The new first principle of politics
The Games of the XXXIII Olympiad take place in Paris in July 2024. The organizers periodically add new events and remove others from sports that have fallen out of use/favor. Not having checked to see if that’s happened for the upcoming Olympics, I have a suggestion for a new event. Credit where due, David Frum inspired the idea.
Frum (indirectly) identifies in The Atlantic the dominant principle held by the Party of Trump: flexibility. “Flexibility is the first principle of politics,” Richard Nixon once advised a staffer and, hoo-boy, are Republicans flexible.* Frum provides a few examples where the Trump faithful nimbly pivot whenever it suits them. There’s a new first principle on the block.
Point out where Republicans benefit from and leverage our system’s anti-majoritarian features to engineer for themselves permanent minority rule? We’re a republic, not a democracy.
States rule that Donald Trump, post-insurrection, is ineligible under the 14th Amendment to hold public office in any capacity? Let the people decide!
Frum summarizes what we know of the Trump era — the lies, the hypocrisy, the attempts to rig the 2020 election, the attempts to rig the post-election. There’s no need to recount it all here. The point is this:
Trump and his supporters have conjured a series of self-serving rules. Where antique anti-majoritarian devices work for them, the antique anti-majoritarian devices prevail. Where crude gaming of filibusters and gerrymandering works for them, the crude gaming must prevail. Where fraud and violence work for them, fraud and violence must prevail. And where invoking democratic ideas works for them—well, you can complete the sentence.
How should people who are serious about democratic principles respond to this avalanche of bad faith? Democratic ideals don’t cease to be true just because they can be exploited by dishonest actors. Yet democracy also cannot become an optional principle that authoritarians can use when it suits them and then discard without consequences when it becomes an obstacle to their goals. Democratic systems have constitutions and constitutional remedies precisely to protect themselves against those who toggle in this way between breaking inconvenient rules and demanding the benefit of favorable ones.
Frank Wilhoit provided the most biting, class-based formulation of bad faith politics:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Even shorter: Heads, I win, tails, you lose.
Those of us living under minority rule know that one well.
Frum, once skeptical of disqualifying Trump under the 14th Amendment, is now “disqualification-curious.”
Maybe prudence genuinely does recommend leaving Trump’s disgraced name on primary and general-election ballots. But remember that old joke about the man who murdered both of his parents and then asked for mercy as an orphan? It needs to be replaced by a new joke about the ex-president who trashed democracy when he had the power, and then pleaded for the protection of democracy so he could have one more chance to trash democracy again.
As popular as public displays of conservative bad faith have become since the 2008 election, perhaps they deserve their own Bad Faith Olympic games event. Perhaps Donald Trump will compete. No one knows more about bad faith than Trump. Just ask him. He and his retinue already possess the necessary Nixonian flexibility.
* Read up on the Nixon renaissance at Politico Magazine.