I am afraid that the UnPopulist’s Andy Craig is saying what I am feeling:
It’s easy to get bogged down in the mire of so many crazy and dangerous things happening at such a rapid pace—the “flood the zone with shit” tactic, as Steve Bannon memorably put it. It is important to resist the big picture being crowded out by the nearly impossible task of responding to each outrage individually and in isolation. And the big picture is we now have a federal executive, the most powerful official on the planet, acting on the firm belief that he is not constrained by the rule of law and determined to run roughshod over the other two branches of government.
America has been flung into a constitutional crisis in the most massive and fundamental way imaginable, ruled by a regime which is not merely doing unconstitutional things but is anti-constitutional at its very core….
The interaction of our various institutions will be disjointed and irregular, and in many cases will lead to unusual and unexpected outcomes. What matters in many cases will be which actors and institutions have the strongest popular backing and, with it, the most credible threat of superior force. The ultimate backstop, as always, is the social sanction which assigns legitimacy to those who wield the state’s monopoly on the use of force.
With no agreed-upon framework to mediate these contests, executive, legislative, judicial, and state-level actors will clash based on sheer political capital, not deference to a unified constitutional system defining their respective roles. These struggles won’t necessarily erupt into violence, a possibility still remote and hopefully to be avoided, but the threat of force will loom over every interaction. Each decision will hinge on the perception of popular support and legitimacy—who can muster more real or virtual mobs—rather than adherence to written constitutional law and settled constitutional norms.
