Lamar Alexander’s impeachment vote exhibits how our politics is damaged

Sen. Lamar Alexander’s resolution to oppose witnesses in President Trump’s Senate impeachment trial looks as if the nail within the coffin. With out Alexander’s vote, Democrats have virtually no shot at successful sufficient assist to name vitally essential figures like former White Home nationwide safety adviser John Bolton to the Senate flooring to testify about Trump’s threats to withhold army help from Ukraine.

Alexander’s justification for his vote is outstanding. He argues that there’s “no want for extra proof to conclude that the president withheld United States help, not less than partly, to stress Ukraine to research the Bidens” as a result of ‘the Home managers have proved this with what they name a “mountain of overwhelming proof.’”

Not solely did Alexander admit that Trump was responsible, however he admitted that what Trump did was flawed — he simply didn’t assume it warranted Trump’s removing from workplace.

“It was inappropriate for the president to ask a international chief to research his political opponent and to withhold United States help to encourage that investigation,” he says. “However the Structure doesn’t give the Senate the ability to take away the president from workplace and ban him from this yr’s poll merely for actions which might be inappropriate.”

He thinks, in impact, {that a} president who tried to intervene with the integrity of the 2020 election ought to be allowed to compete in that election with none actual punishment for his habits.

That is an absurd place. It’s an particularly absurd place provided that Alexander is retiring from the Senate, and thus has nothing to concern from Trump politically. So what’s going on?

One of the best rationalization I’ve seen comes from Tim Alberta, Politico’s chief political correspondent and a deeply sourced reporter among congressional Republicans. He means that Alexander was afraid — not of shedding his job, however of threats to his future revenue and social standing:

To place it one other method, many Republicans exist in a social world the place criticizing Donald Trump is an act of cultural treason. Bucking Trump doesn’t merely danger their congressional seat, but in addition their means to seek out future employment and reside comfortably of their communities even after retiring. Alberta describes profound fears of Trump’s “cult,” of “harassment of their households, lack of standing in native communities, [and] estranged relationships.”

I agree with Alberta that, when the stakes are as excessive as impeachment, this can be a type of “weak-ass excuse-making.” And never all Republican officers reside in social worlds as Trumpy as those described in his thread. However these qualms apart, I feel it’s additionally value making two extra factors concerning the significance of the phenomenon he’s describing.

First, it’s an instance of the hazards of what political scientist Lilliana Mason calls “mega-identity” in politics: Partisanship has come to be so carefully linked to different elements of individuals’s identities, like their faith and racial self-identification, that it has turn into a form of grasp stand-in for cultural belonging.

In a rustic outlined by two mega-identities, defeat in your facet isn’t merely a political loss, however an existential menace to your whole lifestyle. When Republicans really feel this manner about politics, then it is smart that they’d see a vote in opposition to their president as an act of deep betrayal — and deal with the individual accountable accordingly, even in personal life. This type of excessive id polarization poisons politics in methods typically invisible in day-to-day statement that, nonetheless, contribute to the basic dysfunction of our political system.

The second factor is that it exhibits the methods wherein the fashionable proper relies upon by itself type of “political correctness.” We’re typically instructed that the fashionable left is in some methods uniquely censorious, notably on points referring to race, gender, and sexual orientation. “There’s no right-wing equal to this type of ideological policing towards individuals sympathetic to right-wing causes,” because the journalist Cathy Younger recently put it.

Alberta’s rationalization of Alexander’s vote exhibits us that that is merely not true. In conservative cultural areas, even a really lengthy right-wing file like Alexander’s doesn’t immunize you from the implications of violating the group’s political requirements. Stalwart conservative legislators are, in keeping with Alberta, petrified of what individuals of their communities consider them. Think about the methods wherein many unusual individuals in pink areas, who’ve far much less monetary and social capital than the Lamar Alexanders of the world, really feel about expressing anti-Trump sentiment!

The truth that this type of censorship performs out in native communities, moderately than the pages of nationwide magazines, makes it no much less highly effective — and arguably extra so. In truth, right-wing political correctness seems to be an essential purpose why Trump is about to get away with a monumental assault on the integrity of our democracy.