Don’t you love a farce? My fault, I fear
I thought that you’d want what I want, sorry my dear
But where are the clowns? Send in the clowns
Don’t bother they’re here
Isn’t it rich? Isn’t it queer?
Losing my timing this late in my career
But where are the clowns? Send in the clowns
Well, maybe next year… 

From A Little Night Music by Stephen Sondheim

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week — 3-5 February 2020 — will undoubtedly be three days for the history books. On Monday, with the Iowa caucus, the first actual, real, tangible voting takes place in the American 2020 electoral cycle. After millions of words have already been written about the upcoming election, there will now be real votes counted and analysed, and results interpreted.

This vote will immediately be followed by the president’s constitutionally mandated State of the Union address. Then, on the day after that speech, the final vote in the Senate for the president’s impeachment trial is scheduled.

This Iowa caucus is destined to ask, but not necessarily answer with any real degree of finality, a whole range of questions about the subsequent shape of the race for the Democratic nomination for president. But because it uses this complex voting system — and an entire evening’s activity for participants — rather than a simple primary vote and because there are still so many candidates, there will be various ways to interpret the outcome.

Because it is a caucus, voters gather in hundreds and hundreds of community venues across the state to convince one another to support a particular candidate, and then to reshuffle the deck in further choices, if initially favoured candidates drop below 15%. The results then get to inform the eventual delegate distribution.

But wait, while the delegate totals matter, the ability of candidates to claim moral victories by virtue of exceeding popular expectations matters too. And if the apparent frontrunners such as Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden show up as weaker than other candidates (or significantly weaker than their reported national strength), someone else may be able to claim the momentum out of all of this. With momentum, of course, comes the chance to tap into the fundraising contributions crucial to sustain a future vast national effort.

All of this will then matter for the primaries that follow in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, also taking place in February. And, of course, the really big, early delegate-capturing-prize of “Super Tuesday” on 3 March awaits, with more than a dozen state primaries taking place on the same day, including California. Just by the way, this date is where Michael Bloomberg hopes to make his initial effort to gain the initiative — and thus the lead in the delegate count.

But then, on the very next day, incumbent President Donald Trump gets to make his nationally televised best case for his successes so far and to underscore his bid for a second term, early in the electoral cycle. The State of the Union speech is a constitutionally mandated report to Congress, and, over the years, it has turned into a televised extravaganza with private individuals attending who are positioned to get shout-outs by the president in his speech and thus serve as visual, telegenic exclamation points in the president’s text.

The president is obviously going to make much over the state of the economy and to minimise perceptions of the international chaos that emanates from Trumpian behaviour such as his fumbling efforts to achieve a North Korea agreement, his inchoate policies on Iran, his continuing kowtowing towards Vladimir Putin, his flawed, one-sided Middle East peace plan, and his use of trade conflicts and threats against everyone as a substitute for actual policy. Then, too, there are his efforts to eliminate — root and branch — any trace of Barack Obama’s eight years as president, regardless of the wisdom and impact of such choices, domestically and internationally.

His congressional supporters (and probably legions of formal and informal advisers) are reported to be counselling the president to avoid any form of intemperate gloating, sniggering, mugging, bragging and taunting, coming out of the apparent end of efforts to impeach and convict the president. But Trump being Trump, such adult, restrained behaviour may be impossible for him to carry off. As a result, Tuesday evening’s speech may still have more in common with his jeering campaign speeches than with a sober, adult presentation of the nation’s challenges, and his feelings about how best to address them.

But then there is the expected vote in the Senate on the very next day over whether to acquit the president in his trial, following his impeachment by the House of Representatives. There have been hours and hours of presentations of the case for and the case against the conviction of the president. This was followed by several days of questioning from senators to the prosecuting and defence teams.

But the obvious gutlessness of Republican senators in declining to vote for any further witness testimony in a 51-49 vote, came in the face of the stonewalling against any senior administration testimony during the House of Representatives impeachment phase. This came in the face, too, of word that former National Security Adviser John Bolton was prepared to respond to a summons to discuss his direct knowledge of Donald Trump’s deep involvement in holding military aid to Ukraine hostage in order to extract a pledge that Ukraine would hold a public show of an investigation of Democratic candidate Joe Biden — and, concurrently, to speak to the case that Ukraine was central to the 2016 election interference was bogus.

As things stand now, the Senate will vote — largely along party lines — to judge the president innocent, despite the fact that a number of Republican senators have conceded President Trump’s actions were illegal, but were apparently just teensy tiny crimes, as opposed to things worthy of an impeachment conviction. And as Senator Lamar Alexander spoke for some in saying he had heard enough to agree the president did no-nos but he didn’t need to hear any more. Hunh? And this vote came even before any putative testimony from John Bolton or anybody else — let alone any of the White House documents now trickling out, similarly bolstering the case that what had happened was more than just a minor indiscretion or two by Donald Trump.

And so here we are now. The Senate, at least its Republican majority, has been shown to ignore and disown its constitutional obligations as an actual deliberative body carrying out an actual impeachment trial; preferring, instead, to transform into a flock of obsequious, frightened sheep, mindlessly following the tirades and wiles of the man in the White House, wherever that leads.

In the past, we have sometimes cited Plato in discussions about the societal dangers to democracies. But Plato warned about something else. As he wrote:

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”

It is now clear Republican senators prefer the darkness over what Edmund Burke, the foremost philosopher of conservative thought, had instructed legislators to perform as their highest function — voting as acts of conscience, beyond party loyalty or the immediate desires of their constituents.

Instead, we have seen a display of mindless loyalty to a president who cares little for their loyalty or the national welfare, and who suffers from the inability to separate personal political benefit from the national interest.

Like the song says, Don’t send in the clowns, they’re already here. If the vote goes according to predictions, the Democrats’ best path now is to take the fight into the 2020 election, despite their apparent desire to kill one another off in that metaphorical circular firing squad. DM