Well knit observations and distillation of them in this: "The prevailing assumption of a weaker but continued liberal-centrist control of Europe (at least for another eight to ten years) could collapse quite quickly."
A whole lot is packed into these comments that never seem to be addressed, let along understood, by Western commentators:
"Liberal ideology tries to spread power relations within a coalitional structure rather than through a hierarchical structure.
The long odds are against success for the populists if only because the social forces aligned against change today are far more formidable than the conservative forces aligned against change in the 1960s. Accordingly, great risks have to be taken. Donald Trump and his team are nothing if not entrepreneurial risk-takers.
...
Triggering liberals into certain languages and behaviours is very easy precisely because they are trapped in a coalitional ideology. To hold the coalition together requires certain rhetorical gestures and action whereas a hierarchical structure can shift more easily between positions so long as certain core general values are maintained."
It is interesting, in the light of my 'quick off the mark' suggestions, how matters panned out in the subsequent 36-48 hours.
First, the national Democrat Party and the liberal media seemed to understand quite quickly that the Trump camp was playing them in an attempt to draw them into political errors. The media downplayed the events. The 22 Governors and Democrat national establishment moved into a much lower key, leaving the Californians to fight their own corner while they waited on events. New York in particular reacted defensively and cautiously.
On the other hand, Newsom himself and the Mayor of Los Angeles adopted a very different line - taking the sort of aggressive position that you would expect to be necessary within California according to the 'liberal coalitional' theory. The Mayor in particular has been challenging the Federal Administration to halt the raids which is just not going to happen
The pressure from the Right is not letting up. The Republican States are throwing their weight behind opposition to Democrat lawfare operations and the executive in Washington seems gung-ho to press whatever advantage they have harder, pushing their claims to the limit as we expected.
I am not into conspiracy or prepared to over-estimate the ability of politicians to co-ordinate on scale so I suspect that what was happening was more instinctive than thought through. The Californian Democrats have skin in the game of keeping their local coalition together and key components of it want action to support illegal immigrants.
On the other hand, the national Democrats do not have skin in the local game and have more to lose than gain by appearing to be the supporters of lawlessness, looting and rock-throwing. They need to keep their powder dry and wait for the Republicans to 'go too far' so that they can reach credible higher moral ground.
From this perspective, the intervention by Trump forced the Democrats on the defensive and ensured that the more aggressive responses were contained but in such a way as to secure a local base and not cause too much direct damage nationally.
It is also interesting how Trump exploited its intervention to send a very right wing message on base-naming in his speech at Fort Bragg. The language was calculated to send the liberal media into a total hissy-fit with references to rioters as 'animals' and a 'foreign enemy' and speaking of liberating Los Angeles.
This speech may have triggered precisely the emotional result that we suggested Trump wanted and other executive comments in Washington have been driving the message that an insurrection is taking place (which is nonsense but which may be intended to create a self-fulfilling prophecy) so the 'cool' approach of national Democracy may be tested.
The intervention appears to have been a win for Trump but more as a step forward in a war of attrition Russian-style than as a major acquisition of political territory. What he is risking though is a split in military and law enforcement opinion which gets us one step more not towards fascism but to genuine insurrection and civil war.
The lesson is that Trump is looking for ways to drive his ideological agenda at every point in the game and the Democrats remain on the defensive and will continue to do so until they resolve their internal coalitional tensions. Trump is prepared to risk genuine insurrection and problems within his own monopoly of force and Democrats are constantly on the edge of having their street force them into a confrontation they will not win and which is too early in their game plan.
Managing chaos-of-the-day operations has become damn nearly impossible for any purpose other than keeping the Demos relatively occupied. For any Western spectator not inside a genuine 'war zone', any emotional impetus to be so has evaporated. Pretensions of Made for TV battle and fear dramas have lost their excitement potential.
Regarding the judiciary and lawfare there is an interesting tension within the Trumpian coalition as well, so its not just a liberalism vs Trumpism cleavage: the decades-old conservative legal movement (Federalist Society and co.) aimed at overturning the long 1960s (mostly through lawfare) is an important part of the first (and even the second) Trump coalition, but its corporative-elitist bent is in tension with the more populist impulses within Trumpism. It can also be described as a temporal tension: the too late fruition of one trend of conservative politics of law and the too early birth of another. Anyways, this report is an interesting reading: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/trump-aims-build-maga-judiciary-breaking-traditional-conservatives-rcna210785
Also I was wondering what your thinking is about the AMLO-style judicial reform and its recent implementation in the form of judicial elections: does it bare any relevance on Trump's struggles with the judiciary?
