Elite Acquiescence and Treacherous “Normalcy” All Around Us

What are the reasons behind the pervasive tendency among ostensibly anti-MAGA elites to accommodate authoritarian power and preemptively signal compliance with Trumpism?

credit: The White House

On November 15, the New York Times published a guest essay titled “End the Criminal Cases Against Trump.” There have, of course, been many entries in the “Let’s not hold Trump accountable for his rampant corruption and criminality” genre. On the Right, any attempt to mobilize the justice system has been rejected as a fundamentally illegitimate political witch hunt. On the Center and the Left, the arguments have oscillated between “The right thing to do in theory, but little chance of success in practice” and “Just a silly distraction, as Trump is a political problem that must be defeated at the ballot box.” But this latest example still stands out, because the author, Thomas Goldstein, comes with the highest credentials of elite lawyerdom. He used to be a star Supreme Court litigator and has argued many cases before the Court. In 2002, he and his wife founded SCOTUSblog, which became really influential in shaping coverage and perception of the Court, especially among Liberal observers and commentators, and has received all sorts of prestigious awards. Goldstein also has been connected to high-level Democratic politics for decades. His piece is, in fact, addressed to “my fellow Democrats,” as he says, who Goldstein is trying to convince that all criminal prosecution of Donald Trump must immediately cease.

Weirdly, this elite liberal lawyer doesn’t offer a legal argument at all. Instead, Goldstein claims that “Democracy’s ultimate verdict on these prosecutions was rendered by voters on Election Day.” Were you aware that the election was a referendum on whether or not Donald Trump should be prosecuted, and that winning such a referendum, even by the slightest of margins, means that all criminal activity must be struck from your record? Interesting!

There is more where that came from. “A central pillar of American democracy is that no man is above the law.” Sounds right. However, Goldstein is not finished: “But Mr. Trump isn’t an ordinary man.” Ah, the “no ordinary man” exception to the rule of law. This is indistinguishable from MAGA propaganda: Trump, the Tribune of the People, must not be hampered by puny laws. And Goldstein continues down that path: The cases against Trump, he declares, are not at all motivated by “legal theories and evidence,” but “driven by politics and hatred of Mr. Trump. The New York case was brought by a prosecutor elected in Manhattan, where more than 80 percent of voters cast their ballots for Ms. Harris.” This is exactly the attack line Trump himself has pursued: It is all just a political farce, and a prosecution in a “liberal” place is fundamentally illegitimate.

Finally, the bizarre but, at this point, unsurprising crescendo: To us simpletons and silly fools who “will always be convinced that dismissing the charges will let Mr. Trump get away with crimes,” Goldstein explains that the Constitution “isn’t concerned with preserving a couple of criminal cases. It is concerned with having a system of government that can hold our democracy together for centuries.” In order to save democracy, we must let the criminal demagogue abolish it! Gaslighting nonsense, packaged as sage advice. No one embodies the system-wide failure to hold Trump accountable and defend democratic self-government against the authoritarian onslaught quite like the legal establishment and the supposedly serious, often self-regarding “liberal” legal commentariat.

It would be easier to dismiss this embarrassment of an essay (who cares about this lawyer dude! And the New York Times opinion pages, who cares!) if there hadn’t been so many worrying signs since the election that our – nominally – anti-MAGA elites are opting to accommodate power, acquiesce, and preemptively obey.

Last week, for instance, retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer sat down for a nice chat with Justice Neil Gorsuch at the Antonin Scalia Memorial Dinner, organized by the Federalist Society. Let’s all be friends (and lend legitimacy to the conservative legal movement that has for decades been the vanguard of the reactionary counter-mobilization against democratic pluralism), right? That certainly seems to be the motto for the hosts of “Morning Joe,” MSNBC’s morning news talk show, Joe Scarborough and his wife Mika Brezinski. Scarborough is a conservative and former Republican congressman (exactly the kind of perspective MSNBC insists on having at the head of one its flagship programs so it can prove its “serious” credentials). But he has been very publicly feuding with Trump for years, making him one of the most prominent anti-Trump conservatives in the country. Earlier this week, however, Scarborough and Brezinski went to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the king’s feet – uhm, “restart communications,” excuse me. And would you believe it, when they returned, they brought excellent news: Trump “seemed interested in finding common ground with Democrats,” they declared on television – might he become the great uniter after all? TV hosts can dream, can they not?

