Trump’s First Impeachment: What Not To Repeat the Second Time
The U.S. House of Representatives impeached Donald Trump, after several weeks of hearings, for ‘abuse of power’. Trump had withheld military aid to Ukraine for use in its active border war with Russia, until the Ukrainian government agreed to announce two fake investigations, that he could use as conspiracy theories to help him win re-election in November 2020. A second charge of ‘obstruction of Congress’ was added because Trump orchestrated a coverup by ordering all potential witnesses to refuse to testify and by rejecting all requests for documents.
About a dozen people ignored Trump’s orders and testified, but all of the senior people in the know (and many others lower down) obeyed. In April 2019, long before the impeachment began, Trump’s White House Counsel Don McGahn had refused a subpoena. For whatever reason, the courts delayed for months (to this day) giving a ruling on whether he could be compelled to testify. The Democrats decided not to wait until the courts ruled on whether other witnesses could be compelled to appear before Congress. After Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi briefly held up conveying the two articles of impeachment, Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell got all but two Republican Senators to vote down allowing new witnesses or documents, and then got all but one to vote to acquit Trump. In the short term, Trump’s poll numbers went way up. It remains to be seen what will happen later. Several of those who testified have already been fired by Trump or have resigned. If Trump gets re-elected, it seems likely that his vengeful acts of retribution will go even further.
Was Pelosi right to impeach Trump? If so, could the Democrats have done anything differently to produce a better outcome? What can the overall Left learn from all this?
WHAT THE DEMOCRATS DID WRONG
It is difficult to see how the Democrats could have ignored the Ukraine scandal after the whistleblower’s complaint became known. Could they have done something other than impeachment in response? Perhaps, but impeachment gave them the greatest opportunity, perhaps the only opportunity, to get enough facts from witnesses and documents to make the case against him (e.g. EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s testimony and emails). In the event, they did a brilliant job in making the case in the televised hearings. They likely persuaded almost everyone in the general public, including Republicans, that Trump did what they charged him with doing. But they failed to persuade almost anyone who was not already anti-Trump that Trump should be removed from office.
Democrats Did a Brilliant Job of Persuading Even Trump Supporters that Trump Did Something Wrong — They Failed to Persuade the Same People that Trump Should Be Removed in an Election Year
What did the Democrats do wrong, and why? Here is a list of ‘mistakes’, and why I think they were made, by very skilled politicians who know ten times better than I do what usually works best with voters in the U.S. political system.
** They decided to make a legalistic case, as if they could reproduce the 1973-4 Watergate hearings that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon. Watergate was a success because key Republicans joined Democrats in voting (in House committees) to impeach the president, and then sent a delegation to tell him privately to resign. Nixon’s approval ratings were apparently down to 23%. In 2019, the entire world knew that reproducing the same kind of House hearings was impossible, let alone the same result (which this time would have required the majority of Republican Senators to vote for removal).
** They further narrowed the case to just the Ukraine scandal. This let them narrow their pitch to a purely patriotic one, with strong Cold War echoes: Trump betrayed America’s ‘national security’ by denying military aid to an ally at war with Russia, in order to cheat in the 2020 election, just as he had accepted Russia’s help in winning the 2016 election.
** Senate Leader McConnell made clear that he would collaborate closely with Trump’s lawyers to prevent anything resembling a real trial (despite the fact that this violated the constitution). The Democrats opted to go ahead anyway, and to essentially repeat the same case from the House hearings without any new arguments, witnesses or evidence.
On its face, Trump and the Republicans won this battle, hands down. The Republican majority Senate acquitted and ‘exonerated’ Trump. Republicans were also able to make the case to their supporters rather easily, that what Trump did might be a clumsy and even ‘inappropriate’ attempt to get ‘opposition research’ on a potential electoral opponent (Joe Biden), but it ‘did not rise to the level of an impeachable offence’. The Democrats nevertheless accomplished two goals. They tarnished the reputation of Trump going into the year in which he seeks to get re-elected. They will look good in the (conventional) history books for having ‘stood up for the constitution’, and for repairing America’s reputation as a ‘defender of democratic Ukraine against despotic Russia’s aggression’. At best, a moral victory, with the victory part deferred to an uncertain future.
