Failing to Update Our Understanding of the New Political Reality (with a Discussion of the Hunter Biden Pardon)

The country and the world have had four weeks to process and try to explain the outcome of the 2024 US elections, but the analysis is not getting any better.  Joe Scarborough's hot take on the morning after the election that it was a "red wave" unlike anything since Reagan's 1984 landslide was obviously wrong even before the later vote-counting turned Donald Trump into "Mr. 49.8."  (In a November 22 column, I called Trump "Mr. 49.9" but promised that I would adjust that moniker as appropriate.)  All of the other nonsense -- blaming "the left" for caring about pronouns, and on an on -- has been as predictable as it is infuriating.

And none of that misanalysis has changed or been updated, even given nearly a month to reconsider the situation and pay attention to something called data.  Unfortunately, that failure to update opinions in the face of a fearful new world is not limited to assessments of the election itself.  Despite the Herculean efforts of Democrats, some decent Republicans, and many others to warn that democracy and the rule of law would be doomed by Trump's return to the White House -- and even though Trump's cabinet picks have been rightly mocked and scrutinized for showing just how bad things will become -- the political conversation has lapsed back into comfortable nonsense.

Yes, I will talk at length below about the reaction to President Biden's pardon of his son, but that is only the most baroque example of how the conventional wisdom has reverted to form without missing a beat.  It is as if everyone decided not to notice that their smartphones now require a system update (or, perhaps more accurately, a new kind of power adapter) and continue to act as if the old system is just fine.  That can only last until the looming new reality finally becomes impossible to ignore (one hopes).  In the meantime, clown time is not over.

A week ago, an op-ed in The Washington Post purported to explain "[w]hy the resistance went quiet after Trump’s victory."  Written by a little-known Post columnist with a classic D.C.-insider pedigree, the piece makes what amounts to a rather explosive accusation.  The reason that Democrats have not been talking about Trump's threat to democracy in the weeks after November 5, the author confidently asserts, is that they never truly believed what they were saying.  It was all a political stunt, you see, and now that they have lost, they have no reason to continue lying.

In a vain attempt to support this scurrilous claim, the author points out that Biden "welcomed the would-be dictator to the White House and seemed in good spirits, pledging to do everything he could to make sure the president-elect was accommodated."  Harris, meanwhile, "did not seem overly troubled by the prospect — for the first time in U.S. history — of a fascist in the most powerful office in the land.  Instead, she offered a succession of motivational platitudes."  The op-ed writer calls this a "dishonorable surrender," adding that this "sudden softening" somehow "raises questions about whether Democrats ever truly believed their own words — or whether they were engaging in a cynical effort to motivate and even shame Americans into voting against Trump in the absence of compelling reasons to vote for their candidate."

Note that the final sentence of that last quotation is a now-standard rewriting of history.  The Harris/Walz campaign in fact ran on all kinds of affirmative reasons to vote for her, from economic policies to reproductive rights and beyond.  More than that libel, however, the "sudden" change in Democrats' tone is easy to explain.  Never once does the author even consider the most obvious reason to act differently: Now that we know Trump will be in the Oval Office again, it no longer would do any good to try to convince people that Trump will shred the rule of law and install himself as a dictator (happily abetted by Republicans).

In fact, it is better to speak as if the worst-case is not in the process of happening, hoping that maybe treating Trump's transition period as at least semi-normal might avoid further enraging the man who promised to take revenge on everyone who has angered him.  That hope is probably futile, but with the election in the rearview mirror, that is what we are reduced to.

But the op-ed writer is certain that people who were truly sincere when they declared Trump a fascist would be rioting in the streets as we speak.  Because that is not happening, we supposedly have proof positive that they were lying all along.  Here is the most twisted bit of the piece:

We are not revolutionaries. America, for all its flaws, is still a democracy. And in democracies, there probably shouldn’t be revolutionaries. There are citizens. And that should be enough.  Luckily, the alternative to protest is as obvious as it is urgent. We should allow Trump’s victory to chasten us, to force us to reflect on why so many of our fellow Americans cast their lot with Trump despite being well aware of his flaws. And then we must focus not on inchoate expressions of rage but on persuading voters to vote differently next time around.

In an essay in which the author dared to called Joe Biden "endearing[,]" that bit of treacle is more than a bit much.  Who is being touchingly naive here?  Yes, America is still a democracy.  It will not be one for much longer, however, and the point of the worries about Trump putting himself above the law is that there will be no "next time around."  Yet we are told, in essence, that because people are not preemptively rioting -- which would create a problem not for Trump but for Biden -- the entire argument that Trump will end constitutional democracy was dishonest.

