I shouldn’t. It is a clear representation of kind of elite, national security establishment consensus and worldview that I not distrust, but believe has done tremendous harm to the country. And is part of the reason Trump was elected in the first place.
I do not necessarily doubt their knowledge — I think the folks who work for Brookings and outfits like Brookings are reasonably skilled and knowledgable. they know their fields and are fairly expert in them.
What I do not trust are the worldview most of them hold and I am not inclined to agree with their interpretations of the facts, knowledge and experience. I start from a different place — that American power is not an unalloyed virtue, and that as a class, the people who use that power are not as good, wise, or disinterested as they claim. I don’t pretend to be able to muster lots of facts in response to claims made by policy makers, but I can and do questions the presumptions they make when it comes to the application of national wealth and power.
And, to be honest, as a citizen and voter, I’m allowed to. I keep being told having an input in how the state is governed is one of the advantages of democracy. So, the fact that the concerns of citizens like myself who are much less credulous of claims about the virtue and use of American state power are so often ignored or dismissed (as “isolationism,” for example) is another reason for my deep and abiding suspicion. Too many policy elites come off as people who don’t like being questioned and don’t believe they should.
At any rate, not long ago, Brookings sponsored a panel (chaired by the execrable Fred Hiatt) on Susan Hennessey’s and Lawfare host Benjamin Wittes newest book, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump’s War on the World’s Most Powerful Office, and it is a fascinating discussion. Listen to it here. It is well worth the 88 minutes you will need to listen.
It’s a smart and insightful panel, and it’s full of some amazing observations. Mostly, they conclude that Trump is a kind of perfect storm of abuse of power, doing all sorts of things simultaneously and publicly the way no other president ever has. (Wittes, I believe, notes that Lyndon Johnson claimed to have divested himself of his family businesses but never actually did, and continued to run his business empire as vice-president and president.) That the oath of office doesn’t and can’t be made to actually mean very much, and certainly not when taken by someone who doesn’t mean to keep it. And it sees some solid failure in the Founders for failing to foresee the rise of partisanship and for investing so much power in a combined head of government and head of state.
And yet, missing from their examination of the presidency is any self-examination. The folks at Brookings have been in the forefront for at least a generation of creating a sprawling and expansive presidency and then vesting it with ever-increasing power because they believe in both the presidency and what that power can accomplish. (Trying to preserve the presidency is one reason I believe the Democrats have engaged in the futility of impeachment over the nonsense that is Ukraine.) In the hope that the sheer sprawl of Executive will somehow restrain executive action, though both Wittes and Hennessey acknowledge that somehow having junior managers and civil servants have to sneak around the president to ignore or countermand orders isn’t a particular happy place to be either.
If the presidency is so carefully curated that it cannot bear the rough and tumble cruelty and incompetence of Donald Trump, then we no longer live in a democratic society where “anyone can grow up to be president.” Rather, we live in a kind-of aristocracy, where presidents are carefully bred and raised to the office. I don’t care if that’s true, I just would like someone to be honest about it. Stop lying to me that “every vote and every view counts” when clearly it doesn’t.
But also missing from this is, of course, any sense that the people at places like Brookings have failed in governing the country and administered the world. That contrary to their gold plated credentials, they aren’t wise enough to order the planet. I know, I know, that kind of humility and self-examination is beyond these people — they may not be born for the task, but they clearly are bred for it, and the sense of self-righteous injury that the task of making the world legible has been (likely only temporarily) stripped from them is quite palpable.
This, however, is yet one more reason Trump was elected. Yes, by the thinnest of margins — enough people to fill the L.A. Coliseum for the USC Trojans game — but it was a victory nonetheless.
Wittes wondered whether after Trump would come a Restoration or if trump marked a permanent break, a new “expressive presidency” in which Trump’s use of language and social media are a harbinger of things to come. I think, sadly, Wittes is right when he speculates that more like Trump — and worse, and a great deal more competent — are coming.
I suspect any restoration will be short-lived.
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