Misunderstanding The Trump Accountability Assignment

John Rittner: Analysts and commenters like yourself have plenty of advice for the Democrats, in addition to the normal party insiders. How is the party processing these information inputs? Is it processing it at all or are all of us just yelling in the wind?

Do we have a Project 2025 equivalent that can provide a framework or blueprints or model legislation (ideally) for quick effective action if we take power again? If we did have a Project 2025 effort, who would control it?

This is a long series of questions but it looks like there is little to no effort on this type of organization and no planning on how to manage the politics of it. I would love to hear your opinions on this subject.

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There’s a resemblance, which I won’t draw out here at length, between political professionals trying to make strategic decisions and swing voters wrestling with how to cast their ballots. They’re both buffeted by conflicting appeals and ideas and propaganda—that is, information. They process it all as best they can. And then they act.

It’s very unstructured. Different decision makers have different information transoms, consumption habits, and decision-making processes. But the key is that they’re all impressionable. They are not sequestered from the marketplace of ideas. And so if you can write or talk persuasively enough to command their attention, or even just reach them osmotically, you can influence their actions. It’s the social-media age, so we use the term “influencers” promiscuously, but before there were algorithms, ideas still went viral much like influencer hot takes do, and politicians leaned heavily on the unsolicited advice of wisemen.

In other words, things aren’t so different today than they were in the past. The biggest difference is the sheer volume of available information.

Which brings me to your question about the wind. Elites aren’t equally influential, and the reach of any one person’s influence doesn’t tell us much about the merits of their ideas or the quality of their thinking. The most influential people in conservative politics are propagandists. Donald Trump is influenced by money, dictators, and whatever’s on television. Barack Obama enjoyed bouncing ideas off famed everyman David Brooks. Joe Biden’s intellectual tastes were, with some notable exceptions, fairly pedestrian. As far as I know, none of them are Off Message subscribers. Alas.

But because information diffuses, people like me can shape developments and outcomes indirectly.

By September of this year I’d written several, lengthy pieces arguing that Democrats should withhold their votes for annual budgets, and how they might go about it to maximize their chances of constraining Trump. All to seemingly little effect. Then Ezra Klein wrote this article for the New York Times, and reluctant Democrats on Capitol Hill flocked to the idea. Ezra has a bigger platform and more restrained temperament than I do, so more members read his piece, and the fact that it came from somebody who doesn’t run hot probably had persuasive power of its own. Even Ezra Klein and all that.

But the point is that the idea gurgled up from below, from niche platforms and backbench Democrats to people higher up the elite ladder, who are impressionable as we all are. That is how people like me and other fight-liberals forced the hand of Chuck Schumer (who probably dislikes this newsletter!) indirectly. I don’t know if my writing influenced Ezra directly or not, but we’re all in the middle of and contributing to a maelstrom of ideas and arguments, and the case for a shutdown carried the day.

This can feel frustrating, like yelling into the wind, but it is also helping create the weather.

This dynamic wasn’t unique to the shutdown. It is generalizable. To your question about a Project 2025-style plan of action for Democrats in 2029, a few groups are already doing this kind of work. It’s a bit early to cast judgment on them. A lot will depend on what they produce and who wins the Democratic presidential nomination and so on. But it isn’t to early to try to influence them, and to that end I’d point you to this article I wrote and this article I published by Sam Bagenstos, and encourage you to share them with other politically active Democrats and liberals.

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David Wolkenfeld: What do you think of Amy Davidson Sorkin’s review essay in The New Yorker which provides some pushback to your repeated insistence that a more rapid prosecution of the crimes of Trump 1.0 would have ended his political career.

I’m a huge fan of Amy’s writing and have been for years, so I say this advisedly, but I found her review a bit straw-mannish, and oddly redolent of the kind of second guessing and self doubt that paralyzes Democratic officials: Acting decisively could go wrong in various ways so we should proceed with caution or not at all.

If anyone has standing to speak for holders of the “received wisdom that, if only Merrick Garland…had promptly ordered a criminal investigation of Trump …everything might have been different,” it’s me. And our view is not that Jack Smith made a bunch of mistakes or that if Garland had moved with greater dispatch, Trump’s trial would, per Amy, have proceeded as scheduled in 2024, and that he would’ve been convicted and sentenced in election year.

It’s that acting quickly would have preserved degrees of freedom and better husbanded the precious resource of time. Trump was an emergency and a live danger, he should have been confronted at his weakest, but the powers that be treated him as an afterthought, or someone too scary to fight.

Political dithering (by Garland, but also by congressional Democrats), along with Joe Biden’s determination to turn the page for the sake of restoring normalcy, delivered Trump the time and space he needed to reassert control over the Republican Party, and then to rehabilitate his image. To let the process of forgetting work its will.

If you’re obsessed with Trump accountability, as I am, you saw this all taking shape on January 6, 2021. ...