{"id":38338,"date":"2019-12-03T08:51:42","date_gmt":"2019-12-03T16:51:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=38338"},"modified":"2019-12-03T08:51:42","modified_gmt":"2019-12-03T16:51:42","slug":"the-founders-and-the-demagogue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2019\/12\/03\/the-founders-and-the-demagogue\/","title":{"rendered":"The Founders and the Demagogue"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bob Bauer, a trusted Obama advisor, has written a fascinating<\/font> editorial on how the founding fathers predicted Donald Trump, Fuhrer of the Republican Reich, but failed to provide the necessary tools to get rid of him.  Here is enough of that editorial for you to get the gist of it.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\"1203Demogogue\" <\/p>\n

Donald Trump\u2019s Republican congressional allies are throwing up different defenses against impeachment and hoping that something may sell. They say that he didn\u2019t seek a corrupt political bargain with Ukraine, but that if he did, he failed, and the mere attempt is not impeachable. Or that it is not clear that he did it, because the evidence against him is unreliable \u201chearsay.\u201d <\/p>\n

It\u2019s all been very confusing. But the larger story \u2014 the crucial constitutional story \u2014 is not the incoherence of the president\u2019s defense. It is more that he and his party are exposing limits of impeachment as a response to the presidency of a demagogue<\/strong>. <\/p>\n

The founders feared the demagogue, who figures prominently in the Federalist Papers as the politician who, possessing \u201cperverted ambition,\u201d pursues relentless self-aggrandizement \u201cby the confusions of their country.\u201d The last of the papers, Federalist No. 85, linked demagogy to its threat to the constitutional order \u2014 to the \u201cdespotism\u201d that may be expected from the \u201cvictorious demagogue<\/strong>.\u201d This \u201cdespotism\u201d is achieved through systematic lying to the public, vilification of the opposition and, as James Fenimore Cooper wrote in an essay on demagogues, a claimed right to disregard \u201cthe Constitution and the laws\u201d in pursuing what the demagogue judges to be the \u201cinterests of the people.\u201d<\/strong> <\/p>\n

Should the demagogue succeed in winning the presidency, impeachment in theory provides the fail-safe protection. And yet the demagogue\u2019s political tool kit, it turns out, may be his most effective defense. It is a constitutional paradox: The very behaviors that necessitate impeachment supply the means for the demagogue to escape it<\/strong>. <\/p>\n

As the self-proclaimed embodiment of the American popular will, the demagogue portrays impeachment deliberations as necessarily a threat to democracy, a facade for powerful interests arrayed against the people that only he represents. Critics and congressional opponents are traitors. Norms and standing institutional interests are fraudulent<\/strong>… [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <NY Times<\/a>><\/font><\/p>\n

I strongly urge you to click through and read this editorial in it’s entirety.  It is too valuable to miss.<\/font><\/p>\n

If the Trump Residency survives the 2020 election, I strongly question the survival of freedom in the US.<\/font><\/p>\n

RESIST!!<\/font><\/h1>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bob Bauer, a trusted Obama advisor, has written a fascinating editorial on how the founding fathers predicted Donald Trump, Fuhrer of the Republican Reich, but failed to provide the necessary tools to get rid of him.  Here is enough of that editorial for you to get the gist of it. Donald Trump\u2019s Republican congressional allies […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3712,3744,3743],"class_list":["post-38338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-donald-trump","tag-gop-fascism","tag-republican-reich","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38338\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}