The first Republican candidates debate has come and gone. It’s not particularly useful to comment on everyone; Ron DeSantis is the one who will survive to the primaries with realistic prospects for the nomination. I thought DeSantis did well, although of course he could have made a greater impact if he’d been able to field more of the questions. I did appreciate being informed of what time of day Governor Burgum of North Dakota used to shower as a young feller (night, not morning). Some things you might have known you didn’t know if you thought about them, but I hadn’t thought about that. So I was grateful to have that unknown-unknown knowledge void filled.
That said, my principal comment on the debate is that it ignored the mastodon in the room: the state of American government in 2023, and how it’s heading for a great train wreck for the Republic.
The debate questions focused on some important issues. But not one of them was as important to America’s future as the ones that went unaddressed. The debate had an unreal, irrelevant atmosphere because it proceeded as if three aspects of our current situation don’t exist.
Here are the three.
One, the previous president, Donald Trump, has been indicted in kangaroo-court cases that had to be concocted against him through ellipsis and bootstrapping, because there’s no evidence for crimes that actually exist in statute. Even with the very few single counts that can be credibly said to have definitions in relevant statutes, the evidence adduced doesn’t meet the burden of the definition in law. (E.g., the Georgia case that Trump engaged in a corrupt enterprise to … uhh … challenge the outcome in Georgia of the 2020 election. It’s perfectly legal to challenge an election. It’s provided for in law in every state, including Georgia, and the evidence for how Trump mounted the challenge is public knowledge and is also a set of perfectly legal acts.)
Presumably because of that, we’ve already seen judges play games with attorney-client privilege and the conventions of executive privilege and latitude for prosecutors. The defendant’s lawyers are being threatened by the institutions whose goodwill they need to remain in their profession.
The major media make short shrift of these startling moves, which are so contrary to the rule of law – if, that is, the media acknowledge them at all. The defendant, meanwhile, is subjected to gag orders while the prosecutors are abetted in “leaking” whatever will put their narrative in the best light. That includes relentlessly deceptive talking points.
We’re watching the deck being stacked against a defendant, live and in color, and there doesn’t seem to be anything to do about it.
In the last 10 days we’ve also seen judges set trial dates that are obviously intended to have a political impact in terms of the 2024 election schedule.
All of this is being honchoed by the agencies of a president of the opposing political party, who as far as we can tell today will be his party’s candidate in 2024.
The corrupt nature of this is mind-boggling. Manifestly, it is not merely about President Trump. It’s convenient for a number of purposes to operate on the premise that it is merely about Trump, who is an unusually polarizing figure and often hard to defend on grounds of rudeness and bombast. But Trump is a distractor. The real issue is the abusive weaponization of government against a political opponent.
That comes into sharpened focus with aspect two of the state of the Republic. That aspect is the weaponization of government already underway against numerous ordinary citizens whom the government effectively views, on the model of Stalinism, as enemies of the state.
The J6 riot defendants who have been denied constitutional rights and hounded well past any justifiable level of detention and punishment are one obvious group.
Many of them, though not all, were legitimately guilty of misdemeanor infractions during the surge into the U.S. Capitol on the afternoon of 6 January 2021. But not one of them should still be in detention for a misdemeanor. Even most with felony charges should already be out of confinement on probation. Some number of the defendants never entered the Capitol and in fact did nothing but show up outside it for the “peaceful, patriotic” protest advised by then-President Trump. They shouldn’t have even been tracked down afterward in their homely, unthreatening lives across America, much less arrested.
As with the concocted cases against Trump, a very small number of defendants has been indicted for conspiracy to perpetrate an insurrection. That case is thin, and it applies only to those few. No connection whatsoever to an “insurrection” plot has been established for the hundreds of other defendants. (In other words, there simply were not enough people involved in a plot to make it into anything resembling an “insurrection.”)
Tellingly, a shroud of secrecy surrounds federal agency processing of this whole event. The vast majority of security camera video from the Capitol building on J6 has never been released to the public; key decisionmakers including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi have never been deposed by anyone; and the House committee assembled by Democrats in the last Congress to investigate J6 destroyed many of its files so that they would not be available to Republicans in the incoming House in 2023.
The travesty of weaponized law is a growing stain on U.S. federal institutions, but went unaddressed in the GOP debate.
But the lawless J6 project to create a narrative about an “insurrection” isn’t the only instance of weaponization. Others include the DOJ and FBI labeling of school parents and pro-life demonstrators as “domestic violent extremists,” or DVEs. The Americans being vilified are exercising First Amendment rights, and in virtually all cases are doing so peacefully.
There is also a whole area of proclaiming Americans to be security threats, and at the very least unemployable, if they question the instant orthodoxies announced by authorities on topics like COVID-19.
This area of government weaponization has turned out to entail direct censorship of social media by federal agencies. But it also involves requiring, as an “equal opportunity” condition of employment, affirmative agreement to disputable claims on a host of topics from transgender ideology to pieties about “white supremacism” and the intersectional aspects of climate change.
This latter is in spite of the fact that equal opportunity law doesn’t even address such bases for judging whether equal opportunity is being enforced. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four has come to life.