Thank you for that comment. Someone else privately drew my attention to the Federalist Society and made a passing comment similar to yours but you have fleshed this out nicely and more usefully. I acccept everything you say.
As to your interesting question, I am not a specialist in this area. I can quite reasonably say that the struggle to contain (more than control) the judiciary is under way (that is not rocket science) and that Trump’s populist team are ‘clever’ at finding ways to raise concerns in voter’s minds but I am not qualified to comment much on the detail of how they are going about it beyond what I have suggested. I am watching this with no more insight than any other political outsider or non-lawyer.
I will say that the possible irony of the Mexican example - https://americasquarterly.org/article/mexicos-judicial-election-is-a-blow-for-democracy - in the context of possible populist solutions in the US should not pass us by. Trump administration members are said to be strongly critical of the politicisation of the jury along Mexican lines in a way that suggests not an attempt at an American democratisation along those lines (which would be hard to see through politically in any case because of the dominant ideology of checks and balances) but only one to ‘de-politicise’ the judiciary in a partisan way (meaning presumably the restriction of the judiciary’s ability to act as check and balance on this executive’s action). The Mexican model would give huge advantage to progressive activism and so increase liberal power. I can see why conservative lawyers would not like it.
I suspect that we are not seeing anything too revolutionary here and certainly not some incipient fascism but merely the usual business of identifying boundaries and vacuums of power, pushing them outwards or into them in order to serve political purposes. The problem is self-evident - not only would radical democratisation almost certainly result in increased progressive presence in the Judiciary through NGO support (unless populists start to mirror progressive organisational methods) but anything that gives power to a populist executive will pass on that power to a later liberal executive.
Under these circumstances I would guess Trump II ‘populism’ is simply concerned with ‘advantage’ in three directions - maximising non-liberal presence in the judiciary as it is, maximising populist approaches to the law over and against traditional conservative ones and increasing maximum political pressure on juries and career judicial figures to help them shift position in favour of the current executive. I merely postulated in the article that one (but only one) of the drivers for the LA intervention was to test the system by forcing Democrats to try and use the law politically in order to help discredit such use with voters and to see how far executive power could be pushed to help deliver a key policy. If the policy fails, it would also be useful to have liberal judges on hand as responsible.
Well knit observations and distillation of them in this: "The prevailing assumption of a weaker but continued liberal-centrist control of Europe (at least for another eight to ten years) could collapse quite quickly."
A whole lot is packed into these comments that never seem to be addressed, let along understood, by Western commentators:
"Liberal ideology tries to spread power relations within a coalitional structure rather than through a hierarchical structure.
The long odds are against success for the populists if only because the social forces aligned against change today are far more formidable than the conservative forces aligned against change in the 1960s. Accordingly, great risks have to be taken. Donald Trump and his team are nothing if not entrepreneurial risk-takers.
...
Triggering liberals into certain languages and behaviours is very easy precisely because they are trapped in a coalitional ideology. To hold the coalition together requires certain rhetorical gestures and action whereas a hierarchical structure can shift more easily between positions so long as certain core general values are maintained."
It is interesting, in the light of my 'quick off the mark' suggestions, how matters panned out in the subsequent 36-48 hours.
First, the national Democrat Party and the liberal media seemed to understand quite quickly that the Trump camp was playing them in an attempt to draw them into political errors. The media downplayed the events. The 22 Governors and Democrat national establishment moved into a much lower key, leaving the Californians to fight their own corner while they waited on events. New York in particular reacted defensively and cautiously.
On the other hand, Newsom himself and the Mayor of Los Angeles adopted a very different line - taking the sort of aggressive position that you would expect to be necessary within California according to the 'liberal coalitional' theory. The Mayor in particular has been challenging the Federal Administration to halt the raids which is just not going to happen
The pressure from the Right is not letting up. The Republican States are throwing their weight behind opposition to Democrat lawfare operations and the executive in Washington seems gung-ho to press whatever advantage they have harder, pushing their claims to the limit as we expected.
I am not into conspiracy or prepared to over-estimate the ability of politicians to co-ordinate on scale so I suspect that what was happening was more instinctive than thought through. The Californian Democrats have skin in the game of keeping their local coalition together and key components of it want action to support illegal immigrants.
On the other hand, the national Democrats do not have skin in the local game and have more to lose than gain by appearing to be the supporters of lawlessness, looting and rock-throwing. They need to keep their powder dry and wait for the Republicans to 'go too far' so that they can reach credible higher moral ground.
