SATURDAy, NOVEMbER 9 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
I
n the future, where D.C. Council member Jack
Evans finds himself seated will depend upon
where his council colleagues and the U.S. attor-
ney stand on his performance while in office.
Confronted with a report by the council’s outside
law firm detailing Evans’s serial transgression of
council ethics rules, a majority of the council w ould
seem to be satisfied with having the veteran Ward 2
Democratic lawmaker sit anywhere in our nation’s
capital except on the dais in the John Wilson
Building.
Whether federal prosecutors, on the other hand,
want Evans seated at the defendant’s table or
simply out of their sight cannot be immediately
determined. Given the FBI search of Evans’s home
and the federal grand jury subpoenas seeking
documents from him and his consulting clients, it’s
fair to conclude that the council’s longest-serving
member is of keen interest to the Justice Depart-
ment.
In response to my inquiry about the Evans case
status, Kadia Koroma, public information officer in
the U.S. attorney’s office, emailed, “Per DOJ policy
we generally do not confirm the existence of or
comment on ongoing investigations.”
Evans, for his part, maintains that he has done
nothing wrong. To be sure, a separate investigation
by a law firm hired by the Washington Metropolitan
Area Transit Authority found that during Evans’s
tenure as Metro board chairman, he violated the
board’s e thics code by failing to disclose a conflict of
interest. And yes, caught by Metro, Evans did agree
not to seek reelection as chairman and stepped
down from the board.
’Tis also true that the city’s ethics agency fined
him $20,000 for hustling his influence as a council
member and using his government email while
seeking work at local law firms.
And now staring him in the face is that report
from O’Melveny & Myers, the law firm hired by the
D.C. Council — which in 97 pages cites 11 instances
of his violating ethics rules by taking action that
helped his employers or clients, who paid him more
than $400,000.
In a letter to Council Chairman Phil Mendelson
(D) and Council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3)
this week, lawyers for Evans contend that the report
did not find that any of Evans’s official actions were
linked to “any financial gain” or that “he sold his
office, nor that he had any intention to circumvent
the rules.” They slammed the report as “one-sided”
and complained that it had been “improperly
leaked... to the media... with malice and with the
intent to poison the well of public opinion” in order
to force Evans’s resignation or pressure the “Coun-
cil to expel Mr. Evans without any further consider-
ation.” They asked for a “fair process” and a forum
for Evans to explain his actions.
In a letter of her own, Cheh, the council’s
designated chair of the “A d Hoc Committee in the
Matter of Councilmember Jack Evans,” shot back
that the lawyers’ concern is “misplaced.” Evans,
she said, has been given due process and is invited
to meet with the committee in a public hearing to
explain himself, especially if t he committee c hoos-
es to consider recommendations for sanctions.
Cheh, noted for her directness, told Evans’s law-
yers, “Cloaking your public relations campaign in
legal jargon does nothing to advance your de-
fense.”
Thus, a taste of what’s to come when Evans and
the council meet for an exchange of views.
Hopefully, the council hearing will not be inart-
fully conducted with extravagant displays of
feigned indignation by council members comfort-
ably seated at t heir raised platform. Nine of 13 mem-
bers have already called for his resignation. Evans
deserves an opportunity to be heard if and when the
reported violations are aired and examined. Disci-
plinary action must be on the table.
Based on what’s known, censure of Evans is the
least the council should do. Expulsion, however,
would subject voters in Ward 2 to the same injustice
imposed by Congress on the District: a denial of
voting representation in an institution where laws
are made.
Evans should lose the privilege of engaging in
council business, and stripping him of all commit-
tee assignments would achieve that end.
Should he choose to remain in office, Ward 2
voters can decide that question either by the
ongoing recall effort or a vote in next June’s
Democratic primary.
Which brings up the role of the U.S. attorney.
The federal probe of Evans is wedged between
District voters and the ballot box. That’s not where
the government belongs. Any unresolved federal
presence has a chilling effect on campaign workers,
donors and voters, and it’s more damaging the
longer it goes on.
Yes, the feds should fairly and impartially pursue
possible criminal wrongdoing. But there must be no
foot-dragging on Jack Evans. Voters have a right
and need to know what, if anything, is coming next.
Evans, no doubt, also wants to know where he will
be seated.