Trump’s Ukraine Actions Blatantly Served the Partisan Interests of Himself and His Party — But This Made it Nearly Impossible for Democrats to Overcome the Perception that It Was Merely a Partisan Conflict
It was easy for the conservative propaganda machine to make the case that Trump’s behaviour was not impeachable, because everything that the Democrats did looked (to Trump supporters and many others) like a clumsy and inappropriate attempt (a) to tarnish the reputation of their Republican presidential race opponent (Trump) in an election year, and thereby ‘interfere in the 2020 election’ themselves; and (b) to continue to blame the Russians for Trump’s election victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, instead of accepting that 63 million Americans decided that he was the better candidate for them, and to declare in advance that if Trump won re-election it would also be due to Russian interference. For American voters not invested in believing whatever their party said, the tactics used by the Democrats fed the perception that it was all a partisan battle between elites in Washington, and that both sides were ignoring the issues affecting them personally that politicians should be doing something about.
ARTICLE ONE: A TV TRIAL WITH A TARGET AUDIENCE OF NEVER TRUMPERS
Let us look then at what the Democrats did wrong, and what they might have done differently. Before doing so, let me spoil everything by revealing my basic conclusion. What Pelosi and Schumer and the Democrats did was in fact not tactically wrong, but right -- given the limits of the ‘democracy’ they were defending, the social and political environment in the USA, and the actual goals they had because of their belief system and the interests that they seek to represent. What follows then are two things that the Democrats might have done differently, corresponding more or less to the two articles of impeachment, followed immediately by reasons why it did not make sense for them to act that way.
(1) By making a very narrow legalistic case about the alleged abuses of power that constitutional scholars agree would be, if proven, “high crimes and misdemeanors” warranting impeachment, Democrats succeeded in proving to most TV viewers that Trump leveraged the powers of his office to get dirt on a potential political opponent. But most people already saw Trump as being the kind of person that would do this. His opponents see this as just further proof, when none was needed, that Trump is both corrupt and unfit to be president. His supporters, and many people with no clear views on Trump’s suitability, see the same facts as proof that Trump is a tactically clever and Strong Leader. He is not a politically correct liberal wimp but a fighter, who breaks the rules in order to ‘get things done’ on behalf of his aggrieved victim supporters (including his cynical upper and educated middle class supporters who see Trump as a ‘useful idiot’). He does this over and against the resistance of corrupt elites in the Big Government swamp of Washington DC, that are cheered on by the establishment of liberal professionals in the universities and the arts and the biased ‘fake news media’.
Democrats Were Afraid to Attack Trump From the Left — This Would Have Undermined their Election Strategy of Being Centrists Who Could Win Anti-Trump Republican Votes
Shouldn’t the Democrats have done something different to challenge this narrative? One way to do this would be to make the case that Trump was more a symptom than a cause of a rising extreme Right racist nationalist movement, that included the dominant forces in the Republican party,. He was not an outsider taking on the upper class establishment and their professional middle class allies. Rather Trump was a useful idiot and a con artist, fronting for a faction in that class that needed to re-legitimate itself, by promoting a patriotic Strong Leader populism, that scapegoated various others lower down in the social order. Of course, they could not make this case in this kind of radical left language, but the case could have been made.
In fact, this kind of case could not have been made. The Democrats had decided on the day after Trump got elected in November 2016 that their strategic goal was to unite all who could be united to either remove or electorally defeat Trump. They would make an alliance with the ‘Never Trumpers’ in the Republican party to achieve this. Hence MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other media have prominently featured right-wing Republicans who oppose Trump as personally unfit to be president, making anti-Trump arguments every day for over three years. Hence the endlessly repeated case made by Adam Schiff and others in the impeachment hearings and trial that said: ‘Look all you Republicans in the Senate and voters watching on TV. We Democrats are defending all those things that you Republicans have always believed. It is Trump who is betraying this common cause that we share with you as patriotic, freedom and democracy loving Americans’.
Many Democratic party leaders believe that the aggressively reactionary words and actions of the Trump administration are mostly due to Trump and his personal idiosyncrasies. Or at least they think that they are due to a wing of the Republican Party that he incarnates in his person that is mostly just being politically opportunistic. These opportunists are cynically pandering to the ‘white working class’, and to other ‘deplorables’ who have been left behind by the rapid technological changes of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’. In other words, the pressure to embrace white supremacist nationalism is coming from below. Some Democrats will go further and agree that the swing towards the extreme right is not completely or mostly coming from below. It is also coming from a section of the upper class that is short-sighted and greedy in profiting personally from the continuing Great Recession, instead of making needed reforms (which the Democrats are ready to enact if elected to governmental power). Whatever their precise view, they all more or less think that they can ally with the other part of the Republican party and upper class, against Trump and Trumpism. At the very least they can patiently discredit Trump by sticking to this alliance, and defeat him in November 2020.
