The decision to publish reflects the ethos that grew up during the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal--that any secret should be published. This has contributed enormously to our loss of respect for elected leaders of every party. The MSM in the 1970s began setting itself up as the ultimate authority on what government should not do, and what Americans should and should not think about it. That was the role the founding fathers tried to reserve for elected leaders. It's a role that Donald Trump is working very hard to regain.
Then I turned to Sunday Opinion, the section which, as I have pointed out, was in the 1950s and 1960s called the News of the Week in Review and later changed to the Sunday Review. That section leads with head shots of every single Democratic Senator (the Times does not, apparently, deign to address Republicans), and a long piece by Millennial Ezra Klein demanding, essentially, that the Senate Democrats take advantage of the filibuster rule to shut down the government in a few weeks and keep it shut down until Donald Trump abandons major policies and practices of his administration. The Democrats, he says, should say something like this: "Trump won the election. He is the legitimate president. But the government has to serve the people and be accountable to the people. ICE can conduct legitimate deportations, but there can't be masked agents roaming the streets refusing to identify themselves or their authority. The Trump family cannot be hoovering in money and investments from the countries that depend on us and that fear our power and our sanctions. There have to be inspectors general and JAGs and career prosecutors watching to make sure the government is being run on behalf of the people rather than on behalf of the Trump family." And one reason that Klein favors this confrontation is that he does not think that the Supreme Court will stop Trump from doing the things that he does not like.
Klein doesn't mention that the Constitution provides not one, but two ways of dealing with an incompetent, authoritarian or corrupt government. The first, of course, is through elections--which have defeated Trump only once in three tries, and which have given Republicans control of Congress. The second is impeachment, trial, and removal, which failed twice against Trump during and after his first term and which is impossible now, with Republicans barely in control of the House. (And new impeachments after a possible Democratic victory in 2026 would be as futile as the earlier ones.) He does acknowledge, at length, the unpopularity of the Democratic Party and the weaknesses of its congressional leadership. But his whole argument seems to me to boil down to this: No possible measure against Trump can be omitted, because he is doing things that I and people like me oppose.
I agree that Trump and his family have embarked upon an unprecedented in-office quest for private gain, I oppose almost everything that he is doing, and I don't think he is competent to be president--but he is, and his party controls the Congress and the Supreme Court as well. They can do what they are doing within the framework of our government, and they may maintain the support of a majority of the American people. And that is not all.
The founders left us a wonderful blueprint for a democratic government in which no one would exercise absolute power, but they understood that that blueprint depended upon the citizenry to work in practice. It is not working, in large part, because both sides have abandoned any loyalty to established procedures and rules of fairness, as the redistricting controversy shows. And those like Klein who want to bring the federal government to a halt should ponder another provision of the Constitution, the one that gives Congress the power (by simple majorities) to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in time of invasion or rebellion, as the public safety may require it. I think there are people in the Trump administration looking for a pretext to use that power, and they might do it, as Lincoln did in 1861, without waiting for congressional authorization. The founders did not prefer anarchy to order, and we have to ask ourselves if anarchy would really serve anyone's interests now. And major media outlets might start asking themselves if their job is really advocating routes to a better future, rather than reporting accurately about the present.
And last but not least, the section includes a long piece by the high priest of the church of the op-ed page, Thomas Friedman, who has been telling the whole world how to solve all its problems for several decades. Drawing heavily on the ideas of an A.I. specialist named Craig Mundie, who co-authored a book on the subject with the late Henry Kissinger, he paints an alarming and probably accurate picture of the impending ubiquity and autonomy of A.I. systems--but assures us that he has the solution, a very Kissingerian one. The U.S. and China, he argues, must collaborate to create A.I. regulators--themselves a form of A.I.--that will insure that their systems will work to the benefit of all mankind. And they simply must do that, he argues, because it is the only way out. That is why, Friedman has now told us for at least three decades, the Israelis and Palestinians must make peace, too--but somehow, it never happens.
I am not optimistic about the immediate future of the nation or the world, because its current state owes so much to developments that have been going on for decades. And to younger readers especially, I say that the real problem of the next few decades is not to avoid various catastrophes, but how to deal with them emotionally. We all eventually deal with terrible events such as the deaths of loved ones, and ultimately, of course, of our own. Denial does not solve this problem. Politics are failing us, but they do not alone make life worth living even in the best of times. We all remain very fortunate to be here on earth. Please do not regard posts like this one as prophecies of ultimate doom.