[email protected]COLBERT I. KINGThe D.C. Council
must decide
on Jack Evans
O
n Nov. 9, 1989, the impending death of the Soviet Union
occasioned a delirium. First, the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Then the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. itself. It marked
the disappearance of the world’s leading communist
state and the end of the very idea of communism as a plausible
system of social and political organization. And the end of
six decades of existential struggle between a democratic West
and the totalitarianisms of the left and right that had defined
world politics since the 1930s.
It w as possible in that dawn to believe that we had reached the
peak of mankind’s political development. The romantics among
us called it the end of History — the capital “H” being homage to
the transcendent, self-conscious History of 19th-century Ger-
man philosophy. It was the vindication of Churchill’s aphorism
that democracy is the worst form of government except for all
the others. The others having failed, what was left standing was
a political system — the modern capitalist democracy of
universal suffrage, the rule of law, guaranteed rights and the
peaceful and regular transfer of power — that balanced and
satisfied individual, communal and national needs. A democrat-
ic future, gradually expanding throughout the globe, seemed
assured.
Three decades later, the landscape has changed radically. The
slide back away from liberal democracy is well underway. That
was perhaps to be expected: History has been unkind to every
stripe of utopian thinking. But it is not just that we have failed to
achieve the messianic future. Even the democratic present is
under widespread assault.
Though disappointing, democracy’s failures among the col-
lapsed autocracies of the developing world were understand-
able, given how difficult democratic transition has proved
elsewhere. More dispiriting was rollback where the foundations
of democracy had already been laid: functioning democracies
systematically undone and effectively transformed into dictator-
ships, most prominently in Turkey and Venezuela.
And now, in a development once unimaginable, mature
Western democracies are experiencing a surge of ethnonational-
ism, a blood-and-soil patriotism tinged with xenophobia, a
weariness with parliamentary dysfunction and an attraction —
still only an attraction, not yet a commitment — to strongman
rule.
Its most conspicuous symptom is a curious and growing
affinity for Vladimir Putin. Remarkably, this tendency is most
pronounced on the right. After decades of left-wing apologists
for Russia, it is now conservatives asking: What’s so bad about
Putin anyway? Upholder of traditional values, defender of the
faith, restorer of order through ruthlessly centralized power, he
took a basket case of a country and made Russia great again, did
he not? Sure, he emasculated the opposition, shut down
independent media and regularly kills political opponents and
journalists. But he’s got omelets to make.
Contrast that with decline and decay in the West. Paralyzed by
process and grown decadent, it cannot rouse itself to defend its
values, its borders or its history. Instead, it passively watches the
debasement of its foundational institutions of family, church
and community.
European fascination with Putin-style authoritarianism is far
more developed than the American variety. All its characteristics
are found in the ideology of populist parties sweeping the
continent. Its most alarming manifestations appear in two
post-Soviet democracies, once heralds of the post-Cold War
dawn: Hungary and Poland.
How to account for the retreat? In t he aftermath of World War
II, the same question arose in addressing that era’s totalitarian
temptation: the rising, powerful communist parties of the West.
At the time, conventional wisdom described it as a flight from
freedom: democracy’s burdens were too heavy, the attractions of
security too many.
Traditional rights — the “negative liberty” of being left alone,
especially by the state — were derided as bourgeois. True human
rights were concrete and material — the right to sustenance, to
work, to shelter, to physical protection. Note that these were not
freedoms from the state, but benefits that could only be
conferred by the state. The resulting dependency is the very
antithesis of freedom.
But the argument found many takers. After all, went the
cliche, what was free speech to people with empty stomachs?
Given the abject destitution suffered amid the rubble of the war,
that may adequately explain the attraction of totalitarian parties
in the 1940s and 1950s.
It does not, however, explain the flight from freedom today.
After all, it’s been well and widely demonstrated that liberal
democracy is infinitely superior in producing not just freedom
but prosperity as well. The economic security promised by
socialism and the various collectivisms has turned out to be a
fraud.
No. What drive people away today from the classic liberal
democratic model are considerations not economic but cultural.
The hunger is not for bread but for ethnic, tribal and nationalist
validation. For respect, recognition and purpose. Betrayed by
globalist elites, pettifogging democrats and politically correct
politicians, what attracts Westerners to authority is the image of
strength and self-assertion.
