We must zoom out from our partisan moment, and instead look at this event in the broad sweep of American history
On Wednesday, the US House of Representatives, where Democrats have a majority, voted to impeach Donald Trump. But his conviction in the Republican-controlled Senate is highly unlikely, meaning Trump will soon have the opportunity to declare victory and march forward into the 2020 election, where he will need to be defeated by electoral means. Why, then, does this moment matter?
One way to answer that question is to look at the short-run political impact of impeachment. Pundits have endlessly debated who will benefit from impeachment and what it means for the left’s progressive agenda. But another way to think about impeachment is to zoom out from our hyper-partisan moment. Instead, we should place this momentous event in the broad sweep of American history, stretching from the distant founding to the distant future – along those “mystic chords of memory” which Abraham Lincoln famously hoped would be touched once again “by the better angels of our nature”.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/38QAPsk
