Wednesday, January 5, 2022
Wednesday, January 5, 2022
By naming this newsletter “The Mess We've Made,” I run the risk of sounding like nothing more than a crabby old man, and thus a cliché: Gramps, venting because things ain’t like they used to be.
Well, I can't escape it, I am a crabby old man and I am venting. But I'm not complaining about the disappearance of CD players or of the Oxford comma or about baseball caps worn backwards. I'm complaining about the erosion of democracy, and in that respect I’m joining a chorus. More fundamentally, I’m worried that Americans seem to have given up on the idea that we have a right to good, corruption-free government. I stay awake at night fretting that my countrymen no longer believe that we can reform and reshape our laws. We seem resigned to the fact that money and power are highly concentrated, that there are rulers, and that the vast majority of us are simply ruled.
I hear my friends voice a kind of wistful resignation about politics, one that sounds to me like a mild brand of cynicism, the way nice people sound when they surrender their ideals. Some of them no longer pay attention to the news. They’re escaping inward, cultivating acceptance, focusing instead on getting in shape, losing weight, taking CBD, meditating, walking in the woods, binge-watching Netflix, learning to throw pots. “What’s the use?” is their refrain. “Don’t let it upset you. Nothing is going to change.”
As if they were Russians.
Even more darkly, we seem to accept that we don’t really know who our rulers are. The people we elect to office themselves seem powerless, while invisible others, with limitless cash, seem to be pulling the strings.
Two years ago, I and my friends and millions of other Americans—a substantial majority of voters—were focused, and rightly so, on the upcoming 2020 election, fervent in our hope that throwing Trump out of office could restore the nation to sanity and free our government from its incompetence, chaos, and corruption. We saw record levels of voting, itself remarkable in a plague year, and achieved our immediate objective. When Biden took the oath of office a year ago we heaved a sigh of relief—especially given Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, and especially given the obscene demonstration the Trumpeters had given us on January 6 of their disrespect for American values, freedom, and tradition.
And coming out of the 2020 election, our legislative and reform priorities were hardly mysterious; they were, rather, carefully developed and articulated through the campaign process. We knew then and we know now what we want, what we deserve, and what the country needs:
· Mobilization to defeat the pandemic.
· Decisive government action and economic restructuring to slow climate change.
· The strengthening of voting rights and election security.
· The repair and modernization of our crumbling infrastructure.
· A rational and enforceable immigration policy—one that recognizes the economy’s need for workers, the value that immigrants bring to our culture and prosperity, and America’s role in the world as a center of opportunity and growth and as a haven for the persecuted.
· Thorough policing reform, including an end to racialized police violence and police impunity.
· A more equitable, progressive tax system.
· A more equitable education system, with better schools in poorer zip codes and more affordable opportunities for college and skills-training.
· The elimination of big money in political campaigns—a counter to the Supreme Court’s stupid and phenomenally destructive Citizens United decision.
· Sane gun legislation, somehow countering the Supreme Court’s equally stupid (and ahistorical) Heller decision.
· Universal and affordable healthcare.
· A viable social safety net, including support for families with children and elder-care responsibilities.
· A foreign policy that vigorously and unapologetically champions democracy and human rights worldwide.
Republicans derisively refer to this as a “progressive wish list.” So be it, it’s also what most Americans actually want from their government. It mostly represents nothing more than plain old common-sense American-style good government. None of this is too much to ask and none of it is unaffordable—though we’ve been trained over several decades to consider all of it unachievable. And—though I can already hear the libertarian overreactions to “economic restructuring” and “gun legislation” and the rest—none of this is extreme or radical, and none of it threatens individual liberty. As a matter of fact, to get downright scriptural, this stuff is nothing more than Americans wanting a government “to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
But despite the sincere efforts of the Biden Administration and of most of the Democrats in Congress, over this past year we’ve achieved almost none of it. Instead, we’ve gained a painful civics lesson in just how petrified and undemocratic our legislative system truly is, with an obdurate Senate deliberately structured for minority rule. It appears that control over legislation doesn’t belong broadly to the people of the United States after all; rather, it’s a privilege reserved for the most entrenched corporate interests and the fattest donors. Again, it’s almost as if we were Russians, as if we took for granted that the oligarchs, the thugs, were in charge. As Adam Jentleson recounts in his excellent 2021 book Kill Switch, inaction has become a feature of the modern Senate, not a bug.