That the traditional left-right political divide is increasingly
being surpassed by the nationalist-globalist and a uthoritarian-
democratic divide is disturbing and potentially ominous. Left
vs. right we learned how to manage, if after a century and a
half. Authoritarian vs. democratic may be more difficult. It’s
not just new; it’s coming at a time of profound civilizational
self-doubt. In such circumstances, the unimaginable often
becomes imaginable.
We have traveled far in the last three decades. Wrote
Wordsworth in the romantic rapture that was the promise of
1789: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.” We know how that
ended. How does the End of History end?Th is column is excerpted from Charles Krauthammer’s 2017 essay “The
Authoritarian Te mptation,” published in his posthumous book, “The
Point of It All.” The book and column were edited by his son, Daniel
Krauthammer.CHARLES KRAUTHAMMERThe authoritarian
temptation
P
revious reviewers of this book have won-
dered: Who is this book for? Who has so
entirely missed the plot of the past four years
as to require this dire “WARNING” by an
anonymous Trump (Resistance) official? “The ideal
reader would seem to be an undecided voter who
has lived in a cave for the past three years, and is
irresistibly moved by quotations from Te ddy
Roosevelt and solemn invocations of Cicero,” wrote
Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times.
Well, I am here to say: It is I! I am the person. I
have not lived in a cave, although because of an
incident I cannot describe thanks to a prolonged
ongoing legal battle with Pat Sajak, I have been
cryogenically frozen since 1987 and only just woke
up. I had been reserving judgment on Donald Trump
for the past four years because I had a very large
stack of old Reader’s Digests to get through, and I
have only just now f inished t hem. Or I was t rapped in
the ice three winters running with dwindling sup-
plies after my ill-starred decision to continue northin search of the Passage. Actually, it is that I said to
myself, “This standard Republican is not getting up
from this armchair until he finishes ‘Infinite Jest’!,”
which must have been three years ago now. Perhaps I
was briefly ensorcelled by trolls? Anyway, it certainly
wasn’t the cave thing, I know that!
This is the act of courage I have been waiting for.
Frankly, books with names on them make me
nervous. People with names can be identified and
found wanting. Anonymous is untainted by person-
ality or motive. I am picturing Anonymous as maybe
a benevolent ghost who has been trapped in the
Oval Office and forced to witness all this. Or maybe
Spartacus. Or — Odysseus? Indeed, Anonymous is
one of my favorite writers, and I’ve always been
struck by his range; he wrote many limericks that I
love. I will say I was disappointed by the lack of
limericks in this book.
It a ctually makes me feel more confident, not less,
that this person has no name. I know plenty of
people with names who work in the Trump adminis-tration, and, frankly, I don’t think very much of
them. If one of them were to write a book, I would
not give it the time of day, which, again, I do not
know, because I have been otherwise engaged for
the past few decades.
Having said that, that this comes from someone
working in the White House particularly compels
me. People who wanted Trump to fail might well
object to him on principle. But people who wanted
him to succeed — them I can trust. People unmoved
after Charlottesville for whom the turning point was
that Trump did not sufficiently honor John McCain’s
legacy. People who stayed when all others had fled,
to keep what I now learn is a burning, rat-infested
ship at l east afloat, if not pointed even roughly in the
right direction. The resistance, as it were, from
within. Those are people from whom I want to hear
the bad news.
And it certainly doesn’t sound like good news!
Trump hates it when people take notes? This
brought me up short, but I thought: Perhaps he willbe able to retain everything that happens in his
sharp, steel trap of a mind. But then it turns out, if
you keep reading, his mind is not like a steel trap at
all. It is like a steel trap only in that if you tried to
administer an intelligence test to a steel trap, the
trap would not do very well and might injure you in
some way.
On top of that, I learned that the president is, in
private, a pretty nightmarish boss and a pretty bad
sexist. At this stunning news, I called my wife,
Solveig, who had waited for me all those years. I
read these passages aloud, but somehow she did not
seem as shocked as I expected. And when I told her
that he even wanted to get rid of judges, that it was
so bad that a group of senior officials in the
presidency ALMOST RESIGNED (but then decided
not to), she just sort of sighed heavily and left the
room.
I am glad that someone — or, I guess, No One — is
here to tell us these things. I, for one, am stunned.
Twitter: @petridishesALEXANDRA PETRICan the anonymous Trump book change my mind?
DRAWING BOARDB Y SHENEMANB Y CLAY BENNETT FOR THE CHATTANOOGA TIMES FREE PRESSB Y DANA SUMMERSB Y MARGULIES