Because the Democrats and other liberals genuinely think that the roots of the drift to the extreme right are in bad or opportunistic policies and individuals, they also think that the solution is to have their party elected to change everything back again with different policies and personnel. They really do believe, as Barrack Obama declared in his famous keynote speech to the 2004 Democratic party convention, that there is no left-wing America and right-wing America, there is only the United States of America. More prosaically, they believe that when the Democrats get back in power, there will be a ‘return to normal’. It will be a normal in which liberals can continue to respond to the ever more aggressive attacks on liberalism and the norms of liberal democratic institutions by that unfortunate minority on the right, by conciliating with conservatives further. They will do so by being the good guys, like Obama tried to be, by working patiently to isolate the bad guys among the conservatives and to restore that elusive common ground, that ‘center’ where liberal and conservative elites can accommodate one another, while peacefully competing for electoral power.
Democrats Act as if Trump’s Racist Nationalism is Driven from Below by ‘Left Behind Deplorables’ and Is just ‘Playing to His Base’ — They Spend Very Little Time Showing How It is Driven by the Agenda of People at the Top of the Social Order
It remains to be seen whether the Democrats can win the White House in November 2020 based on their analysis and strategy, by running a moderate who is as close to being a Never Trump Republican as possible. It would be someone who could ally with those conservatives once in office to restore respect for the rules of the liberal democratic political game, while agreeing to some necessary reforms that both liberal and conservative elites can agree to, reforms that will repair the breaches in the avenues of upward mobility for as many meritocratic individuals as possible (dealing with rising inequality of condition is something else entirely). The Democrats are likely wrong about the causes of the shift to the extreme right. It will almost certainly take a movement which is significantly to the left of the current leadership of the Democratic party, one that is mostly organizationally outside the Democratic party (at best half in and half out like the Sanders movement is), to push the radical Right back decisively.
But the moderate Democrats are right about one thing. It is not possible to win elections in the USA right now by being openly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. There is no place in the world where a larger proportion of the population has benefitted from capitalism than the United States, and for a very long time. Both capitalism and the continuation of the world capitalist system being centered in and led by the USA, i.e. the continuation of US imperialism as the leading force for peace and prosperity and human rights and democracy, is literally a sacred belief among almost all Americans. Interestingly, and this is not really hopeful for the left, it is probably easier to be critical about capitalism in the US than to suggest that the continuation of American domination of the world is a bad thing. This also proved to be true, in a sense, in the recent British election. The assault on Corbyn and Corbynism was mostly focussed on his lack of patriotism, his long record of having opposed Western imperialism, and his present failure to stand for Britain (and Britons) First. It will be interesting to see in next days and weeks whether Sanders mainly gets attacked for being insufficiently pro-American, or for being against free enterprise. In the event, the attack on Trump made so eloquently by Adam Schiff and others was all about his failure to stand up for the US empire. That argument works with most Americans every time, so who can blame the Democrats for using it? Except maybe people who see Trump and Trumpism as having a different basis, and who think an entirely different kind of movement will be needed to defeat them.
MAKING THE ISSUE LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND THE RULE OF LAW
In the Senate trial, the Democrats spent a lot of time complaining about the fact that the Republican senators refused to vote to call new witnesses and to request new documents, thereby preventing a “fair trial”. They then patted themselves on the back in media interviews for opinion polls that suggested that a majority of both Republican and Democrat voters wanted witnesses and documents too. It made absolutely no difference to the outcome of the trial, and likely made little difference to how voters evaluated the battle between elites over whether Trump’s actions warranted removal from office. In fact, it was another example of the Democrat’s general approach to dealing with the hold of the extreme right on the Republican party and on other private and public institutions. They pose as the good guys who are willing to retreat, retreat and retreat some more -- in order to re-establish a new center or common ground where liberal and conservative elites can make deals with one another again.
Adam Schiff Understood that Playing to Cold War Stereotypes and Criticizing Trump for Failing to Keep the American Empire Great Would Sell Well to Almost All Americans
On the advice of top constitutional scholars, most notably Harvard Law School’s Lawrence Tribe, the Nancy Pelosi led House Democrats reduced their articles of impeachment to two. The first was abuse of power and this was narrowed to a single incident: misusing the levers of government power to get dirt on a political opponent from a government at war with Russia desperate for US military aid. They chose not to risk confusing the issue by presenting evidence on a long list of other instances of abuse of office by Trump and his family members and his businesses and the many of his appointees, who exploited their offices for personal gain. There was little or no mention of the massive tax cuts for corporations and the rich, or the appointment of industry lobbyists to lead regulatory agencies, or the packing of the courts with Federalist Society member lawyers, or the transferring of money from the Defence Department budget to a kitty to (pretend to) build the Mexico border wall, or the attempt to coordinate state level efforts at voter suppression through a bogus task force.
