Last October, the 80-year-old Democratic strategist James Carville confidently declared in the New York Times that Kamala Harris would win the White House. Last month he made another proclamation in the same paper: the most effective strategy for opposing Trump, he opined, was to let him self-destruct. This struck many as the exact wrong advice given Trump’s super-accelerated process of vastly expanding executive power, overwhelming the legislative branch and working towards openly defying and breaking the judiciary. America is becoming another country. If the Republicans lose the House in 18 months and refuse to acknowledge the validity of the election, America will be another country.
Virtually allowing Trump to hurtle forward unimpeded is also producing the unanticipated effect of exposing the vapid, venal obsequiousness at the core of present-day liberalism. Recall the Black Lives Matter movement and the ensuing waves of policed speech and cancelled careers amid scarce material change to actual black lives. Then flash forward to Al Green, a black Democratic congressman from Texas, who rose in defiance during Trump’s joint address to Congress, shouting at Trump and waving his cane in protest. Scores of Green’s fellow Democrats condemned his behaviour. Later, after Green was censured by the House, a small group of Democrats gathered around him on the House floor and sang the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome”. Yet Green’s daring had nothing to do with the civil rights movement of six decades ago. He had intervened in the urgent present, representing the conscience of all Americans, as black figures have often done. But his fellow liberals admonished him, and then patronised him.
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