Aspects one and two go hand in hand. They represent different facets of the weaponization of government against freedom of speech, conscience, religion, and political choice. Bringing them about involves the worst of things: utter corruption of due process and the rule of law. The two aspects are an emergency for the Republic that went entirely unaddressed in the GOP debate.
The third aspect was probably bound to go unaddressed, because few will name it for what it is. Certainly not Fox News. This aspect is the glaringly obvious fact that Americans don’t actually know who is governing us from the White House today.
The current White House is extremely active on a number of fronts, spending money, writing new rules, suspending other rules, initiating costly and invasive projects both at home and abroad. The effects of its activism are ever-present in the lives of the people, largely through soaring inflation, the interlinked cost of energy, and border insecurity and urban crime. But that’s not all. At the height of the COVID-19 mandates in 2021 and 2022, regulatory overdrive in the White House was getting medical treatment withheld from the public and millions of people forced to choose between taking a yet-unapproved vaccine and losing their jobs.
Yet the presidential figurehead, Joe Biden, is manifestly unable to function in his elected office, exhibiting significant loss of cognition and stamina. He was already doing so back in 2020, when the lack of campaign events for him, and the extremely weird nature of the few that were held, were blamed on COVID-19 precautions.
In 2023, there’s no pretending that he is functioning normally, that he is making the decisions of his office, or that there’s a “president” in office whose identity we know and can hold accountable.
Little thought has been given to the implications of this. Again, “President Biden” is the opposite of a do-nothing presidency. A very great deal is being done on its watch. What we don’t know, on an official and accountable basis, is who is doing it.
That leads to an obvious question that few are bothering to ask. What guarantees us that the Democratic candidate in 2024, whether it’s Joe Biden or someone else, will actually function as the president if he is elected? If it’s Gavin Newsom, how can we be sure we’ll actually be governed by Gavin Newsom, and not by whoever is making decisions for the White House today?
With Joe Biden, the accountability factor has already been broken. I suggest pondering this, at the very least: that if a Republican is not elected in 2024, we will have no way of being sure who’s making decisions for the White House.
It’s possible (even probable) that whoever is making those decisions will fight an internecine battle inside the Democratic Party for the 2024 nomination. In other words, a Gavin Newsom would have to either fight for his independence (which observers of Newsom would understand to be unlikely), or agree to carry out the policies of whoever’s making decisions for the Biden presidency.
The big nomination fights involving Bernie Sanders and his sizable constituency in the last two presidential cycles – 2020 and 2016 – remind us that something akin to this has already been going on in the Democratic Party. It’s by no means a stretch to imagine it could happen. Moreover, if you know anything about Newsom, as California voters do, you know that he would come in at a significant disadvantage in terms of the heft of his political resources versus those of a signal-caller for the current Biden White House. I don’t think Newsom would win a primary battle for independence.
On the other hand, if the Republican is elected, the current decisionmaker(s) will seek aggressively to undermine the independence of a GOP president. They are likely, as the Russiagate hoaxers did against Trump, to attack an incoming Republican from before Day 1, and seek to render him non-viable as a decisionmaker from the outset.
There is no such thing as an unfilled vacuum for the most powerful, most highly-leveraged political office on earth. Even if that weren’t a truth that is never contravened, the evidence tumbles upon us daily that there isn’t a vacuum in America’s Oval Office. The bustling executive activity that produces effect after effect tells us that while Joe Biden quite obviously is not functioning as president, someone is. (It’s clearly not Kamala Harris, of course. The point is, it’s not anyone who was elected in 2020.)
It cannot be overstressed that this situation will not simply correct itself. The chain of accountability has been broken. If there’s no prior acknowledgment of that, and thoughtful public discussion of it, there is no such outcome as electing a GOP president in 2024 and having everything revert to “normal.”
I think candidates could show that they understand the issue by articulating policies that would be designed to address it – even if highly-edited debate moderators are never going to ask them direct questions about it. The candidates could also refer to it in a package of talking points for their campaigns about all three of the aspects discussed here.
The first two are about weaponization; the third is about accountability, transparency, and basic honesty in forming and operating government. We should be hearing about those quantities from the GOP candidates. If we try to ignore those very-present problems and irresponsibly wish them away, things will only get worse.
Understand this: the problems are with us because people and interests are invested in malevolent, malfunctioning, non-transparent government.
The problems will not just go away. That is impossible. It’s probable, in fact, that foreign interests – possibly in China, but not only there – are a factor in the investment.
The destructive problems of government weaponization against the people and loss of accountability between the act of election and the policy decisionmaking that ensues have to be countered head-on. They have to be acknowledged for what they are. There is no other option, if we want to keep the Republic.
Feature image: The first Republican presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle, 23 Aug 2023. Fox News video.
The Optimistic Conservative 
I skipped the debate as useless. I’m voting for the GOP nominee, who will be Trump. DeSantis’ time will come, just not yet.
It is interesting to note that Obama, unlike every other president after the end of his term, remains in DC. Despite not having any historical attachment to that city. Chicago, sure, Hawaii, absolutely, even Kansas would be a more natural fit. Though I think the ruling cabal is bigger even than Obama.