The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events is the title of a 1960s book by historian and Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin. Pseudo-events, he wrote, are staged solely to generate news media coverage. Real events, in contrast, involve independent actors and have unpredictable outcomes.
It’s not difficult to say which category the House Democrats’ impeachment hearings belongs in. It’s a classic pseudo-event stage-managed to prod sympathetic media into running predictable stories. Inconvenient questions from Republican members are blocked. Even the name of the original “whistleblower” is concealed, though no law requires that, and the stage managers know who he is.
Yet on the front pages and cable news, this pseudo-event is crowding out two genuine events of potentially world-shaking importance and uncertain outcome.
President Trump is going to be impeached by the House and will not be removed from office by the Senate. But the potential for regime change — or regime rigidification — resulting from the prolonged rioting in Hong Kong and recent protests in Iran is hugely consequential and entirely unpredictable.
Foreign policy analysts classify nations as either upholders or disruptors of world order. The disruptors in the years after World War I were Germany, Italy, and Japan. The upholders failed to prevent them from triggering World War II. Since the end of the Cold War the major disruptors have been China, Iran, and Russia. Now the first two are facing vigorous protests and regime-change threats.
The six months of protests in Hong Kong reflect a rejection of China’s increasingly authoritarian state which, armed with artificial intelligence and face-recognition technology, threatens an Orwellian eradication of freedoms.
Will dictator-for-life Xi Jinping crack down violently in Hong Kong, as Deng Xiaoping did in Tiananmen Square in 1989? It’s not clear. There would be costs internationally, but China today is growing less dependent on exports to the U.S. and advanced countries. That’s partly due to Trump’s tariff threats but also because Chinese wages are no longer rock-bottom and its labor force is shrinking.
So as China disengages from America, Xi may be willing to endure the backlash from a violent crackdown in Hong Kong. How does America deal with a more hostile and less economically connected — and potentially much more disruptive —China? Both houses of Congress passed unanimous resolutions backing protesters’ demands, but beyond that it’s not clear that anyone knows how to influence the regime’s behavior.
On Iran, Trump and the Democrats have opposite positions. President Barack Obama signed a nuclear agreement with Iran, which he hoped would lead to friendly cooperation in the Middle East — hopes that were never fulfilled. Trump renounced the agreement and has squeezed the Iranian economy, possibly giving rise to the current protests. They’re serious enough that the mullah regime has largely shut down Iran’s isolated internet.
Will this lead to regime change? Iran’s “green” protests of 2009, largely ignored by the Obama administration, didn’t. These may not either. But history shows that peaceful protests can sometimes topple a tyrannical regime, even though it’s hard to predict just when. Ronald Reagan envisioned the fall of the Berlin Wall and Daniel Patrick Moynihan the collapse of the Soviet Union, but neither knew those things would happen in November 1989 and December 1991.
It’s possible that the regimes of post-Mao communist China and the mullahs’ Iran might collapse after 40 years of tyranny. Or, less happily and more likely, these regimes may sweep aside the protests and last for centuries, like so many Chinese dynasties and Persian monarchies. Real events have uncertain and possibly momentous outcomes.
Not so for the impeachment hearings. Witnesses are heard complaining that Trump subverted the “formal interagency policy process” and that he pressured — “bribed” is the focus-group-determined but inapt verb that Democrats are now using — Ukraine’s government for political gain. But Ukraine is not a formal U.S. ally, and Obama refused to provide it even defensive weapons when Russia seized its territory in Donbass and Crimea. Now we’re told that Trump should be ousted from office for a two-month delay in delivering those weapons.
“The executive power,” Article II of the Constitution states, “shall be vested in a president of the United States of America.” That president, as the career diplomats testifying have acknowledged, has no obligation to follow “interagency” processes or consensus. It’s hard to avoid concluding that Democrats who detest Trump seized on this weak pretext for impeachment when and because the charges of Russian collusion they brandished for three years turned out to be baseless.
Polls show support for impeachment declining. Americans, it turns out, don’t have to read Boorstin to recognize a pseudo-event when they see one.
