Who gets a second chance?On accountability and reinvention in American life
...But as the Trump era fades and a new wave of second-chance-seeking gets under way, I have been wondering: Who gets second chances and who doesn’t, what must you do to get one, and how is that connected to all the people who don’t even get first chances in America?
...So now, with a kind of constitutional sanction, Trump will get his thousandth second chance. Just as he got after every business failure, just as he got every time he crossed some supposed red line in office. And is this surprising? Is this second chance to resume a role in public life all that different from the impunity of every police officer who has shot an unarmed Black person? Is it different from the impunity of every Republican who laid the ground for Trumpism, then bailed at the last minute, only to reinvent themselves as a democracy-is-fragile guru? Is it different from the impunity of the speculators who caused the 2008 financial crisis? Is it different from the impunity of those who brought us Guantanamo and torture and Iraq and Katrina and climate change and voter suppression and suffocating plutocracy and more?...
Not only are these powerful figures who maim or defraud or starve or oppress other people immune from accountability in America today. They come back better than ever. The 21st-century second chance is a flashy, well-publicized, flex of a reentry in which one expects more than a chance to be back in polite society...
Since it its more or less exactly the same article I have been writing, over and over again...
See, for example, how many highly culpable figures of the George W. Bush presidency have now become well-published writers on the topic of saving democracy — saving it from the totally predictable consequences of everything they once worked toward. Or how the Lincoln Project guys, before the organization imploded, became media darlings, despite having somehow had no problem with the pre-Trump Republican Party of “welfare queen” slander, the Southern strategy, trickle down, WMDs, Sarah Palin, and more...
So one of the problems with this kind of second chance that so dominates our public life is that it isn’t really a second chance, because people don’t atone, don’t seek mercy, don’t show they’ve changed. They just clean their stink, which is different...
Back during the depths of Bush administration I was writing that exactly this thing would happen to the aiders and abettors of that bloody, corrupt, calamitously failed presidency. It's why I dialed in early on frauds like Bill Kristol and David Brooks: two men who, by the standards of any sane society, should have been drummed out of the journalism game once the Bush administration collapsed around their ears.
During the Obama Administration, your humble scrivener shouted as loud as my little blog could that the wingnut reclamation project -- the Bush Off Machine -- was under way right now, and oh fuck, they're getting away with again.
Deaf ears all around because that's the way the Beltway insider club works.
And over the last four years I've pointed out over and over that exactly the same thing was happening all over again. Or, to quote Mr. Giridharadas from the above article:
Or how the Lincoln Project guys, before the organization imploded, became media darlings, despite having somehow had no problem with the pre-Trump Republican Party of “welfare queen” slander, the Southern strategy, trickle down, WMDs, Sarah Palin, and more...
From the the earliest of the rise of Trump, my position has always been that, before we on the Left -- who, by virtue of being the only people who had been right about the Right all along, now owned clear title to the nation's moral and political high ground -- starting letting any 11th-hour-come-to-Jesus Republicans into our good graces, we should insist on some clear and sincere confession, repentance and atonement from them. And rather than allowing them to colonize the media and once again seize control of the messaging just as they did after the collapse of the Bush regime, we should insist that, while we appreciated their help, this time as a condition of their parole they would be on political work-release for the next ten years and that their whole fucking job from now on was to stand in the background and shout "Amen!" at whatever Digby or Athena or Ten Grain or Charlie Pierce was saying that day.
And for taking that position -- which was based on the decades of lived experience we had all just been through with these people -- I took no end of shit from my "allies" for not getting with the program and understanding the bigger picture.
But hopefully, now that such things are being said by a blue-checked MSNBC and Time contributor with nearly a million followers, this is as a conversation that more people with think is worth having.
3 comments:
I did mention your work in this AM chat with AG.
Anand talked about sharing the green room with Steve Schmidt this morning on his Zoom call. Said he didn't get three words in the whole time.
Steve Schmidt is one republican who openly says he not only left the GOP but he registered as a Democratic party member.
Easily he could have did the piissant move to Independent to make a statement.
It shouldn't give him front row box seats at the Democratic party world series when plenty of fine people in the Dem party have been sitting in the bleacher seat for some time.
The moderate conservative ledge has always had room for the Schmidt's out there. But that was enemy territory for him then.
I welcome Steve and support him in his character rehab He really should do some atonement and probably stop hanging out in the GOP bars with his old pals though. Being around their corrupt power drinking to excess can only lead him back into a binger.
In the fantasy of forming a new party and filling it with republicans is like disinfecting the counter and slapping a slab of cow brains on the counter to dice up. That is contamination with mad cow.
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