A LOGIC LESSON.

Dan "Baseball Crank" McLaughlin strikes Jonathan Chait out.  "Both the motive and the rhetorical trick at work here are fairly transparent."  Here's the logic lesson, dear reader. Deploy a tu quoque argument at your own risk.

Is it bad and dangerous to peddle stolen-election conspiracy theories, attack the legitimacy of election results, try to get them thrown out in court, object to certifying electors in Congress, and generally treat the winners of elections as if they have no right to exercise the powers of office? If that is your standard, there are a lot of Democrats who are threats to democracy, including Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Stacey Abrams, John Lewis, former DNC chairs Terry McAuliffe, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Howard Dean, January 6 committee chair Bennie Thompson, and — of course — Jonathan Chait himself. I have documented this in depth here, here, here, here, here, and here, as well as several other places linked in those items. Heck, the current president, Joe Biden, has preemptively attempted to delegitimize the upcoming midterm elections, while the current Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, described American elections as a “rigged game.” Chait appears to have no problem with any of this, having participated in some of it himself.

That doesn't work.  He's on more solid ground, though, noting that it is possible to stand on a principle.

I do not point to the prior and ongoing misconduct of Democrats and their intellectual and pundit class as a justification for the behavior of Trump or the behavior of anyone in the GOP or on the right. But here’s the thing: You can’t have it both ways. You can’t summon up the “danger to democracy” rhetoric on the basis of Trump’s unique behavior, defend and distinguish the behavior of your own side by pointing to that uniqueness, and then just routinely transfer the Trump rhetoric to people who have done nothing like what Trump did.

Being unprincipled might be a precondition for being a politician. The column then turns to matters of policy.  The conclusion points to what might be the harshest logic lesson.

Instead, the modern welfare/entitlement state spends money on autopilot without asking the people for their continuing consent; you need a majority of the House plus 60 Senators plus the president in order to not continue an ongoing act of the federal government. That absolutely is a problem of democratic legitimacy, but it thwarts the results of elections in ways that Jonathan Chait approves of.

It's also the ultimate act of denial. While the likes of Bernie Sanders and Ron Johnson are throwing barbs at each other about "ending" "Social" "Security" nobody is paying any attention to the slow decline in the so-called trust fund, let alone the growing reluctance of bond traders to validate the Jarrett regency's money printing.