In Which Chris Bray Fails to Hit a Great Big Hanging Slow Pitch, Like He Wasn't Even Holding the Bat

I can’t believe I missed this comparison, and it’s interesting that it doesn’t seem to have come up in the comments. We may all be forgetting, maybe because we prefer to forget.

In my last post, I examined the stupid discourse about Donald Trump turning into a dictator because he’s shoving past all the guardrails and governing by issuing orders, which no one has ever done before. How lazy is this ahistorical hyperventilation? This lazy, and look how easily Phil Kerpen got the lay-up:

That’s exactly right. President John F. Kennedy created USAID with Executive Order 10973, which was very good and well within the political boundaries of the republic, but it’s illegal and acting like a king for Trump to use an executive order to restructure the system by which we deliver foreign aid. This ORANGE HITLER discourse is just useless — a bunch of empty noise. It strands the behavior of the current president, which is perfectly fair to debate, in a dumb vacuum that breaks the chain of structural and systemic change. Senator Jeff Merkley has reduced American history to a lame argument about one man’s personality. There’s a lot of that going around.

But what did I miss? What’s the biggest, cleanest recent example of a whole society, or of whole societies, being run on the basis of unilateral executive orders, with almost universal support from the “mainstream” news media and the political class that now clutches its pearls about Trump? Answer in your head — I’ll wait right here.

You said OH RIGHT, didn’t you? My bet is that the question instantly pulled up a suppressed memory.

I would argue, and I don’t think it’s a difficult argument, that Donald Trump is exercising significantly less unilateral power than people like the LA County public health director Barbara Ferrer exercised, for months or years, during the pandemic. Individual government managers, including unelected public health officials, issued prolonged and aggressive stay-at-home orders on their personal authority.

Society is closed, because I said so.

People were arrested, in utterly absurd circumstances, for violating orders. Not laws — orders:

Here’s Gavin Newsom’s statewide stay-at-home order. I order all Californians to stay at home until I decide you can go outside again. Less power than Trump’s executive orders, or more?

Who objected?

The political system in which considerable power can be exercised by the unilateral issuance of orders — who built it? When? How? Seconded:

We should debate the limits of executive power. The focus on Trump’s personality means that we have not yet started to have that debate.

Trump is a dictator, because he’s ruling through orders. Also, this lady is a HUGE HERO and she’s wonderful:

To stand on the back end of the pandemic and watch the news media and the political class scream that it’s wrong to govern through unilateral orders from executive branch officials is…interesting. Each discussion in the public sphere seems to be isolated from all the other discussions, as if we wake up every day in a new world that we’ve never experienced before.