I once heard a history professor tell his students that, when it comes to political protest, "People, generally speaking, do not want to get shot."  (He spoke in a soft English accent, which gave the understatement additional impact.)  Even on January 20, 2025, there will probably not be people pouring into the streets to risk getting shot.  And even when Trump takes the first (of many) steps to consolidate his political power, the man who in 2020 tried but failed to get "his" generals to have troops shoot protesters will have both the inclination and the lack of restraint from his advisors to do his worst.  Again, people, generally speaking, do not want to get shot.  That is why dictatorships persist.

But that op-ed is not only an especially extreme type of group defamation, accusing people of being liars because they are now trying to mitigate damage after having had only a few weeks even to begin to work out what opposition to the onset of fascism should look like.  The man who accused Harris of relying on platitudes offers nothing but.  Why?  Only a person who is fiercely motivated to deny reality could say that the change in the conversation from the day before the election until the day after the election means that Trump was never the threat that Democrats have said he is.

Where else are we seeing this stubborn and unshakable insistence that we can go back to normal?  The freak-out over the Hunter Biden pardon, of course.  Readers who are interested in a careful consideration of the history of pardons, nepotism, and corruption will be treated to an excellent analysis of those issues and more from Professor Dorf here tomorrow.  That column will demonstrate that it is possible to have an adult discussion about this latest pardon.

Here, however, I want to focus on how the immediate reaction from far too many Democrats shows that they are simply unwilling to adjust to the new reality.  The Republicans' hyperventilating reactions are not even worth comment, but on the non-Trump side, it was all so predictable.  Words like "pearl-clutching," "fainting couches," and "getting the vapors" have become cliches from overuse, but they are all applicable here.

Tim Miller of The Bulwark, a never-Trumper who came out strongly for Harris/Walz, looked like someone had died after receiving the news of the pardon.  Shock and dismay followed.  And the mainstream press did exactly what we would expect, with The Post quickly running a "Dems worry" non-opinion article: "President Biden faces criticism over controversial pardon of his son Hunter: Some Democrats fear that Trump will use the pardon to criticize the justice system and bolster his own efforts to remake it. "

Meanwhile, The Post's editors weighed in with this opinion piece: "Hunter Biden pardon undermines Democrats’ defense of justice system."  Their former colleague Ruth Marcus dished out another bowl of pudding with this: "Biden had good reason to pardon Hunter. Except he promised he’d never do it." All of the news feeds up here in Canada emphasized that Biden had promised not to pardon his son.  The hypocrisy!

This, however, brings us back to one of my favorite lines: "When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?"  Commonly (but probably inaccurately) attributed to John Maynard Keynes, the hardly novel idea is of course that consistency for the sake of consistency is foolish.  "I believe in taxing the rich" can be consistent with supporting specific policies that have the effect of reducing some rich people's taxes.  More starkly, "I'll always help my best friend" stops being a wonderful commitment and becomes morally indefensible when the friend commits a multiple homicide and asks for help in a coverup.

Stephen Colbert expressed one version of this idea when he said of the Biden-Biden pardon that "Joe is officially out of malarkeys, and by 'malarkeys' I mean 'fucks.'"  Notably, Colbert's very liberal audience cheered loudly at the news of the pardon, so at least some anti-Trumpers were not recoiling in horror.

But the essential point is that Biden would not have done this if he had run for reelection and won, nor would he have done it if Harris had won.  But the circumstances have changed, and obviously not merely because the Democrats lost.  I was fully expecting this, the only question being when Biden would make the announcement.

Why does this not bother me?  Because I have updated my operating system and recognize the new world in which we live.  The idea that this will "undermine Democrats' defense of [the] justice system," as the editors of The Post put it, would have a lot more oomph if there were any reason at all to believe that this will somehow cause what Trump and the Republicans will soon be doing to become even worse.  They might make noises about the pardon, but that will not change what they will actually do, which was always going to be terrible.  And even if future elections are not shams and we insist on using the old rules and expectations of political analysis, the idea that the pardon by a retired President of his only surviving son will have any resonance at all in 2026 or 2028 is laughable.

Essentially, Biden has said that although he would have been willing to sacrifice his son on the altar of upholding the rule of law, all bets are off now that the Republicans are having an orgy of lawlessness on that altar.  He is also correct that this prosecution -- which he could have shut down by replacing the Trump-appointed special prosecutor when Biden took office in 2021 -- was a political show trial all the way down.  Anyone not named Biden who did what Hunter Biden did would have faced a very different, more lenient form of justice.

But oh, the smarmy pronouncements ran thick.  No one does holier-than-thou more enthusiastically than Jon Stewart -- with a strangely inverse relationship between his level of certitude and the merits of the complaint -- and he did not fail to deliver last night.  Yes, the same man who explained the 2024 election results as if he were a Gingrich Republican -- "The election that we just had was a repudiation of the status quo, an overly-regulated system that is no longer responsive or delivering for the needs of the people." -- almost pulled a muscle last night as he wrung every last drop of moral outrage against Democrats out of the story.

