Goodbye to all that — once again, and for the last time

It was in 2011, amid the eruption of the Tea Party juvenile delinquents in the House of Representatives and the then-novel asininity of birtherism, that I called it quits after 28 years on Capitol Hill — 28 years working for Republicans, no less. 

As for the party I had grown up with in the Midwest — the party of Ike and Gerry Ford, respectable cloth-coated women, Jell-O salad, mainstream Presbyterians in brick churches (and please, no time-wasting and embarrassing hallelujahs or speaking in tongues during services; we all want to make the first tee by noon), late-model Buicks and neat lawns — three decades on, when I left the Hill, that party was as extinct as the passenger pigeon, and I felt I was without a political home. 

It had evolved — or rather degenerated — into a billionaire-funded mob of primitives reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s Yahoos. (Yes, that's the origin of that term.) Within a month of retirement, I wrote my first essay, "Goodbye to All That," which, for a fumbling first effort, garnered an amazing couple of million views and started a minor paradigm shift. 

Until then, the major media had steadfastly held to the agreed fiction that the GOP was a normal party practicing normal politics. As a former "insider," as I was dubbed, my pronouncement that the party of Lincoln had lost its mind seemed to give permission at least to a segment of the political media (Norman Ornstein, and some others) to notice that Republicans had an authoritarian and cultish bent. The balance of the press, though, still pretended otherwise.

I argued in much the same vein in my first book, "The Party Is Over," emphasizing that for all the Republicans' malfeasance, it was enabled by Democrats, who never quite seemed to grasp what they were up against. My second, "The Deep State," hypothesized a shadow government (but operating in plain sight) steered largely by corporate interests. It was one more tragicomic irony that Republicans, the main beneficiaries of corporate power, hijacked the term to describe everyone and everything they didn’t like.

Of course, that time, little more than a decade ago, seems almost innocent now, with the Tea Party’s imbecilities merely college hijinks during homecoming week. These days the GOP practically wallows in its own evil, at once surprised that they dare openly commit their atrocities in what was once a civilized country, and pleased that everyone supinely lets them get away with it.

I am sure that in the coming days and weeks any number of earnest Democrats will advance theories of vote suppression or vote fraud or discrepancies with mail-in ballots or incompetence on the part of the Harris campaign to explain the lamentable state we are now in. 

True or not, those theories disregard the bedrock fact that rises like an Everest before us: Having been confronted with unrelenting evidence of who Donald Trump was through three election cycles, a constitutionally sufficient number of Americans chose a narcissistic egomaniac, convicted on multiple felony charges and indicted on many more, whose pathologies were visibly exacerbated by an obvious and increasing senile dementia.

I posit that the electorate did not vote for him in spite of all that; they voted for him because of it. The last taboo of American politics is something I am now going to break, because the evidence is painfully obvious.

Even as the media intermittently deign to perceive that the GOP as an institution might be authoritarian, or that money might rig the system, or that billionaires just might not be our friends, there is one actor that is invariably held harmless. In fact, it is regarded as virtuous, possessing a homespun wisdom that infinitely surpasses the sophistry of academia and so-called experts.

It is the American people, the fawned-over pet of every gassy idealist from Walt Whitman to Carl Sandburg to Thornton Wilder to the hack editorial writers of the present age. The “good sense of the people” is responsible for each bit of favorable fortune, and absolved of every disaster. I recall an interview with George F. Will (a consummate hack if ever there was), wherein he was asked about the implications for democracy of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

"That wasn’t the American people," was Will’s pat and smug response. Well, then, George, who were they? New Guinea highlanders? Martians? They were Americans, all right, right down to their Camp Auschwitz T-shirts and their s**t on the floor of the Capitol building.

So-called progressives are especially prone to this delusion. They have built an entire edifice of psychological denial on the idea that even if there is a pervasive system of corporate or governmental control and repression, it is somehow unconnected with the moral character of the people the system administers.

I remember reading several years ago the comments section of a left-of-center website in which one true believer proclaimed that “Trump supporters are socialists, but they just don’t know it yet.” So the raw material of socialism consists of people who think public libraries are the equivalent of Stalin’s gulags? 

Sometime in the last 40 years, between Ronald Reagan's proclamation that greed is good, the rise of hate radio and garbage social media, the vicarious victimhood of 9/11 and the kill-fest of Iraq, the dominoes falling from Wall Street all the way to some empty and forlorn McMansion slum in 2008 and finally Trump shrieking in our ears nonstop, at least half the American people lost whatever shred of rationality they possessed. These people now think Joe Rogan or Alex Jones are philosophers on par with Henry David Thoreau or William James, except that they've never heard of the latter two.