There was not a word about any of these instances as being attacks on democracy in the Abraham Lincoln sense of ‘of, by and for the people’ and their interests. There was no case made that Ukraine was but one example of a systematic abuse of the offices of both the presidency and the Senate Majority Leader by Trump and Mitch McConnell respectively. There was no case made about them acting in inseparable lockstep to both subvert the operation of both elected chambers of Congress and to facilitate an ever-worsening influence by wealthy donors over governmental processes and decisions. In short, there was an argument about Trump acting unilaterally outside the ‘rule of law’, and there was another argument about Trump getting a private (political) benefit, but there was no attempt to make the connections necessary to tell a story about the clear march towards autocracy and kleptocracy. To be fair, Democrats often tell at least a softened version of this story in the media, but they chose to leave it out when it came to the impeachment process.
Some will argue that doing all this would distract from the clarity of the legal argument being made on TV, but if so, why did the Democrats not organize a parallel campaign that took the political argument to the public? Why not spend money on media ads, do social media, hold rallies everywhere, encourage popular organizations to mobilize their supporters to do local education and agitation? The Democrats decided quite consciously to do the opposite of that. They were going to make as narrow and legalistic a case as possible, and would restrict the role of the public to watching the Democrat lawyers and lawyer-politicians shine on TV. They would not get labelled as ‘protesters’ and agitators. They were responsible and moderate. It was the Republicans who were irresponsibly stirring up the public and telling non-stop political lies on TV.
Democrats Could Have Taken Their Case to the People By Barnstorming the Country — They Did Not Do So Because Their All Abiding Fear is to Be Seen as Agitators instead of Moderate Defenders of the Rule of Law
This stance was not just a tactic to appeal to Never Trump Republicans and non-political voters, and gain partisan advantage. It was entirely consistent with the conception of democracy that the Democrats saw themselves as defending. It was not Lincoln’s democracy of rule by the people. It was a set of legal institutions enshrined in the 18th century constitution. Both are democracy. The limited version, often called ‘liberal democracy’, is genuine democracy and progressives must defend it as such (even though it is also the form of rule of private capital and the ruling class). But it is a view of democracy that limits the role of the public to mostly free speech and voting and running in elections, extraordinarily important rights and freedoms, but far less than rule of, by and for the people.
BACKING DOWN ON OBSTRUCTION OF CONGRESS AND EVER-EXPANDING EXECUTIVE POWER
(2) The second article of impeachment was obstruction of Congress. For whatever reason, the Democrats chose to scale back their presentation of arguments and evidence on this point, to practically nothing more than a request, after the Senate trial had begun, to make the Senate trial ‘fair’ by subpoenaing the testimony of former National Security Agency head John Bolton, Nick Mulvaney and two others. It must have seemed clever to Democrat strategists – scale down their criteria for what would constitute a fair trial to near zero, with the certitude that even this would be rejected. Again, they looked reasonable. Another victory for moderation! The only problem was that the Democrats ended up making the case that the only thing preventing a fair trial was the vote of the Senate on calling further witnesses and seeking further documents – not the actions by Trump for which he was being impeached.
Rhetorically, Democrat speakers made repeated references to Trump acting as if he were a king, but even here they reduced that to acting as if he were ‘above the law and no one is above the law, not even the president’ – as if it was an issue that could and should be resolved by the courts, not Congress itself. They did not say that it was illegitimate to even propose referring the matter to the courts. They did not say that it did not matter whether Trump was guilty as charged in the first article. His public actions in seeking to prevent 100% of witnesses and documents were all that was necessary to convict on the second article. If he wanted to answer the case against him on the second article, as well as the first, he had to make himself and his Executive branch accountable in public in Congress. If he refused, he had to be removed, no further argument necessary. His behaviour was intolerable in a democracy. (In a parliamentary democracy, an accused prime minister could resign or be forced to resign by his own party and/or an election could be called with the same leader, and let the people decide.)
