The Bigger Question Behind Trump’s Insurrection Clause Case

Sometimes, when advocating for a position, someone will argue something that is absolutely right and yet also absolutely besides the point. These arguments sound good and are often undisputable, but when subjected to any level of scrutiny, they prove to either be irrelevant to, or actually counter-productive to the larger point the person is trying to make.

It’s like the argument I used to make in college when asking for dates. “You don’t want to die alone!”. A bit over the top, perhaps. But you have to work with what you have. And I didn’t have a lot. I had an impressive collection of early ELO bootlegs, I could hyper-extend my left elbow, and I could talk about juggling. To be clear, I couldn’t actually juggle. But I could talk about it. That’s it. So given all of this, I thought I had to go big.

The point is that while it is true that most of the sophomores I was asking out (to the extent they had thought about it) indeed didn’t want to die alone, that was not the actual existential threat they faced at 20. Especially, given that there were several billion other men on the planet who weren’t me, my going-to-the-grave-lonely point was true, but irrelevant, and made people think I was even stranger than I actually was. No mean feat. For these reasons, and many more, it turned out to be an ineffective strategy. The…