Joe Biden’s pardons are a moral surrender Liberals have been cowed into submission

Whatever happened to the Resistance? To the rows upon rows of lawn signs that sprang up in besieged and beleaguered liberal enclaves, signs exhorting their well-heeled, super-insulated residents to stand up to Trump? Where is the deafening clamour that rang out of every nook and cranny of the Left-liberal establishment, right up until the moment when Trump won back the White House, resoundingly and conclusively, last November? Did the “existential threat”— a phrase used ad nauseam by liberals since 2016 — Trump posed to democracy suddenly become downgraded from “existential” to a mere threat, just at the moment Trump’s Republicans took both the White House and the Senate?

In 2016, Trump won by a hair. By December 2017, he was “authoritarian” only in the hollow rhetoric of an ugly temperament. A plaything of laws, customs, rites, and politics that he did not understand, Trump had struggled to gain any kind of stable footing as president. He had not signed into law a single piece of legislation seriously undercutting the liberal agenda.

On the other hand, by December 2017, the woke revolution, existing only by virtue of its fiction of standing up to Trump’s “existential threat”, was on the verge of taking over the country’s major cultural institutions, as well as its educational establishment, from kindergarten on up. So gratifying and rewarding was the “opposition” to Trump that Goldberg could actually make the false claim, in the New York Times no less, that Trump had become president “despite the will of a majority of the American people”. In fact, Trump had won a legitimate US presidential election. And far from forcing themselves on “an unwilling nation”, as Goldberg wrote, the Republicans retained control of both Houses of Congress, giving them both Congress and the presidency for the first time in 12 years.

Leave aside Goldberg, whose husband, a longtime paid political consultant to Democratic political campaigns, only stands to gain professionally from the apocalyptic political fantasies his wife gins up in her columns. Why, when Trump posed no actual threat to democracy in 2017, but when, in the alarmist liberal perspective that has reigned for eight years, he does in fact pose a threat to democracy now, do Goldberg and other liberals cry “Run for cover!” instead of “Resist!”

Why, from 2016-2020, did liberals compare Trump to Julius Caesar, Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, Pinochet and Juan Peron, when he had done nothing to remotely justify the comparison, but now that Trump has truly consolidated his power and, by way of certain Cabinet choices, made clear his autocratic intentions, why does his mere blustering about revenge provoke calls for immunity rather than calls for heroic “resistance”? Was it easier to “resist” Trump when he posed no threat than it is now, when, having the support of the country’s majority, tech titans, the banking and finance sectors and even widening swathes of the media, he — again, along the lines of the erstwhile “resistance” — poses a true threat? Doesn’t more power mean the greater threat, which would require the greater “resistance”? Or is it the very fact that Trump has so much power now that has cowed the liberals, who worship power, into submission?

“Resistance” really shouldn’t be that hard. Trump’s threats to prosecute his enemies have no real basis in any plausible reality, any more than his threats to deport millions of people are within the realm of logistical and legal possibility, any more than he can get Putin to leave Ukraine before he takes office, any more than he can “make America healthy again” by putting a man who has no medical or scientific background, and who is opposed to vaccines, in charge of Americans’ health. But all Trump has to do is say “Boo!” and the former members of the “Resistance” begin to tremble. Perhaps it is the overwhelming nature of Trump’s victory in November. Liberals, who pride themselves on knowing how to please by playing by the rules even as they break the rules, simply cannot bear being unpopular.

It’s not just the liberals. Olivia Troye, who worked as an advisor to Vice President Mike Pence, ran to the New York Times to inform them that she had received a letter from Kash Patel’s lawyer threatening to sue her if she did not retract criticism she made of Patel on television. “I haven’t committed a crime,” she told the Times. But, she said, “these are very different times. Is [a pardon] something that we’ve considered and are concerned about? Yes… I have not done anything wrong, and I haven’t committed any crimes, and that’s where it’s a complicated issue. These are unprecedented times.”

It’s hard to fathom what exactly Troye, Cheney, Romney, Adam Schiff and all the others on Patel’s list have to fear to begin with. In Troye’s case, Patel is a public figure; short of libeling or slandering him anyone can criticise him in any way they want, in any venue they want. Troye needs to loosen up. Cheney herself has stated that “no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis” exists for an investigation of the January 6 congressional committee. At the same time, she pointedly has not said that she would not accept a pardon, or blanket immunity, unlike former Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman turned Trump adversary, who has said flat out that he would refuse Biden’s protection.

As for the other reason Trump’s putative targets say they fear being investigated, which is that such investigations would entail expensive legal representation, these are some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country. You would think that for the sake of the “Resistance” they would welcome high-profile investigations, even lawsuits; that is, if there is a single judge who would not dismiss such a lawsuit as frivolous. The example of their persecutions would indict Trump in the eyes of most Americans, and their standing up to Trump would serve as an inspiration. Look what standing up to and defying his liberal persecutors did for Trump. It returned him to the presidency.

Surely Liz Cheney, a war-profiteer’s daughter, who enabled the horrendously destructive lies her father told that dragged America into an invasion of Iraq, has the grit not to run when the going gets unpleasant. It was Liz who bravely jumped to her father’s defense when Nancy Pelosi criticised Cheney pere’s support of torture. “Mrs. Pelosi’s problem,” Cheney heroically intoned at the time, “is that her spine doesn’t seem to reach her brain.”

At first glance, it is baffling that such powerful people, always so eager to brandish their principles, especially before a camera, would allow the possibility of immunity to be raised with Biden rather than choose to inspire their fellow Americans by defying Trump. It is bewildering because, in doing so, they make it unnecessary for Trump to actually go after them. By opening themselves to a pardon that would protect them from Trump, they make it seem like Trump has already brought them to heel. He doesn’t have to investigate or prosecute them at all. Apply yourself to this seeming riddle of self-defeat, though, and the clouds of perplexity begin to part.

“Immunity” is what the liberals who made it their profession to pursue Trump from pillar to post always wanted in the first place. They desired the moral immunity that comes with presenting yourself as morally outraged; the professional immunity that accompanies the display of superior virtue; the intellectual immunity that you get when cries of “existential threat” mask your intellectual mediocrity. Woke is, essentially, the endless pursuit of immunity by robustly crying affliction, portraying yourself as good by calling other people evil, and aloofly professing “kindness” and “caring” at every abstract turn. No longer certain that they can obtain that sort of immunity in Trump’s America, some of the country’s most prominent liberals now seem to hope it is conferred directly.

Receiving immunity from Trump is certainly less expensive than paying for it. Ask Mark Zuckerberg, who, having been threatened with jail by Trump, has just paid protection money to the president-elect in the form of a $1 million donation to his inaugural fund. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon has just forked over the same amount of money to the fund. You remember Bezos. His newspaper, the Washington Post, adopted as its motto “democracy dies in darkness” in 2017 as a response to Trump’s presidency.

So much for the “fascist” threat posed by Trump, who just appeared on the cover of the echt-liberal Time magazine as its “Person of the Year,” followed by his Time-sponsored appearance at the New York Stock Exchange, where he rang the opening bell to thunderous cheers and applause. So much for “holding the line against authoritarianism”! Especially now, when a rising autocratic tendency on the right in politics — the same tendency on the Left has already killed culture — is becoming, actually and really, “existential”.  But, then, like compartmentalised people, compartmentalised political and media coteries never tell anyone the truth.