I’m getting really tired of lefties slamming Pelosi for not insisting on impeaching Trump. A far too common argument is that impeaching Trump is the obvious thing to do, and she is too corrupt, craven, cowardly, or corporate to take the obviously correct line of action.
This is a standard—and profoundly anti-democratic—position that people all over the political spectrum take about all sorts of policy disagreements: that the correct course of action is obvious, and anyone who disagrees with that position does so out of bad motives. This position assumes that politics is simple, that there is not legitimate disagreement (at least on this issue), that the person making this argument has perfect perception and knows everything necessary, that, in other words, there are not other legitimate needs or perspectives. That’s in-group authoritarianism. Democracy presumes that we have to argue together because no single individual (or group) can see an issue from every possible perspective—we need input from multiple perspectives.
I have no problem with people believing that impeachment is the right course of action. I have no problem with people passionately believing that they are right, and arguing with vehemence about how right they are. I have no problem with people getting frustrated at not getting their way. I also have no problem with someone coming to the conclusion that an interlocutor is a bad actor, acting in bad faith. But I do have a problem if people are arguing irrationally . The rationality of an argument is determined by how the argument is made, not the emotional state of the people making the argument, nor even (in general) what the argument is.
There are irrational ways of framing a debate, such as beginning with a false binary. One of my least favorite false binaries is the “do this now or do nothing ever.” There are not two sides on whether to impeach Trump, even among people who believe he has committed acts that should cause any President to be impeached.
The Dems could impeach Trump now, begin impeachment hearings now (and impeach any time between now and his reelection), begin impeachment hearings in January 2020, not begin impeachment hearings at all unless he gets reelected. Any one of those positions can be defended through rational argumentation.
What can’t be defended through rational argumentation is the argument that impeaching right now is so much the obviously right thing to do that anyone who disagrees must be corrupt.
Impeachment cannot succeed with this Senate. There aren’t the votes in the Senate, and there is no reason to think—at this point—that that will change in the near future. Even if you think Trump should be impeached (and I do believe that the GOP would be screaming for impeachment had a Dem President done what Trump is doing), that doesn’t mean impeaching him now is right.
If impeaching Trump would be a futile effort because the Senate would never convict, but it starts a cultural conversation about demagoguery and political corruption, it could be the right thing to do.
But, if it doesn’t start that conversation, costs a lot of money, and enables Trump to get reelected, then it isn’t necessarily the right thing, even from within the set of premises in which preventing Trump’s reelection is right. When you passionately (and perhaps rationally) believe that an end is absolutely right, you can get suckered into skipping arguing about the means–it can seem that doing something is better than doing nothing. But it isn’t; doing nothing is better than doing the wrong thing. (There’s a wonderful part of The Phantom Tollbooth about exactly this.)
Doing something doesn’t mean doing this thing. That’s how Bush argued for invading Afghanistan and Iraq–we had to do something. We did the wrong thing. For people who believe that Trump needs to be removed, that our political world needs to acknowledge the depth and consequences of his corruption, impeachment now is not the only option. It might be the right option, but it isn’t the only one. We were not in a world of invading Afghanistan and Iraq or doing nothing about terrorism. We are not in a world of impeaching now or doing nothing about Trump.
There is something odd to me about people who have never managed to get themselves elected to Congress deciding that they know that Pelosi is making the wrong move. She has her flaws, but she is better at politics than many of her critics. Does that mean she’s right? Nope, but it does mean that argument from person conviction that Pelosi is wrong is just that and nothing else—it is not an argument from authority, nor rational support for a claim.
I’m not saying that people who disagree with Pelosi are irrational. I’m not saying that people appalled by Trump’s corruption are obviously wrong to argue for impeachment now. I’m saying that we are not in a binary of the obviously right position and all other obviously wrong positions–about Trump, about raw dog food, about bike lanes, about much of anything.
I’m saying that we are in a world in which being passionately and rationally committed to your position (and it’s possible to be both at the same time)—about impeaching Trump, immigration, raw dog food, abortion, Billy Joel, bike lanes—requires acknowledging that the situation is not obvious, that it is not a binary, and that no one died and made you God.
If you believe that our policy options about Trump are a binary of your position and everyone else, and you believe that only your position about Trump is legitimate, and that the people who disagree with you are irrational people with bad motives, then whatever your position is about Trump, it is not coming from a place of respecting or protecting democracy.
Was it Socrates who said a good action is one that is good and also practical?