The Left Acts and the Right Reacts

This week we saw the Left act in the Trump indictment. But how will the Right react? Though the Left never seems to anticipate reactions, they always occur.  We look at governance, education, SCOTUS, Nixon, and even stolen elections to see a distinct pattern.  

Transcript

The Left Acts and the Right Reacts

April 2023

“Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough!”

 Karl Marx

“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”

Freidrich Engels

As the call, so is the echo

Russian Proverb

Karma is a bitch

American Proverb

“I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone - and I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward.”

Barack Obama 

A little context when Obama made these remarks back in 2014. When elected in 2008, Obama had the trifecta, the House of Representatives, and a veto-proof Senate of 60 Senators. Though perhaps not a majority liberal Supreme Court, with John Roberts, David Souter, and Anthony Kennedy comprising the so-called majority against four staunch liberals, Obama was not too worried about enacting his agenda constitutionally. By 2014, that had changed. He lost the House in 2010. The Senate Majority was whittled down to three seats, and though he could appoint two of his justices, he still had to contend with five Republican appointees. 

With much of his agenda stalled in the house, he became extra-constitutional. As NPR noted at the time, “since the start of the year, the president has announced three new economic “promise zones,” a college affordability initiative and a manufacturing research hub. These are all part of what the White House is calling a “Year of Action.” And they’re all things that didn’t require Congress to do anything — something the President makes a point of saying.

“I am going to be working with Congress where I can accomplish this, but I am also going to act on my own if Congress is deadlocked,” he said at an education event at the White House on Thursday. “I’ve got a pen to take executive actions where Congress won’t, and I’ve got a telephone to rally folks around the country on this mission.”

I used to tell my gloating liberal friends celebrating Obama’s action to watch out when a Republican president takes a similar approach of the executive branch only, separation of powers be damned, style of governance. After the likes of George W Bush or his father, they were not too worried, but I would note that President Cruz would not care, thinking of one of the most controversial Republicans of 2014. But, boy, I did not see what was coming. A figure that would make Cruz look like the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln.  

Trump issued Steel Tariffs under a dubious national security ploy – thinking Canada does not qualify. He tried to use funds allocated for other ventures to build a wall on the Southern border. His cabinet comprised a collection of “acting” secretaries so he could avoid Senate approvals. 

Trump blocked Twitter users, issued non-constitutional COVID executive orders, and bombed Syria without Congressional approval. Yet there was little governance differentiation to Obama’s actions. Reaction.   

In a previous podcast entitled the Reagan Reaction, I noted that the Left engaged in a rare moment of reaction. With the Reagan election in 1980, something broke among the progressive, liberal, Democratic Party mindset. In 1988 they were willing to sacrifice Gary Hart to a sex scandal but were comfortable with philanderer Bill Clinton just four years later. In the 1988 election, they supported Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis but, 20 years later, were willing to go all in on Illinois Senator Barack Obama. 

But Reagan himself was a reaction. For nearly 80 years, the progressives had acted, adding the Federal Reserve and innumerable regulatory bodies to the executive branch, Social Security and Medicare, a half dozen new executive departments, and the EPA. During this period, the “shadow government,” as Jonah Goldberg calls it, came into being. So why not the fourth branch in terms of a descriptor? Because a department, such as the SEC, can regulate, judge, and fine, the latter being taxation by another name. This is not a fourth branch; this is all the branches, a government unto itself. And from the Great Depression to 1980, it went largely unquestioned by anyone who mattered, including GOP presidents. But Reagan represented an existential threat to how they saw government, and after the election of 1988, they would do anything, support anybody, to break the conservative movement and regain traction. 

There was a time when the Supreme Court, despite having the power of judicial review established by the Marshall court in 1803, was not front page news for their terms. There were blights on their records noted by historians such as Dred Scott or Plessy V Ferguson. There were brighter days, such as Brown V Board of Education. But primarily, they existed in a semi-anonymous state. 

That ended with Griswold in the 1960s and the unconstitutional Roe in 1973. But, as I noted in a previous podcast, Patricia Brennan Washington Post Staff Writer writing about Justice William Brennan in 1996, wrote, “Brennan also believed that the meaning of the Constitution is to be found in the current day, not in the intent of its 18th-century creators, as his colleague Antonin Scalia believes.” But don’t take my word for it. Here’s the late, much-lamented lioness of the High Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a 1992 lecture: Roe “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue.”

