People wonder if Trump would step down if impeached or defeated next year at the ballot box. I can’t say definitively that he would ignore the democratic will and institutional constraints, but I will say that it is far easier said than done. And in any calculus of such a brazen action Trump would have to consider the consequences of failure. Needless to say, they would be exceedingly high.

What bothers me these days isn’t so much pundits who tell us, usually with a sense of gravitas and supposed superior knowledge, that removing Trump via impeachment or the ballot box isn’t enough to turn the country around. I expect as much from them.

But what I find irritating is this. In their attempt to save us from our parochial vision, they miss the fact that removing Trump from office in itself is a BFD!!! The very act would set into motion a new political dynamic.

The ring leader of the unprecedented assault on democratic governance, institutions, and rights would no longer occupy the White House. The sweeping powers and the bully pulpit that come with the office would be in someone else’s hands. His underlings would be retreat and disarray as well, pointing fingers at one another. Finally, Trump’s base, angry, even dangerous as they might be, would have to digest the bitter (and depressing) reality that their Great Leader has been taken down.

Meanwhile, political initiative and moral authority would, through the force of events, shift to the Democratic Party as well as the broad democratic movement and the millions who resisted Trump and Trumpism. The confidence that comes from winning would become a material force. And resistance would now mingle with new expectations and horizons of democratic and progressive change.

Will it be smooth sailing? Of course not. Trump would likely be reluctant to leave the stage of politics. And defeated reactionaries and racists, history tells us, attempt, if allowed, to regroup and regain the initiative.

Not least, the new landscape of politics would bring to the surface tensions within the broad democratic coalition and the Democratic Party that were simmering while Trump was in the White House.

Still bringing Trump down is a BFD !!! And don’t let anybody tell you different.

Some people think that to say anything positive about Nancy Pelosi sullies their radical credentials. Seems like the ghost of the “radical sixties” has a new lease on life. To paraphrase Marx, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

To reduce the impeachment fight, as framed by Democratic Party leaders, to simply an intra class fight of competing elites is mistaken and could be dangerous if too many people swallowed this swill. But public opinion polls suggest that growing numbers of people understand the matter differently, as they should. Leave it to some on the left to think that their role is to up the ante at every turn in class and democratic struggles.

Samuel Moyn’s oped, “Impeachment isn’t the answer to America’s political crisis,” might seem radical at first glance, but on closer inspection, it’s a modernized version of leftist analysis that in its earlier iterations in the second half of the 20th century provided argument — the system is rigged and the two parties are corrupted and evil — to left and progressive minded people to sit, albeit righteously, on their electoral hands, while right wing extremists electorally ascended to power. This ascent, beginning in the late sixties and gaining momentum and scope with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, continues to this day, but in a far more dangerous form and with far more dangerous consequences for the country and world. Indeed, unless challenged by a diverse, multi-class, majoritarian coalition, a descent into a long era of right wing, white nationalist, anti-democratic rule is probable.