Why the left should care about impeachment-and support it wholeheartedly
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By C.J. Atkins
Anyone who's been reading this publication over the past few years knows that we've been raising the specter of impeachment practically since President Trump took office. Our first article to mention that the crimes of Trump could be grounds for impeachment was published only 19 days after his inauguration. As the number and extent of his offenses escalated, we kept pace with our condemnations and indictments of this president. When the Mueller Report finally came out, we said "enough is enough" and took a clear editorial position that the time had come for Congress to act.

We reported on the push by several Democratic lawmakers to impeach Trump-including "The Squad," Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ayanna Presley, as well as the persistent efforts of Texas Rep. Al Green. Our readers were urged to contact their member of Congress and ask them to join in. When the Teachers, Service Employees, and Nurses became the first national unions to back impeachment, we reported the news immediately. And as the majority of the American people swung behind removing the president from the White House, this paper again ratcheted up its criticism of Trump's manipulation and deceit.

All this is recounted not just to blow our own horn or brandish our impeachment credentials, but to make a point: We thought it was a no-brainer that the left should be backing the campaign to BOTH impeach Trump AND build the movement to turn the country in a more progressive direction in 2020 and beyond. In fact, we believed it to be pretty obvious that branding Trump with the stain of impeachment was a particularly effective way to expose the misdeeds of the whole corporate class and their corrupt representatives in public office.

Apparently not everyone on the left sees it that way.

In a recent op-ed that appeared in "The Guardian", Samuel Moyn argues that the "coalition of long-governing elites, from liberal technocrats to 'never-Trump' conservatives" is declaring war on the president simply for their own interests-as part of an attempt to re-install centrist neoliberalism in power. That might be largely true, as far as it goes, but is that all that's at work? Moyn, who is a Yale professor and a contributor to "Jacobin" magazine, also says that "the pathologies of the country that led to Trump" have to be the main focus for the left-things like the imperial presidency and rising economic inequality.

Certainly those are challenges that absolutely must be central to the campaign to unseat Trump and the entire capitalist cabal that backed him, as well as those elites that did not. But do we have to choose between impeachment and doing everything else? Is not the push to remove Trump an opportunity to...

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