After the spate of societal changing laws, and the eventual failure of the Great Society, the Left concluded they could not get an abortion through the legislatures, so they turned to the court. 

Conservatives, led by the Federal society, and finalizing the work with three justices selected by Trump, reacted by first getting the right justices on the court and then those justices removing Roe. Reaction. 

Speaking of the Great Society and the sixties in general, the 1968 election of Richard Nixon was a reaction. Nixon was one of six Americans to run for President, garner their party’s nomination, lose, then come back to win again. 

He was also the only one to do it in the 20th or 21st centuries. The others were Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Grover Cleveland. So, of course, we have an aspirant as of this writing, but we will address this aspect of Trump in another podcast. As for Nixon, he noted, “And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.” In this case, the silent majority is an unspecified large group of people in a country or group who do not express their opinions publicly. In this usage, it referred to those Americans who did not join in the large demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the time, who did not join the counterculture, and who did not participate in public discourse. Nixon and many others saw this group of Middle Americans as being overshadowed in the media by the more vocal minority. In other words, conservatives were doing business while the liberals marched in the streets. Not surprisingly, the term the silent majority preceded Nixon by half a century, employed in 1919 by Calvin Coolidge’s campaign for the 1920 presidential nomination. Coolidge saw himself as a bulwark against the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson. Reaction. 

In education, the left acts, and the right reacts. Let’s start with Critical Race Theory. Melissa Moschella of the Heritage Foundation explains, “Critical race theory has its roots in the Critical Theory of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School.” Moschella adds, “CRT grew out of the Critical Legal Studies movement of the 1970s and 1980s, a version of Critical Theory that argued that law is not truly impartial but a means by which elites maintain power and privilege. Critical race theorists such as the late Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado drew on this general approach. Still, they shifted their focus from social class to race, extending their critique beyond the legal arena.” 

So the Left develops CRT out of critical theory as an indictment of the American system of individual liberty and personal agency. Central among these is the claim that racism in the U.S. is pervasive and embedded in social structures, not an aberration from the norm or limited to the actions of a few racist people. As a result, values like legal neutrality, objectivity, color blindness, and meritocracy are viewed with suspicion. These principles are seen as means of perpetuating inherently racist legal, social, and economic systems.

One of the goals of those who favor CRT is to embed these principles into our schools, often without the approval, nee the knowledge, of parents. A popular outgrowth of CRT that has significantly influenced American education is the New York Times 1619 Project. This project is a rewriting of United States history in which the founding and history of our nation are portrayed as essentially based upon racism and slavery. So parents, especially in Florida, led by Ron DeSantis, have been reacting to CRT by enacting laws meant to curb its use: action and reaction.  

In terms of claims of stolen elections or voter oppression, we have a long and sordid history. But from 1964 through 2000, the charge was largely dormant. It was the Left who acted beginning in 2000, echoed in 2004, repeated in the 2016 election by no less than Joe Biden’s current press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, “Stolen emails, stolen drone, stolen election .....welcome to the world of #unpresidented Trump.” Then most notably with the claims of voter oppression leveled against the GOP in Georgia after the 2018 governor’s election featuring Stacy Abrams who lost, to Brian Kemp, who said, “On November 6, when malfeasance and incompetence and my opponent who was a cartoon villain stole the voices of Georgians when he purged 1.4 million voters and oversaw the shutdown of 214 precincts that left 50,000 to 60,000 people without the ability to vote when Georgia had the most extended lines in the nation and the highest rejection rates of absentee ballots and provisional ballots. It was not just about me. He was doing that to Georgians.”

In a piece from the Washington Post so puffy it could be super soft toilet paper, called The Power of Stacy Abrams, she is portrayed in a superhero’s cape, no less. “Abrams pauses for a moment, allowing her words to simmer. Then, the audience cheers as she smiles broadly.” Did the Left then castigate Abrams for creating this environment of questioning democratic voting norms? No, she was feted, became a Democratic celebrity, and received fawning, practically sycophantic pieces in the paper that once brought down the Nixon administration.  

