Making Donald Trump president may have been foolish — my own views on his fitness for office have not mellowed at all — but it was entirely legitimate. The voters voted and the electors elected. As Ed Koch famously put it: “The people have spoken, and now they must be punished.”
Rosie O’Donnell, who in these unserious times reaches far more people than any pointy-headed political commentator, literally called for the imposition of martial law. The progressive intellectual Geoffrey Stone, who rejoices in the title of Edward H. Levi Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, called for an Electoral College coup d’état, not drunk on a barstool but writing in Time magazine. Paul Krugman, who as you may have heard once won the Nobel Prize for economics, has gone deep into conspiracy theory. Barack Obama, in his final presidential speech, wondered aloud why there is so little trust in our institutions. One wonders whether he’s been following the news at all.
There will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and conservatives will enjoy it more than we probably should. But we should also take the opportunity to share with our progressive friends the virtues of federalism, localism, limited government, subsidiarity, a genuine culture of free speech and free inquiry that overflows the merely legal framework, and a model of authentic citizenship that puts the state at the service of the individual and not the other way around. And if Republicans start feeling grandiose, they should meditate upon that hilarious hostage-video image of poor old Mitt Romney dining at Jean-Georges with Donald Trump, and try twisting their own faces into the expression he was wearing to see how it feels.
Somebody has to be the adult in the room. And the Democrats have made it clear that it isn’t going to be them.
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