Court-packing! Puerto Rican statehood! Votes for felons! Why—and how—the next Democratic majority should play dirty.
If Democrats are wise, they will embrace President Donald Trump’s demonstration that there no longer are any unwritten rules in American politics. (I’ve come to think that the key text for understanding our era is the 1997 movie Air Bud: “There’s no rule that says a dog can’t play basketball.”) Democrats should be preparing to exercise power, beginning as early as 2020, with that lesson in mind.
As we all know, Trump and the Republican Party that enables him eat norms for breakfast. A norm is a tacit and mutual agreement that certain exercises of power, while lawful, also are unthinkable. As a result, a willingness to think the unthinkable is itself a source of power. With that willingness, you can deny a president a hearing on a Supreme Court nominee. You can threaten to jail your political opponents and call an election rigged if you don’t win. You can demand investigations of your enemies, you can fire the FBI director investigating you, and you can quite possibly pardon yourself for federal crimes.
Trump and Republicans are not interested in self-restraint. We ought to be past surprise, for example, that the “let the people decide” standard invented by Mitch McConnell to block Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination no longer applies now that Trump can choose a successor for Anthony Kennedy. Those who care about the future of liberal democracy in this country ought to be beyond outrage and ready for something altogether colder and more disciplined.
Democrats should plan to treat political norms, when and if they’re in charge of a unified government, the way Trump and the Republicans do. They should be readying a program of systematic norm-breaking for partisan advantage—but only if they are willing and able to follow it through to its conclusion.
That’s bound to sound inflammatory, especially because so much criticism of Trump has stressed the value of norms for keeping political conflict within manageable bounds. Even now, there’s a profoundly comforting appeal in the notion that we could one day soon cordon off the Trump years like a toxic Superfund site. The anti-Trump conservative David Frum recently endorsed that notion in an interview with Democracy. Democrats might “become an Eisenhower party of the broad center,” Frum said, as he called for the party to act as “a relatively conservative, unifying force in American life.” We could call it the Return to Normalcy program: Treat the Trump years as an ugly aberration and commit to rebuilding the consensus under which mutual self-restraint once again looks honorable rather than traitorous to partisans on either side.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/07/04/democrats-majority-rules-norms-trump-2020-218947
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