{"id":72679,"date":"2017-06-22T17:03:18","date_gmt":"2017-06-22T23:03:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/brooks-lets-not-get-carried-away\/"},"modified":"2017-06-22T23:03:18","modified_gmt":"2017-06-22T23:03:18","slug":"brooks-lets-not-get-carried-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/brooks-lets-not-get-carried-away\/","title":{"rendered":"Brooks: Let\u2019s not get carried away"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"David
David Brooks<\/span>du1-i-syn<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Now, I confess I couldn\u2019t follow all the actual allegations made in those essays. They were six jungles deep in the weeds. But I do remember the intense atmosphere that the scandal created. A series of bombshell revelations came out in the media, which seemed monumental at the time. A special prosecutor was appointed and indictments were expected. Speculation became the national sport.<\/p>\n

In retrospect, Whitewater seems overblown. And yet it has to be confessed that, at least so far, the Whitewater scandal was far more substantive than the Russia-collusion scandal now gripping Washington.<\/p>\n

There may be a giant revelation still to come. But as the Trump-Russia story has evolved, it is striking how little evidence there is that any underlying crime occurred \u2013 that there was any actual collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and the Russians. Everything seems to be leaking out of this administration, but so far the leaks about actual collusion are meager.<\/p>\n

There were some meetings between Trump officials and some Russians, but so far, no more than you\u2019d expect from a campaign that was publicly and proudly pro-Putin. And so far, nothing we know of these meetings proves or even indicates collusion.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not saying there shouldn\u2019t be an investigation into potential Russia\u2013Trump links. Russia\u2019s attack on American democracy was truly heinous, and if the Trump people were involved, that would be treason. I\u2019m saying first, let\u2019s not get ahead of ourselves and assume that this link exists.<\/p>\n

Second, there is something disturbingly meta about this whole affair. This is, as Yuval Levin put it, an investigation about itself. Trump skeptics within the administration laid a legal minefield all around the president, and then Trump \u2013 being Trump \u2013 stomped all over it, blowing himself up six ways from Sunday.<\/p>\n

Now of course, Trump shouldn\u2019t have tweeted about Oval Office tape recordings. Of course, he shouldn\u2019t have fired James Comey. But even if you took a paragon of modern presidents \u2013 a contemporary Abraham Lincoln \u2013 and you directed a democratically unsupervised, infinitely financed team of prosecutors at him and gave them power to subpoena his staff and look under any related or unrelated rock in an attempt to bring him down, there\u2019s a pretty good chance you could spur even this modern paragon to want to fight back. You could spur even him to do something that had the whiff of obstruction.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s just something worrisome every time we find ourselves replacing politics of democracy with the politics of scandal. In democracy, the issues count, and you try to win by persuasion. You recognize that your opponents are legitimate, that they will always be there and that some form of compromise is inevitable.<\/p>\n

In the politics of scandal, at least since Watergate, you don\u2019t have to engage in persuasion or even talk about issues. Political victories are won when you destroy your political opponents by catching them in some wrongdoing. You get seduced by the delightful possibility that your opponent will be eliminated. Politics is simply about moral superiority and personal destruction.<\/p>\n

The politics of scandal is delightful for cable news. It\u2019s hard to build ratings arguing about health insurance legislation. But it\u2019s easy to build ratings if you are a glorified Court TV, if each whiff of scandal smoke generates hours of \u201cBreaking News\u201d intensity and a deluge of speculation from good-looking former prosecutors.<\/p>\n

The politics is great for those forces responsible for the lawyerization of American life. It takes power out of the hands of voters and elected officials and puts power in the hands of prosecutors and defense attorneys.<\/p>\n

The politics of scandal drives a wedge through society. Political elites get swept up in the scandals. Most voters don\u2019t really care.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump rose peddling the politics of scandal \u2013 oblivious to policy, spreading insane allegations about birth certificates and other things \u2013 so maybe it\u2019s just that he gets swallowed by it. But frankly, on my list of reasons Trump is unfit for the presidency, the Russia-collusion story ranks number 971, well below, for example, the perfectly legal ways he kowtows to thugs and undermines the norms of democratic behavior.<\/p>\n

The people who hype the politics of scandal don\u2019t make U.S. government purer. They deserve some of the blame for an administration and government too distracted to do its job, for a political culture that is both shallower and nastier, and for fostering a process that looks like an elite game of entrapment.<\/p>\n

David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times. Reach him c\/o The New York Times, Editorial Department, 620 8th Ave., New York, NY 10018. \u00a9 2017 New York Times News Service<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brooksdu1-i-syn Now, I confess I couldn\u2019t follow all the actual allegations made in those essays. They were six jungles deep in the weeds. But I do remember the intense atmosphere that the scandal created. A series of bombshell revelations came out in the media, which seemed monumental at the time. A special prosecutor was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":72680,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[125],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-72679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-newsletter-opinion"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72679\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72679"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=72679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}