[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]
With our long national Kava-nightmare almost over in one sense (and just beginning in another sense), I suppose I might as well go ahead and share (an expanded version of) the extremely depressing big-picture thoughts on the state of the nation that I typed up last Friday morning (before Flake flipped), almost posted on Facebook, then decided against posting and instead just e-mailed to my dad – because I needed to unburden my soul by sharing my rant with someone, but I wasn’t in a fit emotional state to share it publicly (and thus deal with reading people’s responses). But now I am, I think.
I’m posting this because I sort of want to lay down a marker, I guess, and timestamp this prediction for posterity, however much I hope I’m wrong. But seriously, listen up: if you’re already feeling depressed about politics, and you’re searching for comfort or optimism or motivation or a call to action, DO NOT READ THE REST OF THIS POST. I mean it. I have nothing to offer you but hopelessness about where things are headed. No pithy jokes, no Aragorn speeches, no memes of Mitt Romney riding a horse. I got nothin’. Sorry.
(Well, okay. There’s one LOTR-themed joke about Lindsey Graham. But that’s it!)
Anyway, here goes:
National politics is broken beyond repair, for at least a generation or two, and quite possibly forever. The American Experiment had a good run, but it has failed.
It’s clear now that the rot is much deeper than Trump, and removing or defeating him won’t fix it. Nor will a Democratic rout in November fix it (though we should still certainly vote for that). Republican politicians and opinion leaders, from partisan nihilists like McConnell to vile grievance-mongers like Trump to craven enablers like Ryan to the shameless propagandists at Fox News, are WAAAAAAAY more to blame than Democratic politicians – and yet there are much deeper forces at work than politicians’ (or political parties’) terrible decisions. Technological, cultural, economic, media, you name it. Those bigger forces have amplified the politicians’ terrible decisions, and vice versa, to the point that we’ve now gone beyond the Republicans’ power to undo the damage they’ve done, in any realistic scenario.
Nor can the Democrats undo it, though they’re our best hope to forestall things a little. But mostly I think this is a runaway train now. In 2016, I believed that a few well-placed acts of principle could pull us back from the brink. I don’t believe that now, and I’ve begun to doubt that it was true even then. Which, in a way, makes the twists and turns of 2016 slightly less agonizing in retrospect: if Trump is merely a catalyst, speeding up an inevitability instead of fundamentally changing the course of history, then stupid bullshit like Rubio imploding in New Hampshire, or Kasich not dropping out, or Romney not running third party, or Hillary’s pneumonia/deplorables weekend, or the Comey letter, feel less tragically world-historical, and more like footnotes to America’s decline. So that’s…uh…comforting? I guess??
Anyway, if 2016 shattered my previous worldview (it did), I guess this is the extremely depressing new worldview that I think I’m settling into: for a huge variety of interconnected reasons, America’s national politics has stumbled into a perfect shitstorm, and the cavalry ain’t coming. The problems have become structural and fundamental, as well as cultural and moral, and at some level even spiritual, for lack of a better term. The cancer has metastasized into the very marrow of our civic life, and there is no cure.
Maybe, decades from now, my daughters’ generation can fix things somehow. But I fear the clusterfuck will keep spiraling downward so badly that the Republic as we know it will be well & truly doomed before the current generation of leaders relinquishes power.
I’m not going to lay out a point-by-point case here, setting forth all the reasons and examples of exactly what I mean and why I’ve reached this conclusion. If you think I’m being hyperbolic and ridiclous, that’s fine. But I don’t think so. I have a long history (pre-Trump) of usually being very skeptical of sweeping pessimistic conclusions like this – because everything is cyclical, every generation always thinks doom is nigh, and recency bias is a helluva drug – but even despite those priors, I can no longer persuade myself that American democracy is in anything other than an existential crisis. The system is broken at its core, in countless ways, and its brokenness corrupts nearly everyone who participates in it. They’re corrupted to differing degrees and in different ways, to be sure – so, like, Lindsey Graham has outpaced Ben Sasse in the race to the bottom, for instance – but even the principled people are corrupted and worn down by it eventually, and/or they give up because there’s simply no place for them anymore.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: OMG, both-sides-ism! Yes, what I just described is mostly happening on the GOP side right now. But just you watch. When the Democrats take power, they’ll respond to the GOP’s misdeeds in ways that will feel justified and right and necessary, maybe even to me, but will ultimately make things worse – if only because of the counter-reaction, and the counter-counter-reaction, and so on. Plus, even if the Dems try their very best not to be consumed by bad ideas that sound good to an angry mob, they will have to throw a few bones to their increasingly furious base, or face electoral doom. Mind you, the base is furious for good reason – but even righteous fury eventually starts feeding on itself. And throwing bones to an angry base (while still mostly governing like statesmen) is how it started for GOP, too. Just you wait. It won’t end well for us either, and we’ll only look good in comparison to them.
