Ilya Repin, Ivan the Terrible and his Son, 1885.

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Dan Nexon has a very good post over at LGM:

At some level, this is just another example of how much the United States has depended on informal norms and formal – but fundamentally toothless – guidelines to prevent abuse of executive power. As Julia Azari pointed out back in 2018, the strength of those norms, in turn, depends on a commitment to liberal democratic values.

This commitment is what the Trump and the Trump administration lacks. It’s one reason why the old view – which I admit to holding – that the ‘character’ of a president doesn’t matter turns out to be true only within certain parametric limits. A president can be a morally compromised so long as they retain a sense of obligation to basic responsibilities of the presidency. These include, for example, taking into consideration the interests of the country as a whole, maintaining the rule of law, and upholding some baseline of democratic values.

What happens when a president’s character flaws cross these bounds? Instead of 20,000 to 40,000 people killed in a pandemic, we get over 130,000 and counting – if we can count, because that president may decide the best way to handle their failure is to do their best to hide it. We also get abuses of power, from minor but corrosive violations of the Hatch Act, to the manipulation of emergency powers to circumvent the separation of powers, to the kinds of deployment of internal security forces we’ve seen since the outbreak of the #GeorgeFloyd protests.

It’s not just the character of the president, or of his personal swamp of cronies and relatives. It’s also the overwhelming majority of the Republican party (I won’t waste your time by rehashing the contents of literally hundreds of previous posts, you can just go read them yourself). We’re stuck in an extraordinarily dangerous position. The United States has a two-party system, but only one of its major parties is built on an electoral coalition that benefits from more, rather than less, liberal democracy. So instead of the two parties trying to outbid one another when it comes to democratic values, democratic values themselves become politicized.

Please do read the whole thing.

Clearly, going forward, it’s going to be necessary to codify, in statute, a lot of rules that previously worked on the “honor system,” or as informal norms, or as gentlemen’s agreements, or as simply “the way things are done.” Just about every day of Trump’s campaign and administration have shown the weaknesses of these informal rules. Trump has revealed (and exploited) the weak points in the system. This criminal administration–and it’s enablers, especially but not only, GOP members of Congress–have highlighted the cracks in the foundation.

Plus: “it’s also clear that Trump’s little green men aren’t being deployed in a good faith way. People are being grabbed and detained as they walk home from protests. Even if legal, the totality of behavior is authoritarian by disposition. If normalized, it invites worse to come. Especially since, despite the record of the last two months – in which we’ve seen federal and local authorities repeatedly and verifiably lie to justify their abuses against protestors – plenty of people continue to take the word of law enforcement at face value.”

1. Sophie Vershbow: why can’t I read books right now?

2. How treadmill running differs from running outside.

3. On the life and death of Takaya, a solitary sea wolf in British Columbia.

4. The Paradox of Karl Popper.

5. Chris Plante on The Last of Us 2, game design, and ludonarrative dissonance (i.e., the disconnect between game narrative and game play).

Lord Almighty, A.D. 2018 felt like ten years.

Good riddance to 2018, and good luck to us all in the year to come.

Joseph Farquharson, The shortening winter’s day is near a close, 1903.

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

A panel of three district court judges has rejected a Republican bid to block the new Pennsylvania congressional voting map.

Also: the U.S. Supreme Court has decided not to get involved.

Says Kevin Drum:

If you’re in a pessimistic mood, this ruling doesn’t mean much since the Republican case was really weak from the start. If you’re in an optimistic mood, it might suggest that the Supreme Court is becoming less tolerant of blatant gerrymandering.

Image Source: Pennsylvania Courts, via Wikipedia.

1. Kevin Drum on why Japanese drivers don’t want to buy American cars.

2. Interesting NPR story on businesses in Dalton, Georgia, that are worried about how the Administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants will affect their workforce.

3. Steve Saideman asks: when will aging professors retire and (hopefully) make room for some new folks?

Kitty Lange Kielland, Fra Jæren, 1878.

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Henri Matisse, Les toits de Collioure, 1905.

Source: Wikipedia.

1. An underwater city engineered by octopuses.

2. Using the writing process to clarify your thinking.

3. From back in August: Nicholas Kristof: How Rome survived Caligula.