To add insult to injury, the removal of Trump from the Oval Office hasn’t diminished his toxic power over a substantial minority of our fellow citizens. While some of my progressive friends seem to be withdrawing from the world, every day we witness a crazy, escalating engagement on the right: the bullying of local school boards, the armed anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, the proliferation of broad misinformation campaigns and hate-speech propaganda, the demonization of everything not-MAGA. There is increasing talk on the right, approvingly, even among sitting members of Congress, of a shooting civil war. And what sense can we possibly make of the Q faithful who show up in Dallas expecting Trump and long-dead JFK Jr. to appear (out of the heavens?) and jointly ascend an American throne—and, incidentally, to execute their enemies. The clown car hasn’t been parked in the garage but is still very much on the road.
A few weeks ago, Michelle Goldberg, the New York Times opinion columnist, wrote movingly about the “horror” and “political despair” infecting the Democratic Party. We had expected, she writes, that by electing Biden we could escape the Trumpian nightmare, but we’ve since discovered that “Dystopia no longer has an expiration date”:
It’s predictable that, with Donald Trump out of the White House, Democrats would pull back from constant, frenetic political engagement. But there’s a withdrawal happening right now—from news consumption, activism and, in some places, voting—that seems less a product of relief than of avoidance. Part of this is simply burnout and lingering trauma from Covid. But I suspect that part of it is about growing hopelessness born of a sense that dislodging Trump has bought American democracy only a brief reprieve. . . .
Given the bleak trajectory of American politics, I worry about progressives retreating into private life to preserve their sanity, a retreat that will only hasten democracy’s decay. In order to get people to throw themselves into the fight to save this broken country, we need leaders who can convince them that they haven’t already lost.
If you’re looking for an antidote to this pessimism, I invite you to listen to anything Sherrilyn Ifill has to say. Ifill is the president and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a position she’s held since 2013 and from which she’s stepping down next year. Ifill is uniformly inspiring, bracing, and wise. Last week she was interviewed by Chris Hayes on his Why Is This Happening podcast, immediately following Hayes’s interview with The Atlantic’s Barton Gellman—both discussions about the fragile state of our democracy. Ifill’s perspective was, for me, revelatory. She reminded us that, from the perspective of black Americans, true democracy isn’t something being lost; rather, it’s something constantly being fought for, for the first time. The sense of democracy slipping away—the theme that I began this essay with—is, sadly, a privileged one. “What they workshop on us,” she said—“us” referring to African-Americans—"is the stuff that’s coming for the whole republic.”
So, at the end of the day, what has happened now, and the reason that you and I and many others feel so overwhelmed, or feel like this is a catastrophe that we can’t get out of, is because the US is now Alabama. Which, if it didn’t check Alabama, it was always going to be.
So you want me to be sad about the fact that not just the people that I represent are living in a place that is anti-democratic? I am not.
I am actually hopeful that the metastization of this terrible thing means that we will actually make a change, and that change will be for all people, including the people in the communities I represent. . . . .
[P]eople now understand that their fate is tied to our fate, and that whatever is happening and being tried out on marginalized communities is the stuff that they’re coming for the whole republic with.
This is a brilliant way to look at our moment of crisis. Ifill’s point is that our goal is not to rebuild democracy, but to create one anew. The mere conceptual possibility of true multi-racial democracy—in other words, of a just, diverse society—is, generously, a mere 70 years old. White people like me have the luxury of contemplating a long history and tradition of democratic rhetoric and aspiration: and indeed, that tradition is there. But rhetoric and aspiration notwithstanding, it is also unavoidably true that the United States has never been a viable, functioning actualized democracy, a truly just society.
Which means that, in this moment of inescapable crisis, we need to get to work.
https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631497773
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/opinion/american-democracy.html
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/qanon-kennedy-jfk-jr-dealey-plaza-dallas-1251929/