Rubicon Crossing

It was fascinating hearing Adam Schiff, Democratic Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, allude to “crossing the Rubicon” after he had first been made aware of the now public and hair-raising whistleblower report that led the Democratic caucus to move aggressively on impeaching Donald Trump. On the one hand it was the first public utterance that indicated that Schiff, a heretofore impeachment skeptic, had had a change of mind on the matter…and that his change of mind was probably reflective of a broader change of mind by the Democratic leadership, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi. On quite the other hand, it was an utterance that probably left at least half the electorate in this don’t-know-much-about-history nation of ours scratching its collective gourd: “Rubicon? Huh? What’s that?”It was both a classic example of Democratic unconscious elitism as well as being a neat stroke of paradoxical liberal nuance. As our dwindling number of B students in history know, the Rubicon was the river dividing Rome from its provinces. The particular ancient Roman law that has been forever attached to it proclaimed that when Roman generals were returning to the capitol after their foreign ventures they were required to disband their armies before crossing. Famously, Julius Caesar did not, and when he crossed the river with one of his legions he sent the Roman Senate into a full-scale panic, eventuating in his ascension to dictator. The irony in Schiff’s use of the expression crossing the Rubicon (which has come down to us today to mean no turning back) is that it signals a turn against the establishment of an American dictatorship. Again, no need to spell that out to the B students among us--nor even the C students--and no point in spelling it out to the class dummies because if they haven’t recognized the incipient rise of Trumpian authoritarianism by now they’re either never going to see it or don’t ever want to see it…or worse they welcome it. I was in an unusually long refund line at Costco a week ago. A four-year old was swinging on the thick barrier cord that separated the refund area from the store exit area. For symbolism’s sake, let’s call that cord the Rubicon. A store employee came over to the kid and firmly, though politely, told the kid that he could not swing on the cord. The kid stopped, stepped back, and watched the employee walk away. He then looked up at his mother standing in front of me in line—her body language screaming, Not my kid. Then the kid grabbed hold of the cord and started swinging on it again…not for long, but long enough to get all our attention. Once he stopped, he glared at his mom and all the other adults in line with a defiant look that fairly well declared, “What are you going to do about it?”  I couldn’t help but see it as a metaphor for the dynamic that was playing out in Washington between our grown up legislators and the little monster in the White House. I resisted intervening with the mom in front of me, but I haven’t been so patient with the Mom of the House in DC, Nancy Pelosi. As much as I admire and trust her, I have taken over the summer months to sending her nasty tweets, jabbing at her in blog posts and just this week took out a Sharpie to reply to a request from her for money with this: Impeach him and then come ask me for money! Literally the day I dropped that in the mailbox, she made her historic announcement that the House would unambiguously be pursuing impeachment of Trump. I suspect a lot of things contributed to her dramatic change of mind on the matter. The new revelations of Trump’s abuse of power were impossible to mitigate. There was a growing chorus in her caucus to take action. She was not immune or indifferent to the criticism from supporters such as myself. She was never as closed to the idea of impeachment as the media or her public statements on the subject made it appear. Barack Obama called it leading from behind. She had said that Trump impeaches himself every day…and so he did. People can say she just got lucky, and he finally handed her a smoking gun. And now as public opinion swiftly begins to coalesce around impeachment, her reputation for political savvy is reinforced. In the beautiful, living color of hindsight, it seems that if she had given in to the urgent and sometimes hysterical calls for impeachment months ago, it all would’ve all fallen apart by now. Negative public opinion may have hardened against impeachment as convoluted hearings unfolded on TV with all the lugubriousness of Robert Mueller’s legalistic, punctilious testimony. It would’ve rendered the explosive new whistleblower’s complaint dead on arrival…if it had arrived at all (a disastrous impeachment hearing may have been demoralizing for the whistleblower). Well, Nancy Pelosi was lucky…no doubt about it. But let’s also give her credit for being patient and open minded enough (the essence of liberalism) to allow luck to make a play. More importantly, going forward, let’s give the leader who managed the near impossible in passing the ACA (and had the vision to see what a disaster the Iraq War would be) some credit for knowing what she’s doing. Already everyone in the peanut gallery has an opinion about how fast or slow, how broad or focused, how public or closed door this impeachment process should be. That’s fine. That’s democracy. 

But here’s something we (we being mostly the liberal tribe) need to be aware of: We are not like them…behaviorally, not politically, speaking. Unlike that other tribe, we do not respond well to the ceaseless repetition of buzzwords and phrases…Benghazi, No Collusion, Build the Wall, Tax and Spend. Unlike that other tribe, we prefer reasonable appeals to our minds, rather than emotional appeals to our gut.Unlike that other tribe, for better and worse, we do not cohere so easily and too often like to march to the sound of a different drum. These are not differences I’m pulling out of my ass here. These are differences that have been verified by social research and neuroscience. In his book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt relies a lot on those studies in his examination of what makes some folks liberal and others conservative. He demonstrates through those studies that much of the harsh division in the land is not due to specific policy differences, but to differences in human wiring that merely manifest themselves in political issues. The brief, 2-minute clip from his book below is a good example of this as an explanation why the Democrats in general and Nancy Pelosi in particular tortured themselves over impeachment for the past few months:


It had little to do with being cowering centrists, craven cowards, or tools of Wall Street. It had more to do with having a sense of accountability…knowing that unlike the Buzzword Brigade on the other side, they had constituencies that were rightfully going to demand explanations from them. It’s a world apart from the accountability-free eco system of social media most of us inhabit. We can say most anything we want with all the rage we can muster in our Facebook feeds, Twitter threads, and blogs without ever having to put a big toe in the Rubicon. So perhaps we should have a little more respect and understanding for those who really do have to make that crossing with unpredictable and profound consequences for themselves and the country. They're going to need it in the critical months ahead.