for me, are George Eliot's Adam Bede and his incandescent love interest, the Methodist lay preacher Dinah Morris.

And really, why not? Is not the responsible independence of the ordinary middle class a shining star to the dependent and irresponsible serfs, peasants, and workers?

So, it may be that what we are seeing right now is blacks starting to move seriously out of the "client" class into the "commoner" class. It obviously can't hurt that black unemployment is the lowest ever, and that rapper Kanye West is pushing Christianity and Trumpish #MAGAness.

If indeed blacks are moving into the "commoner" class we can expect a lot less interest in voted 90-10 for Democrats.

The basic rule about electoral politics is that people vote for the politician "that cares about people like me."

The reason that Republican voters moved away from Bush-Romney politicians is that they stopped believing that Bush-Romneys cared about people like them. The reason that gentry liberals vote for Obamas and Warrens and Buttigiegs is that Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg are people like them: educated and holding their opinions and believing in their beliefs. The reason that blacks and Latinos and single women have voted Democratic is that they are subordinate people that look to a strong lord to plunder the Other and hand out the necessary loot to them.

The reason that the educated suburbans have moved away from the Republican Party is that they see the Democratic Party and its big state and its millions of jobs for educated bureaucrats as their kind of party for their kind of people. And I think they are right.

But what our educated gentry are happily unaware of is the verdict of Charles Murray's Coming Apart about white America. That today the top 25%, the educated elite, is doing fine with great careers and merger marriages. That the middle 40% is doing so-so, and in the bottom 35% the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. Imagine what that looks like in non-white America.

Do I have to spell it out? America works great for the educated gentry. For everyone else, not so good. So you would expect that, slowly and in fits and starts, the fundamental injustice suffered by the non-gentry classes would start to emerge into public consciousness and that enterprising politicians would start to notice at put themselves at the head of the crowd.

Obvioulsy, President Trump is appealing to America's commoners. And he is making a clear push to appeal to non-white commoners too. Of course he is. That's where the votes are for him: persuading black and Latino "clients" that they are really "commoners" and that he cares about people like them.

What Should Be Grounds for Presidential Impeachment?

The Constitution, as we know, issues a rather grand and confusing definition of the grounds for impeachment. So Article Two Section 4 begins

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.

Treason, according to the Constitution Article 3, Section 3, Clause 1:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

But does negotiating with a foreign power, and getting a quid quo pro amount to Treason? I doubt it.

Bribery, according to the Constutional Rights Foundation:

It takes place when a person gives an official money or gifts to influence the official’s behavior in office. For example, if defendant Smith pays federal Judge Jones $10,000 to find Smith not guilty, the crime of bribery has occurred.

In fact, several federal judges have been impeached and removed from office for bribery. But whatabout giving money to a candidate for president? I once had a boss that gave money to a politician and immediately wanted a quid quo pro. The politician was monstrously offended. Of course. A direct quid quo pro is not how the system works. Politicians help their friends, not their contributors.

What about high crmes and misdemeanors? La Wik:

Since 1386, the English parliament had used the term “high crimes and misdemeanors” to describe one of the grounds to impeach officials of the crown. Officials accused of “high crimes and misdemeanors” were accused of offenses as varied as misappropriating government funds, appointing unfit subordinates, not prosecuting cases, not spending money allocated by Parliament, promoting themselves ahead of more deserving candidates, threatening a grand jury, disobeying an order from Parliament, arresting a man to keep him from running for Parliament, losing a ship by neglecting to moor it, helping “suppress petitions to the King to call a Parliament,” granting warrants without cause, and bribery.[9] Some of these charges were crimes. Others were not... They can be thought of as serious cases of power abuse or dereliction of duty, without a requirement for these cases to be explicitly against the law. 

Well, on those grounds, I'd say that every politician that ever lived is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, since the whole point of politics is to obtain by force what cannot be obtained by ordinary social cooperation.

So let us forget all that, and appoint ourselves philosophers and try to think what would really justsify impeaching and removing a president.

• Whatabout asking a foreign power to look into a case of corruption involving a US politician? I don't think so.

• Whatbaout conversations between a presidential candidate's staff and a foreign power? I don't think so.

• Whatabout using the intelligence community to spy on a presidential candidate's campaign? Yeah. Could be.

• Whatbaout using a foreign power to gussie up a piece of false opposition research against a presidential candidate? Hmm. Good point.

• Whatabout a nod and a wink to the IRS to slow up the process of political groups applying for non-profit status? Good idea, but impossible to prove.

• Whatabout handing out goodies to members of Congress in return for support on a major bill? Are you kidding?

• Whatabout provoking Japan in 1940-41 and then doing nothing when you know, from decoded messages that the Japanese are on their way to attack Pearl Harbor? Yeah. That's a puzzler.

The point is that I don't know if there could ever be an impeachment of a president that really committed an act worth removal from office. That's because presidents are pretty savvy guys that know what they can get away with. They know what kind of support they can expect in Congress and they know, roughly speaking what it would take to get a 2/3rd vote against them in the Senate. If they have both houses of Congress held by their party, they figure that they can get away with a bunch of stuff. If the president is the First Black President he knows that anybody opposing him can be canceled as a racist. If both houses are held by the other party the president knows to behave himself.

Hey, I know! How about making a scandal of the president's actions, riling up your supporters, and defeating him when he runs for reelection?

Truth is that three of the four presidential impeachments thus far have been on the basis of the president having the nerve, the noive, to have been elected. The other, Clinton, impeachment was really tit-for-tat: you guys removed Nixon from office, so we can play at that game too.

Only, the Clinton impeachment showed how to deal with impeachment. You rally your troops, as Al Gore did when Clinton was impeached in the House. And you win in the Senate. And hey, maybe you rally your troops enough to actually gain seats in the off-year election of the second term of the president.

The Clinton impeachment cured Republicans of the disease. I wonder if a Trump reelection and a Republican House in 2020 would cure the Dems of their impeachment fever.

I hope so.