Impeachment Was on the Family Table This Thanksgiving
This opinion piece by a Harvard history professor in the WSJ is very clever and very fun to read.
Impeachment Was on the Family Table This Thanksgiving
Most admitted they hadn’t been paying close attention. Opinions were nevertheless served.
Thanksgiving is over and, predictably, impeachment couldn’t be kept off the table. We tried to avoid the dish, we really did. But in my family of Philadelphia-area suburbanites, the very demographic that may decide the 2020 presidential election, the hunger to see where everybody stood couldn’t be denied. We are all college-educated, a few of us inclined to wokeness, some members of white-collar unions and therefore left of center, others more concerned with our stock portfolios. Only one beloved aunt was willing to declare her full support for President Trump. The rest had more or less been successfully fed the New York Times’ version of events.
There was a widespread belief that the phrase quid pro quo was the name of a type of felony. Roughly the same family members believed this who last Thanksgiving had believed “collusion” was a criminal act. None except the family Trumpist had at all considered how the information they possessed had been packaged for their consumption. Four or five of us were willing to admit that the hearings were “too partisan” and unfair, though the overriding concern wasn’t so much devotion to abstract justice as fear that the nation wouldn’t swallow the impeachers’ conclusions.
Most of my family had concluded from the little they had heard about the impeachment proceedings—even the retirees hadn’t watched more than video highlights—that Mr. Trump had done something uniquely bad, even shocking. My family has had little direct experience with politicians. Almost everyone believed that Mr. Trump had tried to pressure the Ukrainian prime minister for his own political gain. No one had read the rough transcript of the call between the two leaders.
We discussed what crime might have been committed, and the most popular option was “extortion.” No one present had studied criminal law. Almost everyone thought that Mr. Trump was unpresidential—the epithet “jackass” elicited vigorous nods of agreement—and should be “removed,” like a gravy stain from a baby’s bib, as soon as possible.
These opinions were asserted with considerable passion, leaving the family Trumpist to stew in her juices. Something approaching rational debate arose only on the question of whether impeachment would benefit the Democrats. No one thought the Democrats had a candidate who could beat Mr. Trump. No one thought the Senate would convict him. Most couldn’t comprehend why the hearings so far had failed to move public opinion. The two most woke family members hoped that Mr. Trump would be damaged enough to allow a more radical Democrat to win, but this was generally dismissed as wishful thinking. The moderate Democrats in the family felt that their party’s efforts would have been better spent on finding a candidate who didn’t want to take away their generous private insurance. No one thought Michael Bloomberg was an appetizing alternative to the current flock of turkeys.
As for me, I had taken the precaution of bringing some decent claret to the festivities, and several of the dishes on the table merited close attention, so I managed to keep my private thoughts to myself—a course of action I have always found to improve digestion after family feasts. Pragmatic soul that I am, when some juvenile inquisitor insists I take sides, demanding, “You’re not for Trump, are you?” my standard response is “Compared to whom?” But fortunately the only Manichaean choice imposed on me was between the pecan and spicy pumpkin pie.
I was tempted to opine that if Mr. Trump were impeached and then acquitted by the Senate, he could—and no doubt would—claim loudly during the election to have been exonerated a second time of all wrongdoing, going 2-0 against Democratic “witch hunts.” I yielded instead to the safer temptation to lob another scoop of ice cream on my pie. My other unspoken thought was that the Democrats’ current impeachment tirade was payback for the Republican’s dubious attempt to impeach President Clinton in 1998, and that the Republicans would undoubtedly repeat the whole useless exercise the next time they won the House during a Democratic presidency.
Only one generation of Americans experienced an impeachment proceeding between 1783 and 1973; my generation has witnessed three, and a pattern is beginning to form. One can only hope that the country will eventually learn why regular constitutional order is more productive than engineered political upheavals, or at least that what goes around, comes around. After all, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Mr. Hankins is professor of history at Harvard University. His book, “Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy,” will be published next month by Belknap Press.
Source: WSJ