That’s breaking down in America, and politics here is increasingly reminding me of politics on the subcontinent.
When exactly was that? Republicans ran "Mittens" Romney in 2012 (and John McCain in 2008). Two men whose adherence to institutional norms is irreproachable. Yet, as Vice President, Joe Biden said that Romney would put Black people “back in chains.” That was after prominent Democrats spent years claiming Bush “stole” the 2000 and 2004 elections. https://freebeacon.com/elections/terry-mcauliffe-championed-...
Then Trump won in a fair election in 2016, and Republicans won the House by a million and a half votes. Democrats went completely ape-shit at the emergence of Trump, and the media, unelected bureaucrats, etc., all shredded institutional norms in response to him. Clinton claimed he was an “illegitimate President.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum.... The rhetoric convinced half of Democrats that Putin had “tampered with vote tallies” to get Trump elected: https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/815256370958237696?s=2...
All the crazy stuff from conservatives--the election denialism, etc.--came in response to that.
> Further, Trump being elected happened nearly a decade after the emergence of the Tea Party, a batshit insane movement.
There's nothing "batshit insane" about the Tea Party. They're just the ideological wing of the party, just like the AOC/Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. The Tea Party did nothing outside of established procedures.
> Abandonment of institutional values? Like refusing to even try negotiating legislation with any resemblance of good faith to do good by the citizens of the country?
The parties obviously disagree about what's "good" for the country. “Not doing what Democrats want” isn’t a breach of political norms.
In the U.S., the primary lawmaking body is the House. Democrats lost that in 2010 by almost 6 million votes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_House_of_Re.... Republicans have no obligation to move forward on Obama's legislative priorities when they control the House, just as Democrats had no obligation to move forward on Trump's legislative priorities when they won control of the House in 2018.
> Like the explosion of the use of the filibuster in 2009?
The explosion in the filibuster was done by Democrats at the end of Bush's last two years: https://www.senate.gov/legislative/cloture/clotureCounts.htm. It was double in 07-08 compared to 05-06. It was no higher in Obama's first two years than in Bush's last two years. The filibuster is a red herring in the last six years of Obama's term, because Democrats didn't control the House and couldn’t win a majority for their legislative agenda anyway.
Remember, the filibuster is a legislative rule that can be overturned by a simple majority vote of the Senate, which Democrats had from 2007 to 2014. They could have dropped the filibuster at any point during that 7-year span. They didn’t do it because it’s critical to their strategy.
> Like refusing to bring a Supreme Court justice nomination to a vote on the floor of the Senate?
This is the only thing that comes close to qualifying as a norm violation.
The history of allegations of vote rigging goes back to the 19th century; there were loud, public allegations regarding at least Kennedy, Clinton, Bush, and Obama before Trump. What was notable, of course, about Trump's rigging claims is that they were accompanied by an actual effort to overturn the election, something that has no precedent. That wasn't the "elites"; that was an outsider effort.
Election denialism clearly isn't a reaction to a rejection of institutional norms by elites, unless we're talking about elites during the time of Tilden.
I might agree with you about the filibuster, the Tea Party (bad, but not batshit), and the refusal to confirm Garland. But that doesn't help your argument, which is I think fatally broken.
When Terry McAuliffe became chairman of the DNC, he said that "Katherine Harris, Jeb Bush, Jim Baker, and the Supreme Court ... tampered with the results" of the 2000 election. At the 2004 DNC Convention, he said that Republicans "stole" the 2000 election: https://twitter.com/TeamYoungkin/status/1442488094301822980.
Comparably prominent figures on the Republican side were not saying similar things about Clinton or Obama. Unlike Hilary Clinton said about Trump, McCain and Romney never said Obama was an "illegitimate" President.
> What was notable, of course, about Trump's rigging claims is that they were accompanied by an actual effort to overturn the election, something that has no precedent. That wasn't the "elites"; that was an outsider effort.
Sure. Trump is worse than anything Democrats did from 2000-2018. Certainly individually, possibly in the aggregate.
> Election denialism clearly isn't a reaction to a rejection of institutional norms by elites, unless we're talking about elites during the time of Tilden.
Trump's ability to deny the legitimacy of the election and maintain the support of the same voters who nominated Mittens is absolutely a reaction to elites rejecting institutional norms. For two decades, CNN sanctioned Democrats' election lies instead of condemning them.
Then came 2016, when Democrat-voting federal employees declared war on Trump--the duly elected President--through the "Resistance." If you wanted to convince the American public that the "deep state" exists and that the rules have already been thrown out the window--to make it trivial to draw comparisons between DC and the Capitol from "The Hunger Games"--you could not have picked a better way to do it.
Again: that case is that there is nothing new about claims that elections were stolen, but that there is clearly something new about a President literally attempting (in more than one way) to rig an election after losing.