No one can say that Trump ran a stealth campaign. He clearly told the American people his agenda. Now imagine if any politician told the electorate the following:

• I will lower your standard of living by putting steep tariffs on all the crap you buy at Walmart in order to eliminate taxes on my rich friends.
• I will dump your health insurance, raise your insulin and other drug prices, and if you have a pre-existing medical condition, you can go ahead and die.
• Forget about public health. I will put a brain-damaged lunatic in charge of vaccine policy, so that you will run a higher risk of dying in the next pandemic.
• I will fill government departments with uneducated hacks so that it will be harder to forecast, prepare for and mitigate natural disasters. If you happen to live in an area that didn’t vote for me, I will withhold disaster relief from you.
• If your kid has asthma, tough, because my rich donors will be able to pollute to their heart’s content. Do you remember reading about killer smogs in Pennsylvania steel towns and the Cuyahoga River catching fire? Get ready for more of that.
• If you don’t like any of this agenda, don’t bother demonstrating, because I will use the military against you. And don’t expect habeas corpus when you’re thrown in prison, because I will invoke martial law. The courts won’t help you, because I stacked them with loyalists. And there won’t be a free press to report on it, because it will have been sued out of existence or taken over by my corporate friends.

Trump and his paladins made all of that abundantly clear, and tens of millions voted for it. What, you say that a huge percentage were low-information voters who didn’t know what they were voting for? First, I rather doubt that they had no inkling, after eight interminable years, of what Trump’s program actually was. If, on the other hand, they really were ignorant of it, they are just as culpable, for they are lousy citizens without enough sense of civic responsibility to inform themselves.

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And what of the millions of voters the Democrats were counting on who never showed up at the polls? Isn’t it the Harris campaign’s fault for not mobilizing them? After endless media airing of the most publicized political agenda in memory, these ghost voters’ absence was also a conscious political choice. They simply didn’t care if democracy, however imperfect, slid into fascism. Apparently, staying home and playing Draft Kings was a better use of their time than voting. Lenin quipped that people vote with their feet; they also vote with their lazy asses firmly planted on the couch.

Have you ever had a friend or associate who was determined to do something stupid or irresponsible, and no amount of pleas, threats or appeals to reason could stop them? Continuing to berate them after a certain point only hardens their obstinacy. Why do we think additional door-knocking or robocalls would move nonvoters, considering that we already went through the most expensive campaign in history? The Roman Catholic Church, for all its hidebound reaction, picked up a few smarts in two millennia; it has a term for what I have described: invincible ignorance.

I don’t know this to an empirical certainty, but I suspect the behavioral law of thirds will hold true politically. One-third of Americans will enthusiastically support every enormity of fascism, or whatever political scientists prefer to label the American version of lawless, dictatorial rule, right down to public lynchings and torture. One-third will stand by, gawking like yokels at a county fair, unable to grasp that they are the marks being set up for fleecing. The remaining third will struggle against the blank incomprehension of the so-called swing voters (assuming we continue to have elections that aren’t like those in Russia).

If the remnant of sane and decent people wish to retrieve the situation — a questionable hypothesis in itself, because unlike in World War II, there is no United States to liberate anyone from tyranny: we have become the bad guys — they must digest some hard truths:

• What do-gooders consider the disqualifying features of the Republican Party — the performative cruelty, administrative incompetence and corruption, lack of judgment and utter disregard for what Jefferson called the decent opinion of mankind — is precisely what currently attracts a working majority of American voters. Lincoln to the contrary, these voters have no better angels of their nature.
• If Democrats expect to make any headway nationally — presuming America still has competitive elections — they cannot make the mistake, at least in the short term, of nominating a woman for president. Virtually alone among developed countries, pervasive misogyny makes it a fool’s errand. An even more unpalatable truth is that a large number of misogynists who will never vote for a female president are American women.
• America has undergone a revolution. This was an overthrow of the intelligent, the technical expert and the professional by an anti-intellectual mob. Our situation may not reach the depths of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, when people were killed for the crime of wearing eyeglasses, but it has already nearly reached the level of the movie "Idiocracy," which in hindsight wasn’t a satire but a prescient documentary.
• I have written extensively of the nihilism and death-cultishness of Republicans and their largest constituency, the religious fundamentalists. America controls the largest nuclear arsenal in the world; I doubt many people have honestly confronted the fact that it will be under the exclusive authority of a vengeful and increasingly demented man egged on by apocalyptic Bible-thumpers. (Neither the Joint Chiefs of Staff nor anyone else has a veto.) 

No one reading this can remember a time when America wasn’t preoccupied with a foreign threat: Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, Islamic fundamentalists. But it was all an illusion: the enemy was right here, an incubating serpent’s egg waiting for the right moment to be hatched. Here's Abraham Lincoln:

All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer: If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.

I bid you goodbye, America.