Besides, soon after the Dems’ brief post-Trump ascendancy, the Republicans will re-take power, and back & forth, back & forth. Which, in this climate, means that it’ll continue downhill. Polarization will get worse. Demonization will get worse. Tribalism will get worse. Defending the indefensible will become more & more commonplace. Fear and anger will get more intense, on both sides.
There is no moderating or unifying force in the culture anymore that’s powerful enough to stop, or even meaningfully slow, this civic descent. Indeed, national culture and national politics are merging, which is terrible for both. Everything is becoming political – and because politics is awful right now, everything is becoming increasingly awful. Every horrible human impulse now has a political sponsor (mostly on the Right, for now, but hold the Left’s beer). Conversely, every salutary thought or feeling or belief, no matter how obviously correct, is one national controversy away from instantly becoming virulently opposed by half the country.
At a very big-picture level, I think the ultimate problem is that various aspects of modernity amplify our baser impulses, and suppress our better ones, in ways that our lizard brain just can’t contend with. This leads to weirdly discordant effects: on an individual level, Americans mostly get along fine (albeit while also gradually self-sorting into tribal bubbles), which is why I have some hope for state and local politics. If we’re going to actually “MAGA,” that’s where it will start…slowly. But at a national level, and at a broad cultural level, the divisiveness and discord have become fully self-sustaining. They barely even need to be stoked anymore. They basically stoke themselves – or else they incessantly demand that anyone within earshot stoke them, until someone inevitably accedes. Possibly even someone who was once a man of Rohan, like Lindsey Gríma.
I’m not sure what the end point of all this will look like. It may well be that economic/market forces – assuming they don’t also merge with politics, the way cultural forces are – will prevent the most extreme outcomes (i.e., the ones involving widespread violence) from coming to pass. But even the market lacks the power to restore anything approaching governability or sane politics. Perhaps America will hit bottom, but that “bottom” will be essentially a mostly nonviolent failed state (at the national level).
In terms of the basic functionality of the Republic, though, I see no way out – especially once you consider the notion of our already-broken politics handling, among other things, the social upheaval that will accompany the coming boom in high-level automation and artificial intelligence. Eek.
The best counterargument to all this is generic mild optimism bolstered by a vague nod to history: we’ve muddled through before, so we’ll probably muddle through again. And perhaps so. But that’s incredibly nonspecific, and the truth is, I can’t picture a plausible path back to healthy democracy. Whereas I can easily imagine and describe various specific, plausible paths where things keep getting worse and worse.
I suspect that, in ten years, we’ll probably remember 2018 as the halcyon days when things weren’t quite so bad, just like we now think of 2008 (the year that gave us Sarah Palin, for chrissakes!), never mind 1998 (when the cast of “Rent” was despairing about how awful it was to be “living in America at the end of the millennium”). Ten years after that, we’ll say the same about how great 2028 was, and so on. And this won’t just be dumb nostalgia; we’ll be entirely correct. Things are very bad, and they’ll get much worse. On this one specific point, Derb was right when he wrote in 2002: “We are living in a golden age. The past was pretty awful; the future will be far worse. Enjoy!”
I increasingly fear that the question now isn’t how to repair the damage or restore normalcy, but whether everyday life in America can remain tenable under a permanently (or at least generationally) broken federal government. I have no idea, but I think we’re going to find out. Or our kids are.
I’m probably overreacting, and feeling more hopeless than I should… but on the other hand, over the past 2-3 years, the moments when I’ve felt a profound pessimistic clarity are the moments when I’ve made the best predictions. Hopefully this is an exception, but I doubt it. #DOOM