Leftist New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie would say, nope, it was the right all along. “Conservative belief in pervasive Democratic Party voter fraud goes back decades — and rests on racist and nativist tropes that date back to Reconstruction in the South and Tammany Hall in the North — but the modern obsession with fraud dates back to the 2000 election. That year, Republicans blamed Democratic fraud for narrow defeats in New Mexico, which George W. Bush lost by just a few hundred votes, and Missouri, where the incumbent senator, John Ashcroft, lost his re-election battle to a dead man.” 

So Bouie has two points. One goes back to Tammany Hall, a democratic organization that convincingly did rig elections over 100 years ago. And a forgotten election in Missouri in which the eventual winner was a dead man’s widow. Bouie leaves out that Ashcroft was not considered a martyr for the conservative cause. He was not the subject of flattering portrayals or featured on the cover of prominent newspapers. George W Bush appointed him attorney general, where he served until 2005, and then disappeared into the legions of lobbyists plying their trade to our bloated government. 

And if Ashcroft was featured in some TV show, I do not recall. However, as a Star Trek fan, or used to be, I do remember Abrams portraying the President of the Earth. So I want to find the Star Trek producer genius who cast that part and slap them with a Gene Roddenberry photo.    

More about Abrams in that hard-hitting, take no prisoners Post article, “When she is finally introduced, the women shout and leap to their feet. Young women stand on chairs, camera phones flash. Abrams, who appears both amused and slightly disturbed by the fuss over her, takes control of the chaotic scene. I’ve witnessed this level of affection for very few political leaders in the Democratic circles I’ve been in since the 1980s. They have the last names Clinton (both Hillary and Bill), Sanders, Warren, Jackson, and Obama (both Michelle and Barack). 

“I’m going to make sure there is peace in this room,” Abrams says. “Pandemonium ensues as she walks to the far Left of the stage, like a runway supermodel, stops on a dime, poses, tilts her head slightly, and smiles. Camera flashes explode.” I edit out certain sounds in these podcasts so you, dear listener, cannot hear my throwing up in the back of the office. I mean, Wow. I am just glad Abrams emerged from that journalistic debacle unscathed! 

So given this playbook, is it any wonder that two years later, that fair-minded paragon of virtue, gracious loser, and establishmentarian Donald Trump would not use the same script?

As noted by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, the person who oversaw the 2018 election and became directly embroiled in Trump’s own stolen election narrative, “To many people, President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn an election may have seemed unprecedented. Likewise, many media members have cast Trump’s actions as unheard of. But sitting in Georgia, it was impossible to watch the events after November 3 without seeing the unmistakable signs of the Stacey Abrams playbook: Don’t concede. Say you were cheated. Allege voter irregularities. File lawsuits. Get witness testimony. Raise money. Repeat.

The parallels in their statements alone are compelling enough. After losing 55,000 votes in November 2018, Abrams said: “This is not a speech of concession. Concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true, or proper. I cannot concede.” After losing by a slimmer 12,000 votes, President Trump told the crowd gathered in Washington, D.C., on January 6, “we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.”

There are the media. Consider a few of these dates. In 1968, 60 Minutes aired its first broadcast. Dan Rather, one of its most prominent broadcasters, became the coveted lead Anchor for the CBS news in 1981.  In those days, you had three major networks, PBS and a few lesser ones. And with the sometimes exception of ABC, liberal broadcasting, exemplified by 60 Minutes and Rather, was the norm. In 1980, Ted Turner started the first 24-hour cable news platform, CNN. Turner himself was not shy about his political affiliations. “I like Obama. I don’t know who could do a better job. He’s got an incredibly tough situation and a good heart and mind. I’d like to see him rally support a little better. Turner was a prominent environmentalist calling for eliminating coal and, eventually, all fossil fuels. So in the 1980s, after Reagan won two landslide elections, TV news was in the hands of Dan Rather, NBC, and CNN.  

Then in 1996, Fox News debuted and has been the bogeyman of the Left ever since. Turner himself claimed that Fox owner Rupert Murdoch was “the most dangerous man in the world.”  

And now we have the future, which is something Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, the deceased Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti, or Vladimir Putin would approve. That is, judicial figures use the law, or a tenuous interpretation of it, as a cudgel against political opponents.  