Stewart devoted all but roughly the first two minutes of his 18-minute monologue to shouting at the Democrats for being inconsistent and thus purportedly giving "the people" no reason to trust them.  It was an exercise in false equivalence like few I have ever seen, and I have seen plenty.  Stewart actually used the "Biden took classified documents home, too," line, which was desperate even by Stewart's standards.

Here is just the first of many examples of the unctuousness on display last night (starting at the 2:45 mark): "Faith in the rule of law.  Finally -- [chef's kiss] -- Democrats have a moral perch from which they can judge without shame, hypocrisy, or nuance."

As a quick aside, what is "nuance" doing in that sentence?  By ruling out nuance, Stewart inadvertently reveals his childish belief in purity and absolute good or bad.  Then, after running a news clip about the pardon, Stewart said this: "Motherfucker!  We were so close."  After allowing that maybe a "narrow" pardon would have been acceptable, Stewart then riffed on his suspicions that the pardon was somehow too broad, insinuating that the Bidens were being cagey.  And I do mean insinuating, because there was no evidence or argument backing up that idea.  For a man who decries conspiracy theories, this was an odd moment.

Or how about at the 8:35 mark?  "Hypocrisy isn't illegal, nor is it particularly unusual in politics.  ...  The problem is the rest of the Democrats made Biden's pledge to not pardon Hunter the foundation of their defense of America, this grand experiment."  The last of several clips of Democrats invoking Biden's pledge not to issue a pardon was from MSNBC's Jen Psaki: "[T]he justice system that convicted his only surviving son is the same justice system that he's vowed to protect.  And if that doesn't tell you who Joe Biden is, I don't really know what does."  Putting on a Looney Tunes voice, Stewart snarked: "I think I know what does," then giggled.  He added: "And now, look at the dance Democrats have to do."

It only gets more inane from there.  After running clips of Democrats now defending Biden's decision, Stewart (at 10:37) says this:

Yes, yes, yes to everything you guys were saying, if you hadn't made Hunter Biden not receiving a pardon the Mason-Dixon Line of morality between Democrats and Republicans.  There's a big gap between "the law is the only thing that separates us from the animals," and "'the monkeys threw shit at me first.  I had no choice."  This is what Biden's decision has done.

All of this, however, was only a prelude to Stewart's grandiose finale (at 17:36):

Rules, loopholes, and norms.  The distance between the system the Democrats say they are revering, and the one that they're using when they need to is why people think it's rigged.  Use the rules, use the loopholes, fuck the norms, but also use it to help the people, not just those people related to you.  All of us are somebody's son or somebody's daughter, and we all need that break, too.

Again, not everyone's son or daughter was the target of a Republican smear campaign that led to a biased prosecution and overcharging of what are otherwise non-jailable offenses.  In fact, only one person's son was.  More importantly, however, "the system the Democrats say they are revering" is in fact the system that is now going out the window.  Past tense.  As I noted above, Biden would surely have continued to abide by the old rules if the old system were going to remain in place -- for purely political/electoral reasons, if nothing else.  It is simply inaccurate, however, to use the word "principled" to describe someone who would let his son go to prison when the principles that he would pretend to be defending are no longer operative.

Moreover, Stewart is correct that there is a big difference between "We are as pure as the driven snow" and "We got dirty because they threw shit on us, and we decided to respond."  But so what?  There is still an enormous difference between unilaterally disarming and being realistic.  Issuing one pardon under these most extraordinary of circumstances hardly seems like a gleeful swan dive into the cesspool.  As I noted above, Stewart's rant is a textbook example of false equivalence.

I am ripping into Stewart because he is in some ways uniquely wrong about all of this, but in too many ways he is different only in degree from the other non-Trumpists and Democrats who, as The Post sub-headline above put it, "fear that Trump will use the pardon to criticize the justice system and bolster his own efforts to remake it."  Are Democrats not going to be able to say that Trump should not have Nancy Pelosi arrested, because Joe Biden pardoned his son?  That the FBI should not harass and jail news reporters and editors, because the previous President used his constitutional pardon power in a personally harrowing one-off situation?  And "the people" are going to believe that both sides are equally wrong, all the time?

I phrased those last three sentences as rhetorical questions, but maybe they are not in fact rhetorical.  Perhaps people truly are that stupid, especially when led in that direction by the bedwetting brigade.  I continue to believe, however, that it is insulting and condescending for media and political types like Stewart and many others to say that regular people are so completely undiscerning.  In addition, I want to believe that it is inaccurate, but given that there will be no meaningful elections for the foreseeable future, it probably does not matter either way.