Democrats Said That Trump Acted Like an Unaccountable King — But They Were Unwilling to Make This Unmistakably Clear by Subpoenaing Him to Testify
Actions speak louder than words. There is one way that the Democrats could have got across loud and clear what the second article was about. They could have, and most certainly should have, made their central demand that Trump himself be subpoenaed to appear before the Senate to make a deposition, testify and be subject to cross examination. Clinton, after all had had to do this and McConnell was pretending to follow the example of the Clinton impeachment trial. Indeed, the demand to have the president testify should have been made in the House investigative phase, perhaps towards the end, certainly after Sondland’s first hand testimony implicating Trump. They also should have demanded to hear from Rudy Juliani, not just Nick Mulvaney and John Bolton. They should have laid out a whole set of procedures required for a fair trial. But demanding that the head of the Executive branch charged with the crimes be made accountable to the legislative body by testifying was the key.
The second article was about obstruction of the power of Congress to compel testimony and documents from the Executive branch as part of the oversight function. It was about accountability of the president to the American people, through their elected representatives. It was about which branch of government was supreme, the legislature or the Executive. The Democrats did not make this point. Instead, they repeated the mantra taught to American schoolkids from the early grades: the USA has a better democracy than other countries, for example parliamentary democracies where the executive power is exercized by a prime minister and cabinet drawn from the elected members of the legislature, because American democracy is based first and foremost on the separation of powers. Yes Congress can hold hearings on any issue, and require Cabinet members to explain themselves to the legislative committee overseeing their department, and reject presidential nominees for top jobs and judgeships, and it has the power to impeach. But when push comes to shove, Congress is not supreme over the Executive, but separate and equal.
In practice, from the very beginning of the republic, and this was the conscious idea of the ‘framers’ of the U.S. constitution, the president and Executive branch were ‘more equal’ than Congress. The leaders of the new American republic wanted to be rid of a king like the British king that they had rebelled against, but they ended up replacing him with a president, an elected king who was subject to critique but not accountable to the legislature (except in the extreme case of impeachment for high crimes). The Senate, consciously designed to be a kind of elected aristocracy of men of talent as well as social standing, the organ of sober second thought, was ‘more equal’ than the House of Representatives. As Angus King, the Independent senator from Maine, argued on TV after the Senate trial, both Democrats and Republicans have actively sanctioned the evergrowing arbitrary and unilateral powers of the presidency in the past 70-plus years (he mentioned the president deciding if and when to go to war and what free trade agreements to make with what content plus several other examples). The Democrats were unwilling to open the can of worms by talking about the illegitimacy of presidents and the executive branch having all this arbitrary power to act unilaterally.
The President is Not Accountable to the Legislature Under the US Constitution like in a Parliamentary Democracy — This Makes ‘Obstruction of Congress’ a Legalistic Dispute Rather than a Refusal of the President to be Accountable to the People
Here again the Democrats were acting in accordance with their view of what American democracy was restricted to being, and what it should be restricted to being, in order for governmental action to be ‘efficient in this modern age’. This bipartisan idea was that the Executive should be less and less bound by the ‘partisan politics’ and the slowness of submission to the people’s elected representatives. In practice, both parties have relied mostly on references to the courts to decide such matters, and the courts unsurprisingly have typically deferred to the power of the president. So here again the Democrats were only acting in line with their view of how American democracy should work, a view that is widely accepted, if not necessarily consciously understood and shared, by the American people. Separation of powers and checks and balances, not the primacy of the legislature over the Executive. Overview maybe, but make accountable, no. Where there are disputes, the courts actually act as the superior of the three branches, and decide. This is what is meant by ‘the rule of law’.
But this was not the only step taken to back away more or less completely from actually making the case that Trump had obstructed Congress. Lawrence Tribe had counselled Pelosi that she could withhold presenting the articles of impeachment to the Senate for an indefinite period, and thereby prevent McConnell from operating a farcical non-trial in the Senate that would formally acquit Trump. Pelosi did hold up transmitting the articles over the Christmas break, while demanding that McConnell guarantee a real trial with subpoenaed witnesses and documents, all the material that had been withheld from the House investigation. But then, when McConnell responded by declaring repeatedly that he would collaborate with Trump’s lawyers, and the accused Trump himself, to guarantee a non-trial and the acquittal of Trump on both counts, Pelosi blinked, and transmitted the articles.