I guess some of the leaders of the soon-to-be opposition party saw all this unfold and decided they didn’t want to be quite so oppositional either. Colorado governor Jared Polis, for instance, took to ex-Twitter to declare he was “excited by the news that the President-Elect will appoint Robert Kennedy Jr.” to be the next head of the Department of Health and Human Services. That may surprise you, considering that RFK is a conspiratorial extremist who would likely do enormous harm in that position. Ah, but let Jared Polis – a Democratic governor, it bears repeating – explain to you that he’s really looking forward “to partnering with him (RFK) to truly make America healthy again” by “shaking up HHS and FDA” and “taking on big pharma.” Who says bipartisanship is dead!

Polis has not been an outlier either. Delaware Senator Chris Coons went on Fox News to praise Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s not-actually-a-department “Department of Government Efficiency.” You and I may think that their plans would completely devastate state capacity and dramatically harm Americans in a multitude of ways by removing all consumer, financial, and environmental protections – but Chris Coons knows better: “They could save tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars depending on how it's structured and what they do. This could be a constructive undertaking that ought to be embraced.” Meanwhile, House Minority Leader and Leader of the Democratic Caucus Hakeem Jeffries is already over fighting back against MAGA excesses too much. The slew of brutally unqualified extremists Donald Trump has nominated for key positions in his administration? “All a distraction,” Jeffries declared. He doesn’t want to talk about it. You know, focus on the important stuff. Which doesn’t include the fact that these people would be guaranteed to cause tremendous damage by either incompetence and/or extremism, apparently.

Finally, there is the President himself. A week after the election, Biden welcomed Trump in the White House. It’s tradition (one that Donald Trump did not adhere to in 2020). Surprising, however, how seemingly amicable the meeting was. Lots of smiles. And not just in the Oval Office: The President, the First Lady, and the President-Elect-and-Former-President also took the time for a photo op: outside, sunny day in the nation’s capital, all smiles. The Bidens wouldn’t be doing that if there were anything to be truly worried about, would they? If the President-Elect was a real and acute threat to democracy in America? Things seem to be… very normal? Unless, an unsettling thought, the anti-MAGA elites have decided to appease rather than resist?

Some of these questions are tough – others should not be

There is not one easy, universally applicable answer to the question of how people in influential positions should handle, treat, and confront the incoming Trumpist regime. Leave aside the questions of norms and precedents, since we are in a fairly unprecedented situation that necessitates something other than a “normal” response. But if, for instance, the current administration opted for complete sabotage and instituted a strategy of scorched earth, it would certainly harm government in areas in which millions of Americans depend on a functioning state. Then again, a business-as-usual “We will help our successors to hit the ground running” approach is also entirely inadequate as a universal response when what that successor regime plans to implement on Day 1 is, amongst many other dangerous things, a violent mass deportation.

Another reason why there can’t be a universal answer to the question of how to respond to the incoming administration is the fact that people have different roles that come with different responsibilities. For example, I regularly talk to European politicians and diplomats. Even if they fully agree with my assessment of the Trumpist regime (a big If), they can hardly go into full-on resistance mode, considering that they are tasked with figuring out a way to handle relations with what is very soon the government of the most powerful nation on earth.