From this perspective, the intervention by Trump forced the Democrats on the defensive and ensured that the more aggressive responses were contained but in such a way as to secure a local base and not cause too much direct damage nationally.
It is also interesting how Trump exploited its intervention to send a very right wing message on base-naming in his speech at Fort Bragg. The language was calculated to send the liberal media into a total hissy-fit with references to rioters as 'animals' and a 'foreign enemy' and speaking of liberating Los Angeles.
This speech may have triggered precisely the emotional result that we suggested Trump wanted and other executive comments in Washington have been driving the message that an insurrection is taking place (which is nonsense but which may be intended to create a self-fulfilling prophecy) so the 'cool' approach of national Democracy may be tested.
The intervention appears to have been a win for Trump but more as a step forward in a war of attrition Russian-style than as a major acquisition of political territory. What he is risking though is a split in military and law enforcement opinion which gets us one step more not towards fascism but to genuine insurrection and civil war.
The lesson is that Trump is looking for ways to drive his ideological agenda at every point in the game and the Democrats remain on the defensive and will continue to do so until they resolve their internal coalitional tensions. Trump is prepared to risk genuine insurrection and problems within his own monopoly of force and Democrats are constantly on the edge of having their street force them into a confrontation they will not win and which is too early in their game plan.
Managing chaos-of-the-day operations has become damn nearly impossible for any purpose other than keeping the Demos relatively occupied. For any Western spectator not inside a genuine 'war zone', any emotional impetus to be so has evaporated. Pretensions of Made for TV battle and fear dramas have lost their excitement potential.
Regarding the judiciary and lawfare there is an interesting tension within the Trumpian coalition as well, so its not just a liberalism vs Trumpism cleavage: the decades-old conservative legal movement (Federalist Society and co.) aimed at overturning the long 1960s (mostly through lawfare) is an important part of the first (and even the second) Trump coalition, but its corporative-elitist bent is in tension with the more populist impulses within Trumpism. It can also be described as a temporal tension: the too late fruition of one trend of conservative politics of law and the too early birth of another. Anyways, this report is an interesting reading: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/trump-aims-build-maga-judiciary-breaking-traditional-conservatives-rcna210785
Also I was wondering what your thinking is about the AMLO-style judicial reform and its recent implementation in the form of judicial elections: does it bare any relevance on Trump's struggles with the judiciary?
Thank you for that comment. Someone else privately drew my attention to the Federalist Society and made a passing comment similar to yours but you have fleshed this out nicely and more usefully. I acccept everything you say.
As to your interesting question, I am not a specialist in this area. I can quite reasonably say that the struggle to contain (more than control) the judiciary is under way (that is not rocket science) and that Trump’s populist team are ‘clever’ at finding ways to raise concerns in voter’s minds but I am not qualified to comment much on the detail of how they are going about it beyond what I have suggested. I am watching this with no more insight than any other political outsider or non-lawyer.
I will say that the possible irony of the Mexican example - https://americasquarterly.org/article/mexicos-judicial-election-is-a-blow-for-democracy - in the context of possible populist solutions in the US should not pass us by. Trump administration members are said to be strongly critical of the politicisation of the jury along Mexican lines in a way that suggests not an attempt at an American democratisation along those lines (which would be hard to see through politically in any case because of the dominant ideology of checks and balances) but only one to ‘de-politicise’ the judiciary in a partisan way (meaning presumably the restriction of the judiciary’s ability to act as check and balance on this executive’s action). The Mexican model would give huge advantage to progressive activism and so increase liberal power. I can see why conservative lawyers would not like it.
I suspect that we are not seeing anything too revolutionary here and certainly not some incipient fascism but merely the usual business of identifying boundaries and vacuums of power, pushing them outwards or into them in order to serve political purposes. The problem is self-evident - not only would radical democratisation almost certainly result in increased progressive presence in the Judiciary through NGO support (unless populists start to mirror progressive organisational methods) but anything that gives power to a populist executive will pass on that power to a later liberal executive.
Under these circumstances I would guess Trump II ‘populism’ is simply concerned with ‘advantage’ in three directions - maximising non-liberal presence in the judiciary as it is, maximising populist approaches to the law over and against traditional conservative ones and increasing maximum political pressure on juries and career judicial figures to help them shift position in favour of the current executive. I merely postulated in the article that one (but only one) of the drivers for the LA intervention was to test the system by forcing Democrats to try and use the law politically in order to help discredit such use with voters and to see how far executive power could be pushed to help deliver a key policy. If the policy fails, it would also be useful to have liberal judges on hand as responsible.