On this day of righteous fury — the nation’s second presidential impeachment in 21 years — I have a special request.
I want to hear from someone, anyone, who meets two standards. One, this person is a supporter of Donald Trump and his Republican backers in Congress who believes the impeachment proceeding is illegitimate and unfair. Two, this person is ready in good faith to convince me that he or she would also oppose impeachment and believe the whole matter to be terribly unfair if the facts in the Ukraine matter were exactly the same in every respect but these: that Hillary Clinton was in the White House and she had asked a foreign leader to investigate her potential GOP opponent in the 2020 reelection.
Does such a person exist? I have my doubts, but my standards for the search are lenient. You do not need to convince me of the merits of your position as a matter of politics or law or constitutional theory. You only need to convince me that you genuinely believe what you are saying and can credibly defend it. It will help, for instance, if you can point to previous examples when you took positions on matters of principle that happened to conflict with your own partisan preferences.
If so, send an email to an account, [email protected], that we have set up in a spirit of curiosity, not judgment, to understand how people take the positions they do on impeachment without cracking up. There may be little suspense in this constitutional drama — a House impeachment Wednesday, a Senate acquittal sometime over the next month or so — but we might as well use the occasion to learn about the workings of the political mind. Not just your mind, but mine, too.
As it happens, I do worry about my own crack up. I hold two beliefs that have been fortified by a quarter-century covering Washington ideological and partisan conflict. These two things are not necessarily in outright contradiction, but they certainly rest uneasily with each other.
Most people are quick to spot hypocrisy and double standards all around them but very few people regard themselves as hypocrites on political matters.
Belief One: There is simply no credible way — if one cares remotely about logic or philosophical consistency — that a person could be sufficiently troubled by Bill Clinton’s 1998 sex scandal and the false and misleading statements he made in public and under oath about it to advocate his removal from office and ALSO not be troubled by Trump’s conduct in the Ukraine matter or think that Democrats are horribly out of bounds in demanding accountability.
Belief Two: Most people are quick to spot hypocrisy and double standards all around them but very few people regard themselves as hypocrites on political matters. Most politicians will, on background, wink or sigh or make self-deprecating cracks about having to hold their nose about this or that expedient vote, or bob and weave around some awkward subject. But even in those instances the politicians — just like their supporters at home — will believe they are acting with some ends-justifying purpose. They regard themselves not as unprincipled but as righteous, acting on behalf of a larger truth.
So what exactly is that truth? Again, please, send an email and let me know if you are willing to be quoted by name. I’m not asking people who wanted to evict Bill Clinton from office but indignantly defend Trump against impeachment to justify themselves to me. I’m asking, earnestly, how they justify it to themselves. I’d note that most Republicans — at Trump’s insistence — aren’t saying his conduct was troubling but not impeachable. That was the Democratic defense of Bill Clinton. Most are staying quiet (on the record; there is some background chatter) about what they think of Trump’s behavior. Or they are joining him in saying the way he leaned on Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to announce an investigation of the Biden family was an affirmatively good thing.
One consequence of the Trump years is that it has knocked conservatives off a high horse that they had been riding since the Reagan era. Ideas matter, they said triumphantly, drawing a contrast with the supposedly transactional, spoils-based nature of Democratic politicians and the interest groups they relied on. Another favorite: denunciations of moral relativism, a way of justifying any kind of selfish behavior, when in fact right and wrong are absolutes.
At some level, everyone thinks their own views flow from principle and reason rather than some combination of psychology and prejudice.
For Trump supporters — who back the president even as he regularly shreds once-sacred conservative principles and constantly calibrates his own positions in pursuit of “deals” — ideas matter less than psychology. They like him because he somehow fits visceral notions of how purportedly strong leaders should act. As for moral relativism, it is the essence of Trump politics, as any questioning of his conduct is met with what-about-ism invoking the motives or alleged misdeeds of his opponents, or maintaining that he is simply acting with self-interest that any politician would and it is naïve to expect differently.
This brand of politics sometimes gets described as “tribalism.” That’s an explanation that doesn’t actually explain much, for three reasons:
— It arguably describes broad patterns of group behavior but doesn’t illuminate how this works at the individual level, which is what interests me most. I’ve never interviewed a politician or an ordinary voter who says, “I don’t worry about consistency or even thinking for myself — I just follow whatever my tribe tells me to do.”
— It doesn’t do much to explain why Trump has earned the uncritical support of the tribe. As a native New Yorker whose wealth makes him a “coastal elite,” there are few surface details of his life that he shares in common with his strongest supporters. Sure, maybe they like his views on immigration or believe he is sympathetic to their views in ways more conventional politicians are not. But even a star quarterback gets booed by hometown fans if playing poorly. Logically, wouldn’t tribalists be angry at their leader for embarrassing the tribe through impeachment?
— Finally, I’m not drawn much to a term that is so distancing, and assigns primitive motivations only to people whose views are out of step with one’s own. I’ll be interested in hearing from someone tell me about tribalism to explain the behavior of Trump backers if they would add, “I am influenced by the same phenomenon — here are some of the ways my own political views aren’t strictly logical or principled but are distorted by my group identity.”
At some level, everyone thinks their own views flow from principle and reason rather than some combination of psychology and prejudice. A few years back, an academic and social theorist, Jonathan Haidt, had a bestseller, “The Righteous Mind,” arguing that everyone’s concepts of morality are shaped intuitively, and at a young age. Cognitive rationalization — how warring sides in politics and culture view each other not just with contempt but mutual incomprehension.
Former President Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton at his side, speaks to reporters following his impeachment in the U.S. House of Representatives | Tim Sloan/AFP via Getty Images
Let’s use the Trump impeachment to whittle away at incomprehension. In the George W. Bush years, comedian Stephen Colbert mocked partisans with his concept of “truthiness,” something that feels good to imagine as true no matter the actual facts or logic. In the present circumstances — at least for starters — I’d be perfectly content to understand people at the level of truthiness: Make the case for the basic integrity, for the righteousness, of your position.
Trump defenders may say in backing their president against partisan inquisitors they are just doing what Clinton defenders did. But that’s not much of a defense, since Republicans were incredulous and sharply critical of what Democrats did back then.
“There is a certain satisfaction,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of Napoleon, “in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.”
Two possibilities: Emerson was wrong, or we aren’t yet at the lowest ground. Maybe by the time the Trump impeachment drama is over we will get there, and find out what people really think.