As it happens, I agree with you (or at least, the professors who taught you this at Northwestern) about the 2000 election --- that is, that it was correctly decided. But not only did Terry McAuliffe believe 2000 was wrongly decided, so did almost half the Supreme Court. And despite all that, there was a peaceful transfer of power, and not a whisper from the Democratic party that any of the institutions of government be bent or subverted to "correct" the result.
You haven't provided any evidence to connect obstinate federal employees to Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and so I don't think I need to address that point. I don't agree with you about those obstinate employees (obstinate employees brought Nixon down, after all), but that doesn't matter.
The idea that the Democrats are somehow responsible for Trump's effort to literally rig the 2020 election is a strange hill to die on. I don't think many reasonable people would be sympathetic to the argument.
The references to “they” throughout the speech is usually to Romney and Walker, sometimes to Republicans generally: “Ladies and gentlemen, Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan are running on a theme that they announced at their announcement -- and I'm not being cynical about this -- this when I say they say, quote, we're running to restore the dreams and the greatness of this country. What they didn't tell you in that announcement.”
The immediately preceding text is: “Look at what they value and look at their budget and what they're proposing. Romney wants to let the -- he said in the first hundred days he's going to let the big banks once again write their own rules -- (audience murmurs) -- unchain Wall Street.”
As far as I am concerned, Tea Party acted in a capacity within the institution. The stuff we have seen under Trump including leaking secret military orders just to bring Trump down shows an absurd amount of collusion of institutional bureaucracy, media, corporate powers and security forces (such as FBI) which was unthinkable a decade ago and erodes the core values and credibilities of those institutions. For example, a decade ago FBI was a revered institution by conservatives who would go at length to support its over reaching acts and its the liberals who would question them. How did the table turn so bad that FBI is now actively being used as a force to silence opposition arresting anyone they like in the middle of night in their underwear while inviting media camera crews?
The labor movement always had a socially reactionary underbelly. My hypothesis: it wasn't bad economic times that activated Obama-Trump voters. It was, rather, good economic times that triggered those voters to flip from labor-first to identity-first. The tension was always there. This is why the Tea Party fizzled and why Romney couldn't activate the switch -- reactionary blue collar folks knew intuitively that those movements weren't "on their side". But by 2016 a bombastic billionaire (also obviously not on their side) could be excused because the economy was good enough to at last put identity first.
I grew up in a suburb that flipped and my wife is from a mid-sized non-metro city that also flipped. Obama Trump voters are substantially all of our social circle.
A lot happened, but honestly, "youtube's algorithm and super effective conservative media" is probably the best explanation in over 1/2 of the roughly 3 dozen anecdotal cases. It's just pure identity.
Some blame Obama for outsourcing and the GFC, but that's mostly noise. First of all, the major factory that closed wasn't outsourced. It closed because the company was wildly mismanaged, and was not replaced with a foreign factory. Also, this happened five years before the GFC and Obama's election. Most of the folks in our circles remained employed throughout that GFC and all of them did very well from 2010 on-wards.
They're currently all doing very well financially; far better than the late 20s/early 30s city dwellers whose conversations I overhear in the coffee shop. Red America can afford single family homes with big yards, saves for retirement, and just generally lives a very comfortable life unimaginable in blue cities. With jobs in law enforcement, trucking, and in hospitals which don't require even an associate's degree. It's really the American dream -- graduate from high school, six weeks of training, and you're making enough to afford a house and kids and retirement within a couple years.
The resentment and utter hatred of liberals is visceral and real. Pretending it's economic is bullshit cover. Tell someone sharing a bedroom in NYC that their counterpart with less education, who works fewer hours, and lives in a SFH with a pool hates them because of the unfair economic spoils of the former.
Also, the economy was doing extremely well in 2016. Economics is now top-of-mind, but it didn't even come close to motivating them to vote for Trump in 2016. That was pure identity politics.
Our elites—I don’t mean that pejoratively, but descriptively—used to adhere to institutional values. When I joined a prominent NYC law firm 10 years ago nobody commented on the fact that it was named after someone who argued the pro-segregation other side of Brown v. Board. The institution, not only of the firm but the legal process itself-where even segregationists are entitled to their day in court—was a credo that transcended individual politics or individual notions of “justice” or “human rights.”
That flipped sometime in the last decade. Our institutions have been overtaken my millenarianism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millenarianism. It’s a belief system that transcends institutional values—in the law, the media, everywhere.
Do you remember “The Resistance?” Where Clinton-supporting government employees pledged to work within the bureaucracy to defeat the agenda of the duly elected President—their boss? The craziness we’ve been seeing from conservatives lately is a reaction to that total abandonment of institutional values.