by Jeet Heer is the National Affairs Correspondent for The Nation magazine. He just published an article in The Nation that confirms he is both a fool and a knave.
Heer has called for mass street protests because he feels that Congressional Democrats are being too conservative with impeachment. He calls for a “people’s impeachment”.
Unleashing the power of mass protest to force resignation is rare in America but common elsewhere. Indeed, we seem to be living in an age when it’s not unusual for street protesters to topple governments. From South Korea to Spain to Iceland to Finland, street protests have played a key role in bringing down despised heads of government.
The reason such mass protests to force a resignation are rare in the United States is because we have seen the folly of a civil war.
Heer is critical of impeachment as he thinks it is too “centrist” and too legalistic.
In the words of Pelosi and Gopnik, we once again hear the yearning for a centrist restoration. Trump, in this worldview, is a horrific anomaly in an otherwise well-functioning system. After you get rid of him—or even just give him a symbolic rebuke in the form of impeachment—the system will return to normal. The hope is that once Trump is gone, the old order will rise again, with Democrats and Republicans joining hands in bipartisan comity.
He goes on to say:
Could a people’s impeachment achieve the level of success of the Puerto Rico protests? This is unlikely, given that removal by the Senate would require 67 votes. Further, the anti-Trump resistance isn’t yet as radicalized as Puerto Rico was in the summer of 2017.
Puerto Rico should be treated as a benchmark for the best possible outcome. But even if a people’s impeachment falls short of forcing Trump’s resignation, it still has a crucial role to play in mobilizing the population to defend democracy.
(Author Dana) Fisher says the hallmark of the resistance to date is a commitment to peaceful protest. But she adds that this could change, given that a younger cohort of protesters is being radicalized. She speculates that if Trump is reelected, we could see a wave of truly disruptive protests.
You know my thoughts on a hot civil war. They are something only a fool would want because life becomes nasty, brutish, and short to paraphrase Thomas Hobbes.
It is easy for Heer to call for the protests that lead to a hot civil war. After all he is a Canadian and would just go back across the border to escape the violence. The rest of us would not be so lucky.
Lest he need a reminder, Rule 303 (or a modern equivalent) will always trump a concrete milkshake. I hope and pray we never see Rule 303 put into action.