On this St. Patrick’s Day
If you are not already chilled by the Trump administration’s defiance of a federal court order, Bill Kristol adds more fuel for your anxiety. He listened via computer to Saturday’s emergency hearing on the Trump 2.0 administration’s invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport two planeloads of detainees to El Salvador.
He reflects on Judge Boasberg’s ruling for the plaintiffs. This is how sober aplication of the law is supposed to work, Kristol thought. Orderly. Deliberate, and “with little in the way of emotion or soaring rhetoric.” That we live in a country with a centuries-old rule of law is something to cherish.
But this administration places that tradition, that culture at risk. Vice President J.D. Vance invoked the “great replacement” theory again over the weekend in an appearance with Laura Ingraham. He warned that Germany taking in millions of “culturally incompatible” immigrants puts it on the verge of “civilizational suicide.” Vance is a big believer in culture, just not the one Kristol values.
Kristol warns:
Of course, Germany did destroy itself almost a century ago. It almost destroyed civilization itself until America stepped in to help save it. That didn’t happen because Germany took in too many migrants. It happened because the German people fell for arguments uncomfortably close to Vance’s. Those were arguments that derided the very concept of the rule of law, a derision that was defended in part by warnings about immigrants and foreign blood.
In defying a federal court over the weekend and making outsized claims about the president’s Article II authorities, Trump 2.0 is not defending our U.S. culture of law but slashing its wrists. Drowning it in the bathtub feels less violent in the present context.
Kristol concludes:
One trusts that the United States isn’t going to go the way of Germany in the last century. But the slope toward lawlessness is a slippery one, and we have an administration that is eagerly leading us down it. There are still footholds we can grab onto in order to arrest the precipitous decline that lies ahead. But we are already part way down the hill, and the pace of decline is accelerating.
Faced with a lawless White House, the question many of us are asking ourselves this morning is what are we prepared to do arrrest that decline. It’s the question Officer Jim Malone (Sean Connery) famously asks Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) in The Untouchables (1987).
It’s the question Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut posed on Sunday. If we continue to observe norms and act like the U.S. is business as usual — if we won’t step outside our comfort zones — our democracy could be gone in under a year. We are “at immediate risk.”
“And then what are you prepared to do?” I haven’t answered that question for myself yet. But the clock is ticking.
Is it mere coincidence that Malone and Murphy are Irish?
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