The vast majority of the people who are reading this are in favor of impeaching the President. The majority of the American public are not.
The answer, to those who support impeachment, is to start the proceedings. There is a strong case that high crimes and misdemeanors have been knowingly perpetrated by the President. What keeps the majority of the public from embracing impeachment, the argument goes, is that they don’t pay much attention. They need to have the evidence presented to them… and not just once or twice, in a readily available document or a single high-profile interview, but rather every day. All of the information should be presented, and as people are exposed to it opinions will change.
This is what happened during both the Nixon and Clinton impeachment proceedings. What started as a minority of the population supporting impeachment ended as a majority of the population debating not the impeachment itself but whether the improper actions warranted tossing the President.
Many people who understand that opinions can shift over time, and that political action is best served as part of a long view strategy, are curiously unwilling to apply that simple reasoning to the 2020 election.
Let’s be clear: the 2020 election is more than a year away. During that time, any number of events may happen which will cause a sea change in the political landscape. Trump, Biden, Sanders and Warren are all old enough that their chances of suffering a rapid-onset medical calamity are heightened. Photos of Pence buggering the Falwell’s former pool boy business partner may emerge. Not so very long ago, this would be the time when potential candidates would have just started measuring the possibility of a run.
That’s because, in politics, opinions can shift on a dime among the underinformed, and a majority of the country is willfully ignorant. Most voters, poll after poll has demonstrated, do not begin to seriously investigate the candidates until August or September of the election year.
Recognizing these facts – that it is more than a year until the election; that events may occur to change the political landscape dramatically; and the the general electorate is not yet paying attention to politics – it is the height of folly to state with certainty what is going to occur at the time of the eventual vote.
Without that certainty, the question becomes: why pledge to a candidate?
There is a simple reason. The reason to pledge to a candidate at this stage is to affirm that a candidate sufficiently represents your views, and you wish them to be President more than any available option.
To be clear: this is not the time to develop tunnel vision and make a choice based on “who is available” because until the ballot is in front of you, you do not know who is available. Predictions of the future are notoriously unreliable.
Worse, such predictions have a remarkable ability to reduce options. One of the most insidious of intellectual traps is depression, and its cousins fear and cynicism aren’t much better. All tell people to abandon hope and merely take what is provided.
This is the exact opposite of what is needed in political activism. More to the point, it is fundamentally anti-American… not surprising, because Americanism as a political philosophy is predicated on the value of the individual.
The leaders are supposed to be the representatives of the people. On the occasions when they are not, when they are merely the least damaging despot available, they are to be tolerated only as long as is absolutely necessary, and never embraced.
The overwhelming majority of people who are reading this are former Republicans, or moderate Democrats, or Libertarians, or party-less independents. For a bare handful of them, Biden is a representative leader. For fewer, Trump is. Among the majority, one of the three competitors in the Republican primary is a better fit for their views.
At this stage, an educated voter’s duty is to support (perhaps not with cash or action, but at least with their voice) the candidate who best represents them. If a more appropriate candidate arises (such as, for many of us, Justin Amash) they should then switch their support.
We believe that among existing candidates, these people are best suited to be President. What keeps the majority of the public from embracing them, the argument goes, is that they have trouble getting their superior messages and resumes exposed. The public needs to hear of their value not once a month, but rather every day. If all of the information can be presented, reasonable people exposed to it will change their opinions… provided they can be broken free of their fear, depression and cyncism.
This is the way our political system was designed to work. When the very activists who have spent years following politics abandon the process in favor of ease, it should be unsurprising when political leaders don’t bother following the process for impeachment and instead just go with what the current polls are indicating.
If we want to get back to having the process respected, we need to accept and follow the concepts that gave rise to our system of government.
