On his blog, The Volokh Conspiracy (which I have loyally followed from its independent days, to the Washington Post, and now at Reason), Prof. Eugene Volokh offers a series of rhetorical questions in his post, “Sad Thoughts About American Politics.” Volokh, whom I have corresponded with occasionally over the years, is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. More importantly, he’s a rational, fair analyst with keen ethics alarms. The point of rhetorical questions is to elicit a response inherent in the question’s phrasing and context. Nonetheless, I thought I’d warm up my faculties first thing this morning by answering the questioned he poses. These are just the question, now. In the post, he had considerable context and commentary. But I assume you know the context, and you can read the commentary at the link. Here are the questions…
- “Even if you support Trump, and agree with his policies, answer honestly: Would you have, twenty years ago, wanted someone like him as your candidate?”
No. I don’t want “someone like him” now.
- “Do you trust him to be calm and collected in a foreign policy crisis?”
No. I don’t trust him period.
- “Do you think he’s an inspirational leader?”
Not in the least.
- “Do you think he’s a worthy heir to the Presidents you admire (whether Washington, Lincoln, Reagan, Coolidge, or whoever else)?”
Coolidge??? Sorry, I was distracted. No, of course not, though “worthy” is a loaded word.
- Even if you think his behavior on January 6, 2021 isn’t as bad as it was painted, do you think it actually speaks well of his character and his trustworthiness?
Does anyone?
- “Do you believe what he tells you”
Does the professor mean regarding facts? I’m old enough, have followed politics long enough and know my American history and Presidents sufficiently well to know that it is naive to believe any politician regarding facts. Do I frequently believe Trump’s assessment of a situation is correct? Sure.
- “Even if you just want to stop the Democrats, how good a job has Trump done with that?”
Better than anyone else, under the circumstances.
- “Say the Democrats do persuade Biden to step aside, and persuade Harris to do so as well, and the Democratic Convention chooses a successful purple-state Democratic governor or senator. How confident are you that Trump will win then?”
Very, assuming that the Democrats don’t cheat, and that Trump doesn’t suddenly say he wants to make the Democratic Party illegal as a joke, or something equally crazy. But I don’t think either of those can be assumed.
- “Wouldn’t there be some Republican candidates who would have been more effective at capitalizing on Biden’s historically disastrous debate performance?”
Sure. Well, maybe. It’s a useless question.
- “Has the media done a good job of honestly informing the public of [Biden’s mental decline]?”
The media does a bad job generally, and is reliable dishonest. So the answer is: “No. What else is new?”
- “Was it doing a good job of reporting the problems (or at least accurately predicting them, if you think Biden has taken a sharp turn for the worse in the last few months) when the reporting would still have been relevant to the Democratic primary elections?”
Same answer!
- “If they learned it that night, what does that tell you about them?”
They are biased, incompetent fools, more concerned with bolstering Democrats and progressive agenda items that practicing ethical journalism, and are “the enemies of the people.” But I knew that, and have been writing it here for a very long time.
- “If they knew it all along, what does that tell you?”
Nothing, because I knew the answer above all along.
- [I]f twenty years ago you had been asked, “What would be the consequence for a presidential candidate if he was convicted of felonies, and was being tried for other felonies, all in the middle of an election campaign?,” I expect your answer would likely have been “Disastrous.”
A loaded and misleading question. How about, “What would be the consequence for a political party that used the criminal justice and civil justice systems to try to remove its most popular and threatening political opponent as an adversary?”
- “Imagine this happening in a foreign country. Imagine that, unexpectedly, we Americans started to pay attention to an election campaign in some other nation. In that campaign, an 81-year-old incumbent who was obviously entering cognitive decline was squaring an off against a 78-year-old candidate who had been convicted of crimes, was being tried for other crimes, and who at the very least behaved highly un-Presidentially in response to a prior electoral defeat. Would we think that the foreign country had healthy political institutions?”
Superfluous question. Obviously this situation means that this country’s political institutions are unhealthy.
- “So what is the problem?”
Well, books will and have been written addressing that question. I believe that an accurate and useful overview of the nature of the problem[s] can be found right here on Ethics Alarms when its not pondering ethics apart from the world of government and politics.
- “Is the shift to primary elections part of the reason? (Was the old smoke-filled-room system better?)”
If there are not competent and ethical leaders available and willing to serve, it doesn’t much matter what methods we use to choose candidates.
- “Is ideological homogeneity among much of the media part of the reason?”
Gee, that’s a nice way to put it. Yes, democracies and republics don’t function if they don’t have enough honest and ethical journalists and news organizations.
- “Is the growth of social media part of the reason?”
A scapegoat, mostly. Social media is an outgrowth of democratic principles. Deal with it. Like all tools, it has to be used responsibly.
- “Even if we can diagnose the problem, is there any realistic path to a solution?”
The way Ethics Alarms typically poses this question is “Now what?” Historically, the U.S.’s solution in such fixes has been “Find the right leader.”
At this point Volokh punts, and concludes, “I can’t tell you what caused these problems….I just think that there’s more going on here than two particular extraordinarily weak candidates. And to find a way forward, we have to figure out some solutions that transcend these candidates, and this election cycle.”
Nobody should need a distinguished law professor to figure out that.
Ethics Alarms 
“Even if we can diagnose the problem, is there any realistic path to a solution?”
The question supplies the diagnosis of the problem. We’re in the campaign now, which is a frantic time. The time for sober reflection should be after the election. But, one side is already acting to render the country ungovernable in the event that it should lose. That is the problem.
