Matthew Yglesias: Impeachment Protests and Mass Resistance Are Needed to Beat Trump https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/18/20905686/resistance-protest-impeachment-rallies-trump: "Watergate is the ur-text for how Americans imagine the defeat of a sitting president, but it shouldn’t be how to think about the impeachment of Donald Trump.... A lawless government cannot be constrained by the institutions of the law alone. It is popular mass resistance that creates a crisis point and forces action. And if Democrats want to beat Trump’s stonewalling tactics in 2019, they should consider doing it again.... Defeating Nixon... meant winning a series of difficult elite insider games.... Building a consensus that compelled the president to resign was arduous, and the people who did it are rightly proud of their work. But none of this is relevant to contemporary politics, any more than the Senate’s unanimous passage of the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act has relevant lessons for contemporary climate politics. Today’s Congress is much more partisan and much more ideological, featuring many members who have no personal loyalty to Trump but who can nevertheless be expected to stand by him through thick and thin, thanks to broader partisan and policy objectives. In an extraordinary moment, you need to reach beyond ordinary politics.... The mechanisms through which protest works seem multifaceted, with some of the impact driven by direct personal participation, some driven by witnessing the protest themselves, and some driven by media coverage which serves to rebroadcast key elements of the protest message. The key to it all, however, is that bothering to show up to a march is a moderately costly investment of time and energy. When a bunch of people do that, it serves as a powerful signal to the rest of society that something extraordinary is happening.... The Constitution is in need of defending. And it would be extremely foolish to believe that Republican senators and Federalist Society judges are going to come riding out of the woods in order to do the job....
#noted #2019-10-24
