From an Empty Party About an Empty Man
It’s finally here. Today is the day so many liberals have been desperately hoping for. It’s taken three years and tens of thousands of posts. At some point today Donald Trump will be formally impeached by the United States Congress.
Online, people with no conception of power or political economy, the #Resistance, are celebrating for some reason.
Which is still a little strange given that the majority of them seem to be well aware that there’s really no chance it will result in consequences for the President or any of his staff.
One could argue that even the fleeting, symbolic victory over Trump is cause for celebration, but it has little if any material impact on political reality. This isn’t a unique or even particularly interesting view.
In fact, for the duration of the impeachment proceedings it seems as if the majority of the public, with the exception of extremely online political fandoms, have been ambivalent at best. This is only the third time in the history of the country a President will have been impeached, and yet most people don’t seem to give a shit.
Why exactly is that? For all the TV and news coverage, and all the #Resistance and MAGA posters online it doesn’t seem to be taking up much mental space in the real world. To the point that even NPR has noticed, and they’re not exactly the quickest on the uptake.
After giving it some consideration, I’ve come up with a couple of fairly obvious, but what I think are satisfactory, hypotheses as to why.
It’s boring. I mean really boring.
If you’ve bothered tuning in to any of the proceedings you’ve immediately regretted it. The combination of formal procedure and the almost anti-sensational accusations make the hearings almost unbearably dull.
Funnily enough, this banal observation itself has been made quite literally thousands of times, and generated enormous amounts of angst from liberals, and given the MAGA crowd a way to dismissively hand wave the entire process.
Meanwhile, others in the course of their commentary, have knowingly or unknowingly hit upon a larger topic concerning the transformation of politics into entertainment, and how that link might be influencing perceptions of the process.
The next reason takes us from it being boring to one of the reasons it has been boring.
It didn’t address any of the issues people actually care about.
It really didn’t. No normal person gives a shit about whether or not Ukraine gets military aid from the US. The vast majority of Americans could not only not identify Ukraine on a map, they couldn’t tell you why they need weapons or other military support either.
Your average person would likely be interested in a wider ranging inquiry that looked into the most salient issues surrounding the President’s criminal behavior. Easily digestible and immediately obvious corruption like his personal profiting off of emoluments, nepotism in appointments, child internment camps, or literally any of the dozens of well documented and brazen crimes.
While soliciting an investigation into a potential election opponent is egregious, it probably isn’t egregious enough for people who’ve already internalized doubts about the previous claims of coordinated foreign interference that went unproven in the Mueller Report and Russiagate more broadly. To anyone only keeping half an eye on this stuff, it probably seems like a weak retread of a previously failed attack.
Add to that the investigation asked for by Trump was into Joe Biden and son, and we come to our final hypothesis.
It’s one group of corrupt and malicious politicians attacking another for political gain to the benefit of no one.
In the context of all of the things they could have impeached Trump for and didn’t, an investigation into Joe Biden and his son comes off as itself myopic and politically motivated. Which it is. If Nancy Pelosi and team won’t lift a finger to impeach over family separation, but they pull a 180 the second Trump starts targeting their primary frontrunner, it gets pretty hard to draw distinctions between motivations.
When almost half of all eligible voters sat out the 2016 presidential cycle, it strains credulity that they’d be motivated to engage with impeachment when the dynamic of the corrupt elites fighting it out for their own benefit is being reproduced.
For this reason, if no other, Democrats should have pursued the maximal impeachment position. The process, from the beginning, has been a tactical one. Nobody believes there has been even a slight chance that Trump would be removed from office. Impeachment has always been a political vehicle for whipping up the base, and making a case to the American public ahead of the 2020 election.
I think, at this point, it’s clear that Democrats have punted what might have been an excellent opportunity to damage Trump ahead of the election while grinding the gears of Congress to a halt in the process.
By making the impeachment proceedings aggressively boring and failing to address any of the issues that normal people might actually care about they’ve ended up only deepening the impression that they are both feckless and corrupt themselves.
It’s truly astonishing the sheer number of rakes they’ve managed to step on throughout the entirety of this process, and I’m sure they’re far from done. Merry Impeachment 😎🔫.
Jean Krill is is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His writing navigates the many disparate visions of a radically better future.