All that being said, let’s be maximally clear: A completely unnecessary all-smiles chat in the oval office followed by a friendly photo-op on the White House premises most definitely can’t be it. Must we get all riled up about this? It’s certainly worth being concerned. These are not some silly side plots. This drumbeat of accommodation and acquiescence legitimizes the Trump regime. It signals normalcy. How bad could it possibly be if Democratic leaders and liberal elites act friendly while continuing normal politics? If those who are nominally tasked with opposing Trumpism and defending constitutional government can’t be bothered to switch it up, it is hardly fair to expect people who are not being paid to follow politics and have their own lives to worry about to consider this an emergency. When powerful Democrats and Liberals snuggle up to Trump, they delegitimize any serious form of resistance, anything that would go beyond “normal” opposition. Modern states and societies are extremely complex creatures, and it is actually really difficult for any authoritarian regime to bring them in line. But right now, the Trumpists are getting a big assist from elites who are preemptively signaling compliance and obedience.

Why liberal elites acquiesce

What is behind such immediate acquiescence? In all the examples above, we are not looking at business elites who only care about profits, or tech moguls lusting to dismantle any kind of regulation and check on their impulses. We are looking at people who did not vote for Trump – they weren’t even agnostic about him like so many self-regarding “moderates” and “centrists” in elite positions who probably think Trump is a little extreme, but are certainly willing to entertain making common cause with him anyway, as they are convinced the radical “woke” Left is an acute threat to the way things should be in America. What is worth grappling with is why we have seen so much reflexive accommodation of authoritarian power among those who have claimed to vehemently oppose Trump?

None of this is new. A stark asymmetry has characterized American politics since the Obama era: While Republicans could not have been clearer about the fact that they consider Democratic governance fundamentally illegitimate, some establishment Democrats have insisted on acting as if politics as usual is still possible and a return to “normalcy” imminent.

There is certainly an element of strategy here – you might also call it rank opportunism, if you prefer. I have no doubt that when Senator Chris Coons goes on Fox News to confess his excitement about what Musk and Ramaswamy might come up with, he thinks it’s a clever, savvy play to capitalize on widespread anti-government sentiment. When Hakeem Jeffries refuses to get “distracted,” he probably hopes this “We are the adults in the room” posture will be rewarded by the American public (even though we have ample evidence that voters really don’t care about procedures and norms in the abstract).

There is more than just a tactical calculation going on here, however. Democratic leaders seem sincere in their conviction that they must be the ones to uphold the norms – they are true believers in the gospel of bipartisanship and “unity” politics. One important explanatory factor is that many Democratic leaders are old. They came up in a very different political environment, when there was an established norm of intra-party cooperation and indeed a great deal of bipartisanship in Congress. Joe Biden offers an instructive example: He is certainly nostalgic about this bygone era, something that has, for instance, manifested in him taking every chance he gets to emphasize his friendship with Mitch McConnell. Sometimes, this nostalgia for institutional tradition and personal familiarity has led to some rather ridiculous scenes: When California senator Dianne Feinstein hugged South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham at the end of the Amy Coney Barrett hearings in 2020, it was a bizarre throwback to those days of amity across party lines in the midst of a naked Republican power grab.

It is evidently not just the old guard, however, that is struggling to adapt to changing political realities. Chris Coons is 61 years old; Hakeem Jeffries is only 54. There is an institutionalized culture of “unity” nostalgia that characterizes the Democratic Party, it is a core part of Democratic political identity that the responsibility to uphold the norms lies primarily with them. I do not want to be cynical: In a vacuum, there is something good and noble about a political party tying its identity to cross-partisan cooperation, harmony, and consensus. The problem is that these self-anointed guardians of the “trust in the institutions” have never figured out how to respond adequately to a situation in which, for instance, one of the country’s major institutions, the Supreme Court, is spearheading the reactionary assault on modern democracy.

This problem goes far beyond the Democratic Party and its leading officials. No one suffers more from institutionalist nostalgia than the Liberals on the Supreme Court. In mid-March, for example, when we really didn’t lack sufficient evidence that America could either have a pluralistic democracy and a modern state or accept the ruling of the rogue hard-right majority on the Court as legitimate, but not both, Justice Sonia Sotomayor nevertheless did her very best to signal solidarity with her reactionary fellow justices. She went on a tour with Amy Coney Barrett for a bunch of public events intended to, as the Washington Post put it, “make the case for disagreeing more agreeably at a time when the country is more polarized than ever and public opinion of the Supreme Court is at historic lows.” “That’s the spirit!” a delighted Stephen Breyer exclaimed in his home when he saw the news, probably. Liberal elite brains poisoned by “polarization” talk.