Bravo.
Indeed. We don’t have a good way out of this. The time to have acted was long before now. They should have planned for a successor to Biden when they realized that VP Harris wouldn’t work. Now that it’s after the primaries, replacing him on the ticket essentially tells Democratic voters that their votes didn’t count (so much for democracy) and anyone they can find as a replacement is going to have three months to campaign.
They have only themselves to blame.
Imagine this happening in a foreign country.
We, specifically our media, would most likely portray the party in power as doing everything possible to hold on while portraying the opposition leader as a martyr. Each criminal allegation and trial of the opposition leader would be reported as an illegal attempt to undermine democratic institutions and our government would most likely protest to the UN to sanction the ruling party.
Yep. Mexico comes to mind.
jvb
It would require the electorate at large to practice morals and ethics.
We would be better off if only those of good moral character voted.
The problem is, any law that restricted the franchise to those of good moral character would be enforced by people, and many people would interpret “good moral character” as “vote the way I do”.
“Is the growth of social media part of the reason?”
I think this is an underappreciated factor. The growth of social media has allowed other voices and facts to come out. It is undeniable that the government is heavily censoring what you can know. It is undeniable that the government is using the administrative state to enforce the state media monopoly. Only one social media oligarch refused the demands of the government censors and he is now being investigated by over 50 government agencies.
Imagine if we didn’t have social media at all. What would we know about these candidates? We would know what Joe Scarborough tells us. We would all think that Joe Biden is sharp as a tack and that Donald Trump is a complete criminal. We would know nothing of the Biden family’s ‘businesses’ that get tens or hundreds of millions from foreign governments. We would know nothing of Joe Biden’s classified document fiasco. We would be locked down right now in a never-ending global pandemic, all getting our government-mandated shots every 3 months. We would know nothing about what is happening at the border. Eliminate everything the New York Times has been forced to print because the alternative media exposed it and that is what we would know. The Washington Post editorial page is what we would know.
We don’t need someone to come in and pull the plug on “The Swamp”. We need a tsunami…and the likelihood of that happening, even should President Trump be re-elected, is very, VERY small..in my opinion.
I woke up this morning, thinking about the state of our land. I am sad, angry, frustrated, and confused. Dammit, this can’t be happening! We are a world power, or at least used to be, and we face enemies and problems like China, Russia, Iran, the Hamas monsters, inflation and a country overrun by illegals bringing crime, poverty and disease and demanding care and comfort which we should be giving to our own people, like injured veterans. AND NO ONE IS IN CHARGE, EXCEPT THE REINCARNATED EDITH WILSON!
This has to be stopped, Senile Joe must be sent to a home with his rocking chair, someone needs to be running our country responsibly, with its citizens in mind!
The cause is the same cause that led to a Trump win in 2016. Growing dissatisfaction with the government as a whole. Wanting someone from the outside to “drain the swamp”. Wanting to push back against the government nanny, intruding into more and more areas of our life. It’s people saying “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore”.
however, the left doesn’t understand this; that a vote for Biden is a vote for more of the same and more government in our lives. Look at the uproar over the recent overturning of Chevron. The underlying assumption for this uproar is more control by the government is always better; How can we take away power and control from the unelected “experts”?
Volokh wrote, “So what is the problem? One answer is bad people. But there have always been bad people.”
Well, sure. but only in recent decades have so many flagrantly “bad people” been embraced and celebrated in the popular culture as admirable and worthy of emulation. Conversely, the culture’s rejection, derision and diminishment of morality and religious faith in public life, and the ostracizing of those proclaiming and practicing traditional religious beliefs, have expanded the involvement and influence of the “bad people.” The advance of secular morality unmoored from any objective standard or ultimate authority has done its work. Generation by generation, the deterioration of virtue continues, fostered largely by families and peers with no objective moral compass and bolstered by our failed educational system. Tolerance has been superseded by licentiousness. As a prelude to this year’s “Pride Month,” I remember reading someone’s comment that our culture is now proud of things we ought to be ashamed of, and ashamed of things of which we should be proud. Indeed. Undoubtedly this has taken and continues to take a toll on the character of the citizenry and thus the nation and its political systems.
When I began reading Prof. Volokh’s paragraph that begins, “Our constitutional system…” I thought he might start questioning (rhetorically, of course) the extent to which that constitutional system has been diminished, subverted and ground down, particularly over the past century. I hoped he might question the consequences of our politicians forgetting that they swear an oath to support, protect and defend our constitution, as opposed to support, protect and defend a president, an administration, a party, a political agenda or one’s personal aggrandizement. Of course, this political decline goes hand in glove with the deterioration in morals and ethics discussed above.
Jack mentioned the need for, “…competent and ethical leaders available and willing to serve.” Certainly, this is a tremendous failure of our political systems. Seeking out and encouraging good candidates, then nurturing them to performative and electoral success is an essential task for the political parties, beginning at the local level.
Just as our decline didn’t occur overnight, neither can it be fixed in short order. But we’d better figure it out and start soon.
By the way, the comments and counter-comments on Volokh’s article echo the quality of most current political debate in this country. Very little “Reason” displayed there.
Straight-line deterioration of the comments on VC from its independent days, to the Post, to Reason, the last being by far the worst.
I regularly participate in the comments section.
It is even more interesting than Usenet newsgroups!
Another Hoover Institution fellow, Niall Ferguson, has an excellent explanation for why we’re where we are. See his “We’re All Soviets Now” or, if you subscribe to The Free Press, his most recent column addresses the same issue.