The Fates

 Joseph de Maistre was certainly no fan of the French Revolution. Indeed, he was the most famous counter-revolutionary writer of the era. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, he begins his famous Considerations on France with an extended argument that all of the attempts to prevent or halt the Revolution were doomed to fail. It was the will of Providence that the Revolution go forward, he argued—and this is what accounted for its otherwise baffling strength, the otherwise unaccountable catastrophes of its enemies. 

Maistre speaks in the voice of outraged opinion, as it contemplates this inexplicable onward march of evil and lopsided failure of good: "How then," he imagines them saying, "is it the guiltiest men in the universe who are winning? [...] Everything succeeds for the wicked! The most gigantic projects are executed without difficulty on their side, while the good party fails ridiculously in everything it undertakes[.]" (Lebrun trans.) Maistre then answers his own rhetorical questions: it is fated to be such. 

In regarding the upcoming election in November, it is hard not to feel that we are caught in some similar impersonal force. Our circumstances are just as inexplicable as the ones Maistre describes. Every scheme to hold Trump accountable fails miserably; every effort to halt his inexorable rise ends in pathetic defeat.  On every side, the "guiltiest men in the universe"—Putin, Musk, Trump, Vance, et al.—succeed "without difficulty," whereas "the good party" labors against what seems at times an invisible force. 

Maistre pointed out that none of the usual laws of political science could explain the success of the French Revolution—it was, in the morally neutral sense of an event that occurred outside the operation of natural law—a "miracle." So too, the seemingly inevitable victory of Trump in the next election and the collapse of all efforts to stop him has this character of a dark "miracle." It certainly could not be explained by any of the laws or principles of American elections that we had recognized up to this point. 

Consider the Biden presidency. The laws of electoral politics once told us that, when the economy is improving, the incumbent will reap some advantage. Yet, Biden has overseen a rip-roaring economic recovery, that defied all expectations. And still, his chances of success in the critical swing states have only narrowed. So too, political scientists doubted that a party would ever nominate someone who had lost the previous election—yet, in spite of all the odds, here is Trump heading the GOP ticket yet again. 

I get the same impression of a cruel providence at work when we regard the various criminal trials against Trump. The evidence seems overwhelming that Trump committed at least some of the criminal acts alleged against him. Yet, an array of circumstances has piled up that all seem to work together to ensure that he will face no serious consequences for them. There is no human conspiracy behind this—the circumstances are too diffuse for that. Perhaps it's a conspiracy of Clotho and the other Fates. 

Trump, after all, currently has four criminal cases pending against him—two state and two federal. We have started a trial in one of them—but somehow, by Fate, it was the weakest case against him that made it first to the courtroom. As I've argued before, the "falsifying business records" indictment concerns at best a misdemeanor under New York law—and not one the general public would regard as a serious offense. By leading with this one, it makes all attempts to hold Trump accountable look equally spurious. 

The far more serious allegations against Trump in the Georgia case, meanwhile, may never get a fair hearing, due to the irresponsible behavior of the prosecution team. The federal classified documents case happened—by sheer bad luck (or the Fates, again)—to land in the courtroom of an especially right-wing and seemingly woefully incompetent Trump-appointed judge. The other federal case has been tied up and likely delayed till after the election by ongoing disputes over presidential immunity. 

Most of us, with four different criminal proceedings against us, couldn't count on the hand of Fate to somehow save us and render every single one of them toothless. Yet that appears to be what is happening for Trump. I can no longer entertain the possibility that any one of these convictions will stick. The only one in which we are likely to get a verdict before the election—the falsified business records case—has the least evidence behind it of Trump's personal criminal intent or even any serious wrongdoing. 

Maistre maintained that the "fated" success of political wickedness in his era was due to Providence acting in a stern tutelary manner. He suggested that France had to exhaust all the possibilities of political error before it could settle on the correct path. And while I don't actually believe in Providence or Fates or tutelary spirits, it does seem something similar is happening here: on some deep, subconscious level, Americans have decided they need to put their institutions to this test before they will protect them. 

People have somehow concluded that the national community needs to pass through the fire of Trump's would-be dictatorship. Perhaps they need to see someone actually try to take their constitution from them before they realize that constitution is worth defending; they need to see our representative institutions and independent court system crumble before they will realize we were lucky to have them. This, perhaps, is what accounts for why Trump seems able irresistibly to carry us ever further along that path. 

Of course, there are some who still say that a Trump dictatorship is "impossible." The constitution would forbid it. But everything people have said of Trump—but that has nonetheless come to pass—is likewise "impossible." It was supposed to be "impossible" that he would refuse to recognize the results of the last election and try to stage a coup; it was supposed to be "impossible" that he could then run for and succeed in securing his party's nomination for a second term. Yet, here we are. 

We must keep in mind Maistre's law of dark political "miracles" of this sort—"the invariable law of the French Revolution that wills that everything happens despite men and against all probabilities." That seems to be what is happening with Trump too. Despite all human efforts to arrest his career, and against all probabilities of the success of his opponents—despite all their superior track record of governance and economic management—he is still, as of this writing, on track to win the next election. 

But, we may say, at least—even if Trump wins—we can only have a maximum of four more years of him. Surely anything is endurable for four years. This is the last hope I have been clinging to. This is my "comfort serves in a whirlwind"—"wretch" that I am—to quote G.M. Hopkins. Surely, if nothing else, it is "impossible" that Trump could serve a third term. Yet, why do we think that this "impossibility" is any more impregnable than all of the other "impossibilities" that Trump has already overcome? 

Well, we reply, the constitution limits the president to two terms, right? But constitutions can be changed—or, more likely—simply ignored. Constitutions are just a set of norms, like all others. The merest shadow. They have only the force that people choose to give them. And Trump is already hinting that this norm too, this "impossibility," is one he might like to destroy. As Trump said this weekend: "are we going to be considered three-term? Or two-term?" And the audience roared back: "Three!"