patrick.net

Impeachment is a regime counter-attack against a man elected to bring about change. ​And while impeachment is certainly constitutional, it is an elite procedure not a democratic one. The prestige media has passed the first judgment on whether it’s warranted in this case. (It is, they say.)

The Democratic House will investigate and then — inevitably, if they’re not to lose the faith of their own voters — bring articles of impeachment. Ultimately, the Senate will hold the trial (if Mitch McConnell can’t delay it until the election), and Trump will almost certainly be acquitted on a partisan vote. Instead of showing, as the Nixon and Clinton impeachments did, that party isn’t quite everything and some establishment cohesion remains, the failure of the Trump impeachment will deepen the divisions of 2016 and sharpen the question of regime legitimacy. A mistaken premise — overestimation of support for the ruling class and their rules — will lead to the regime losing rather than gaining credibility. This will be most obvious among the activist wing of the Republican party, but the effects won’t stop there.

​The old saying is that if you strike at a king, be sure to kill him. In this case, the regime is striking not a king but at the very idea that an elected official can challenge the establishment. This risks revealing just how weak the country’s ruling class really is: if 40 percent of the country remains with Trump through the ordeal of impeachment, that will show that 40 percent is anti-regime — revolutions are made with less. And that 40 percent would be a floor, not a ceiling; a starting point for a future anti-regime movement.

The moderate path here is the one that eschews impeachment and instead shows that the elite still has faith in elections. Let the voters decide whether they want to defend the ‘norms’ of the regime, and even if they decide not to — by re-electing Trump — the regime will have lost less credibility than it stands to through a failed attempt at impeachment. Legitimacy is bleeding away from American politics and society, and Trump is a symptom not the cause. The cause is the folly of America’s leadership class as a whole. Electing Trump was the public’s way of impeaching that class.