Pelosi could have held up until just after the Super Tuesday primaries on March 3, leaving time for the Democratic and Republican primaries before then. Delaying that long would likely have led Trump to panic and do a series of stupid things that discredited him further. If the Democrats had made having Trump testify the centerpiece of their criteria for a fair trial, that would have been the focus for the eight week delay after the Christmas break. They could have then submitted the articles to the Senate and allowed McConnell to do whatever he wanted, even just call a vote to acquit on the first day. In fact, in order to make crystal clear that they were not trying to create a constitutional crisis, and wanted to ensure that the legitimacy of the president was not being put into question before the Senate ruled, they should have announced that they were going to do this at the beginning. The ball was entirely in McConnell’s court. Fair trial before March 3 or farcical non-trial after that date, his choice.
Pelosi Knew that Arousing Trump’s Supporters Would Hurt Democrats in the Election — She was Right to Cave In to Moscow Mitch and Get It Over Quickly
As smart a move as this might be on paper as a poker play, Pelosi was right to blink. She knew from the beginning that impeaching Trump would be a vote loser, especially in the short run. The only way that it would work in the November 2020 election was if the Democrats avoided mobilizing the public on their side, and did as little as possible to arouse and mobilize Trump’s supporters. They could hope that the whole impeachment process was marginal to people’s thinking by the time it came to vote. They needed to look reasonable and, above all, look like they were the supporters of ‘law and order’, while Trump was the agent of chaos and misrule, who voters might be getting tired of being in their face 24/7 after over four years. Above all, no matter Pelosi did, the impeachment trial was going to look like a partisan battle between Washington elites. She had to do her due diligence in exposing Trump’s crimes, make the Republicans defend those crimes, and then get it over with quickly.
WHAT CAN THE LEFT LEARN FROM TRUMP’S IMPEACHMENT?
(1) The first lesson to learn from Trump’s impeachment is a reminder that establishment political parties, liberal or even social democratic, understand democracy as liberal democratic institutions, above all free and fair elections and ‘the rule of law’. The left’s view of democracy is more extensive. In the USA and elsewhere that view can be termed Lincoln-ian – rule by the people, the idea that democracy is the rule of, by and for the people and their interests. Most establishment parties will at least pay lip service to the left view, and many in those parties will sincerely think of the two as the same thing. But in practice they are likely to only defend the narrow liberal democracy version. Those are the rules of the game that they play by in competing against other parties for power. It will be up to the left to point out the differences and to spell out very specific measures that should be taken to extend the ‘real existing democracy’ to something better.
(2) In the past, parts of the left, notably anarchists and Marxists, have tended to be dismissive of liberal democracy as ‘bourgeois democracy’, as a mere executive committee that rules over the people on behalf of the capitalist class and other dominant social groups. This is part of the truth but it cannot be a pretext for staying outside the liberal democratic political system, and just petitioning for rights and policies from outside of it as social (but not political) movements. Just as important, we must never forget that liberal democracy is democracy, just not enough of it. We must unite with all liberals and conservatives and others in actively defending liberal democracy, and we should push liberals and conservatives and others to be more active on their own in defending it. Popular mobilization by the left over impeachment of Trump would have strengthened the resolve of some within the Democratic party, and would have helped educate the public about the stakes for the people of the conflict between partisan elites.
(3) Establishment parties will tend to self censor and hold back when they are confronted with a ruler or ruling party that takes repeated steps to weaken liberal democracy. We already have many examples in the past century or so of liberal parties tolerating a slide to authoritarianism in practice while (genuinely enough) protesting against it. They are typically constrained by the perceived necessity to stick to the rule of law and the rules of the liberal democratic game. We have even more examples of conservative political parties and military leaders being willing to put dictatorial strongmen and even fascists into power, sometimes under the illusion that they can control them and return to democracy easily once they have served their purpose (of crushing the left and weakening the liberals). Trump and Trumpism do not yet threaten liberal democracy in the USA or a fascist coup, if only because China is nowhere close to posing a real threat to its world domination. But things could start to get dicey in a hurry if the crazy policies of deregulated capitalism and the marketization of everything lead to a crash and Depression. It will be up to the left to lead the fight to defend liberal democracy (let alone push for extensions), to take the fight beyond legalistic wrangling by elites by mobilizing the public to defend the democratic parts of the liberal capitalist state with collective action campaigns both in and outside of the law.
The Biggest Lesson is that the Left Cannot Leave It Up to the Elites Who Rule Through a Liberal Democracy System to Defend It — The Left Will Have to Lead a Progressive Coalition to Both Defend It and Extend It
Was Pelosi right to impeach Trump? Yes, and she played the game by the rules of liberal democracy as best as she could, given the circumstances. But the left needs to start mobilizing more actively to both defend liberal democracy and to demand that it be extended. We cannot rely on establishment parties to do that for us.