Here is the gist of the case. Alvin Bragg, the District Attorney for the New York borough of Manhattan, alleges that Donald Trump booked the reimbursement of a loan as if it were a payment of legal fees—a misdemeanor bookkeeping issue in New York. Trump’s then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, laid out $130,000 on the eve of the 2016 presidential election to pay Stormy Daniels — the porn star, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford — to keep quiet about an affair she says she had with Trump 17 years ago. On the books of the Trump organization, the reimbursement was made to look like ongoing legal fees paid in monthly installments in 2017. Tawdry, ugly, even a little gross? You bet, especially for a party that once featured Dr. James Dobson, of Focus on the Family fame, run for its nomination. Trump was focusing on his family, keeping certain information from them, of course. Do we think he paid her off? Of course, we do. But was it illegal?

It is not clear New York State suffered any financial harm — we’re talking merely about how an expense was described in the accounting ledgers, not about tax evasion.

The issue confronting Bragg is that even assuming this error occurred, it happened more than five years ago after the statute of limitations had run out. So Bragg had to resort to minor legal prestidigitation. 

Falsification of financial records is just a misdemeanor in New York, which is why it’s virtually never charged. Moreover, it has only a two-year statute of limitations, meaning this one is time-barred. To inflate the misdemeanor into a felony, with a five-year statute of limitations that might — might barely — make the indictment timely, Bragg would have to show that Trump falsified his records to conceal his commission of another crime. That is, there would have to be some other crime, Trump would have to have known that, and he would have to have acted with the intent to conceal that crime.

Bragg argues that the crime Trump concealed was a failure to disclose an in-kind campaign contribution under the campaign-finance laws.

It would be hard to quantify how outrageous that allegation would be. Campaign finance violations are federal. When the New York penal law refers to concealing “another crime,” it is plainly talking about another New York state crime. The Manhattan district attorney has no jurisdiction to enforce federal campaign finance statutes. 

As writer Jeffrey Blehar notes, “An elected prosecutor, who ran his campaign on a promise to prosecute Trump, revives a case abandoned by his predecessor because of its weakness and runs it afresh without burnishing it in any way . . . of course it’s political. This prosecution would never happen to any ordinary individual, or even any ordinary politician for that matter (the failure of the John Edwards prosecution over his cover-up of a far seamier scandal provides instructive comparison here as to why those sorts of cases aren’t normally brought anymore). It is happening solely because the person involved happens to be the extremely unpopular (in New York City and nationally among Democrats) former President of the United States. The fact that Bragg is being forced to resort to arcane, “creative,” or novel prosecutorial theories to even get the case past a judge makes that transparently clear. You don’t make this kind of effort to indict Sal, the milkman.

And writing for Reason Magazine, Jacob Sullum states, “The litany of charges reinforces the impression that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, is trying to justify this belated and dubious prosecution by transforming minor misconduct into a case that looks serious until you consider the underlying allegations.”

In other words, Bragg wanted to bag Trump, or at least appear like he was trying to appease his supporters, especially his campaign donors. “We’re going to indict a former President for, essentially, misdemeanor falsification of business records?” asks former Rep. Peter Meijer (R–Mich.), who voted to impeach Trump after the Capitol riot in 2021. “We’re crossing the Rubicon for that? That seems like f—ing weak sauce.” When one of the 10 out of 200 House GOPers who did not vote to impeach Trump is talking like this? 

Former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, another disparager of Trump, notes, “And they say Trump is the norm-breaker. Alvin Bragg, the elected progressive Democrat who ran for Manhattan district attorney as the candidate most likely to wield his power against Donald Trump, crossed the Rubicon on Thursday. His subordinate prosecutors presented and convinced a grand jury to vote for an indictment that would make Trump the first former President to be charged with a crime in American history. And McCarthy notes of the charge, “At issue are bookkeeping shenanigans that Bragg would ordinarily not give the time of day.”  

One of the flimsy justifications of this from the Left is that nobody is above the law, which would carry more weight if the Left were not already saddled with Hillary’s emails or Hunter Biden’s laptop. But the reality is that a nobody, on a very minor charge, would not be the concern of Alvin Bragg or any other prominent progressive prosecutor. Trump is only getting this attention because he is a highly controversial former president running for office again. And to break this precedent, to cross the Rubicon as McCarthy says, the case needs to be airtight, locked down, and irrefutable, and clearly, this is anything but. Aside from an inconvenient expiration of the statute of limitations, normally five years, and the alleged crime that happened seven years ago, there is the matter of jurisdiction. Trump’s alleged crime involving campaign finance shenanigans to pay.