The reasons for this inability of these immensely powerful people to grapple in earnest with the political realities of the moment go beyond nostalgia for a mythical past of bipartisanship and blind adherence to norms alone. The way some establishment Democrats and leading Liberals have acted suggests they feel a kinship with their Republican opponents that is rooted in class politics. They seem incapable of viewing leading rightwing operatives as anything but fellow elites with whom they may disagree during the day, yes, but nevertheless feel deeper bonds of culture, taste, and sensibility. The love for opera that bound Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and served as a basis of their personal friendship comes to mind. I vividly remember a conversation about the Supreme Court I had with a retired, formerly high-ranking European diplomat in late 2022: He struggled to make sense of the Court’s radical decisions, since his perception of the institution was strongly shaped by a strong personal connection to one of the liberal justices and, by extension, many personal interactions with all the justices in the pre-Trump era. Scalia, a radical partisan operative? “But he was such a wonderfully cultured man! And a wonderful conversationalist, too!” Sneer all you like, but don’t think for a second this kind of shared elite perspective isn’t pervasively coloring the perception among political and societal elites.   

Furthermore, accommodating the authoritarian regime is a lot easier if you are not immediately threatened by it. Elite America’s perspective on the prospect of a Trumpist regime is influenced by the fact that, consciously or not, they understand that their status won’t necessarily be affected all that much. At least not until and unless they object too much and too publicly. I know the Morning Joe hosts have made it known that their rather abrupt reversal was caused by fear of retribution. But that’s the thing: For people in elite positions like Joe Scarborough, there is an easy path of acquiescence. Just like that, they have taken themselves off the regime’s target list (if they were ever seriously on it). The groups that are really the core targets of the regime’s lust for revenge and ideological crusade do not have that option.

Finally, the pervasive tendency among nominally anti-MAGA leaders to accommodate Trumpism in power and cling to a treacherous idea of “normalcy” is also rooted in foundational myths that shape the collective imaginary of liberal America, in particular. We may be decades removed from the heyday of the so-called “liberal consensus” of the post-war era, that shared understanding among the country’s elite that America is fundamentally good, the institutions essentially healthy, and the U.S. inexorably on its way to overcoming whatever vestigial problems there might still be – but such ideas of exceptional goodness are still powerful today. They often go hand in hand with a mythical tale of American democracy being exceptionally stable. Never mind that, empirically speaking, multiracial democracy has existed for only about 60s years in this country and has been hotly contested at all times: What could possibly happen to America’s supposedly “old, consolidated” democracy? A fundamentally healthy, functioning, consolidated democracy cannot, in this imagination, be brought down by an authoritarian threat rising within its midst. So, either the system is not healthy – or the Trumpist regime is not an acute threat to the survival of American democracy. The latter is a much more comfortable proposition. Meanwhile, acknowledging what Trumpism is and grappling with the systemic as well as the broader societal forces that have allowed it to rise to power not once, but twice, would necessitate abandoning any pretense of normalcy. It would require a response that is qualitatively different – something Democratic leaders and the Liberal establishment have struggled to envision for many years. Their ineptitude to imagine a response that is commensurate with the problem therefore constantly fuels the normalization.  

I am not sure if anyone seriously thought Joe Biden, Stephen Breyer, SCOTUSblog, or Morning Joe were coming to democracy’s rescue. But the issue is not confined to high-profile individual cases. It is frustrating and, frankly, frightening that the defense of basic rights and democratic self-government against the authoritarian onslaught depends so much on powerful individuals and institutions that have so far proved largely unable and/or unwilling to model anything but normalcy, compliance, and acquiescence. We need and deserve better.