Weird how I find myself enjoying his pieces more than almost every other liberal leaning opinion writer on NY Times, and find it more insightful. Like I've been saying, as far as I'm concerned, Bouie and French are the only ones worth reading on that paper's op-ed section.
(emphasis added)
First he seems to get the nature of the problem to maybe a greater extent than the Democratic leadership does:
President Trump is stress-testing American law, and the law is failing the test. The health of the American experiment rests far more on the integrity of any given American president than we realized.We trusted that presidents would impose accountability on the executive branch. We trusted that presidents wouldn’t abuse their pardon power — or, if they did, then Congress could impeach and convict any offenders. And so we manufactured doctrine after doctrine, year after year, that insulated the executive branch from legal accountability.
[...]
Madison’s next words were crucial. “A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”In the Trump era, those auxiliary precautions have utterly failed. They’ve been undermined to the point where the reverse is now true. Rather than providing additional precautions against the rise of authoritarian rule, American law and precedent seem to presume that angels govern men, and those angels would be free to do even more good if only they possessed a free hand.
And here's an analysis of the two co-existing states under an authoritarian rule. I personally lived some years under multiple, unambiguously oppressive regimes in another part of the world, so I can tell you that this distinction captures something essential living under a dictatorship ... can't say if the analysis is a particularly good one before actually reading the book, but it does speak to a fundamental dichotomy, and it is accurate wrt how some naive liberals are somehow under the illusion that the old rules still apply. (It can be argued that the dichotomy was always there, but just recently entered the consciousness of the white middle class folks, through the George Floyd killing at first, and through the Renee Good murder after that).
The two components of the dual state are the normative state — the seemingly normal world that you and I inhabit, where, as Huq writes, the “ordinary legal system of rules, procedures and precedents” applies — and the prerogative state, which is marked (in Fraenkel’s words) by “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees.”“The key here,” Huq writes, “is that this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state.”
It’s the continued existence of the normative state that lulls a population to sleep. It makes you discount the warnings of others. “Surely,” you say to yourself, “things aren’t that bad. My life is pretty much what it was.”
While we’re thankfully not yet close to the Nazi reality, you can see the emerging dual state in action in Minneapolis right now. In much of the city, life is routine. People create new businesses, enter into contracts, file litigation and make deals as if life were completely normal and the rule of law exists, untainted by our deep political divide.
But if you interact with ICE, suddenly you risk coming up against the full force of the prerogative state. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of the ICE agent’s video of the fatal encounter between Renee Good and ICE is that it’s plain that Good thinks she’s still in the normative state. She has no idea of the peril she’s in.
She seems relaxed. She even seems to have told the agent that she’s not mad at him. In the normative state, your life almost never depends on immediate and unconditional compliance with police commands.
But she wasn’t in the normative state. She had crossed over the border to the prerogative state, and in that state you can be shot dead recklessly, irresponsibly and perhaps even illegally, and no one will pay the price. You might even be rewarded with more than $1 million in donations from friends and allies.
It's a good piece, though what I quoted here capture the essential parts, I believe.