But is this Pandora? What is this reaction? McCarthy notes, “A democratic republic needs the rule of law to survive. The rule of law hinges on the public accepting the justice system’s outcomes as legitimate. If the American people become convinced that the justice system is a rigged partisan game in which progressive Democrats exploit their control of law-enforcement processes as a weapon against their enemies — even as progressive prosecutors refuse to enforce the laws against actual criminals who prey on society — then the rule of law is dead.”

A recurring theme of the Dispatch’s Sarah Isgur, a journalist and a lawyer is to cite Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Season and perhaps the most famous scene in which More and his son in law William Roper who exclaims he would cut down all the laws to get at the devil.  But More, correctly notes, that with all the laws down there is no place to hide when the devil turns upon you.  Doing things correctly, through the law, can be hard, and bully on that because then the law can protect me.  

And this from the WSJ Editorial Board, “If there was ever a case that opens Pandora’s box, the first indictment of a former President in U.S. history is it. The evidence should also be solid enough that a reasonable voter would find it persuasive. The last thing a politically polarized America needs is a case where partisans line up on either side, like a political O.J. Simpson trial. The prosecution must be seen by most of the country as an example of fair-minded justice. The danger for America is the precedent this prosecution sets. Mr. Bragg is busting a political norm that has stood for 230 years. Once a former President and current candidate are indicted, some local Republican prosecutors will look to make a name for themselves by doing the same to a Democrat. U.S. democracy will be further abused and battered. Mr. Bragg, the provincial progressive, is unleashing forces that all of us may come to regret.  

Possible Reaction. 

And for all the liberals like Bouie may contend, this is not a chicken and egg proposition. The core of conservatism is preservation. In my estimation, echoing Will, it is the preservation of the founding principles upon which this nation was built and why it has thrived for 230 years. The left would contend that much of the nation has not thrived, blacks, other minorities, women.  I would agree because in the case of denial of voting rights in the 1800s to Wilson’s German discrimination of the 1910s to the internment of Japanese American citizens in the 1940s, all of these are examples of not preserving the founding principles of liberty spelled out in the Declaration.  Brown V Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s were not radicalism as noted but rather a return to Locke’s nature rights, for all citizens.  This is not what motivates the left.  The issue is that individual liberty will lead to some form of inequities.  The NBA, 90% African American, is one of the most obvious examples of inequity that we have because, like most sports, it is entirely based on merit, on individuals exercising, and being amply rewarded, for a unique set of skills.  Despite the disparity, I do now want to reorder the NBA as it is an exemplar of natural rights.  

The radicalism comes when the left, using the power of the state, wishes to reorder society based on an imposition of equity.  This concept is now centuries old and it does not work.  

Another aspect of this, and why it is the left who acts is the hero complex, something being mirrored, disconcertingly, on the right.  At the core of Critical Theory, which is reliance on Marxism, is the inability of an individual to exercise their liberty because current power structures will not align.  The only way to destroy these power structures is through organizations and institutions run by the left, to reorder them. And who does the reordering.  For a conservative, the best hero is the one in the mirror, exercising their agency.  The next heroes are family, friends, and local institutions.  The nexus is the person.  For the leftist, the hero for others is themselves using state power. The nexus is the state.  

I began with quotes from that dynamic duo of eventual destruction and devastation Marx and Engels because I believe they capture the ethos of the Left. As Bernie Sanders, Senator from Vermont, notes, “The middle class in America is at a tipping point. It will not last another generation if we don’t boldly change course now.” Or even Obama, “Change will not come if we wait for another person or time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change we seek.” Change does not come from within but rather from a Sanders or Obamas, they are more than the hero of their own story, they are the hero of your story. They have acted by reordering our heroes in this fashion and then are shocked as the right, with figures such Trump, do the same.  

As a capitalist, I believe in the concept of change in terms that our economic system means change. No more rotary phones. Better cars, better computers, better homes. But it is within our governmental system of checks and balances, separation of powers. It is within an educational system that serves the needs of parents and children, not public sector teacher’s unions or a small rump of leftist ideologues. For this past century, the Democrats have attempted to change our society’s fabric, to move away from the founding, and the more they impose their vision, the worse it can become. Motivated by moral feelings and no apparent reason, the Left will continue the deterioration of our society. And when first the right tries to stop them and even more, disconcertingly, emulates them, they cry foul but never take stock.  They act yet never seem to anticipate the reaction.