Sunday, May 31, 2020

It's Time For an Act of Faith

I see from Wikipedia that the aphorism "May you live in interesting times" is not a translation of a Chinese curse.  But it's still an excellent curse.  And the times have gotten awfully interesting.

There is a nihilist wing in the Republican Party.  It's deadly serious about tearing down the federal government.  Some of these nihilists are libertarians¹ who believe that if you degrade government to the point where it no longer functions, something will magically spring up to take its place and all will be rainbows and unicorns.  These people are idiots.  However, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they mean well, even if they're agents of ruination.  When they see what they've wrought, they may be capable of learning a lesson.  We'll call this group the "stupid" wing of the GOP.

There is another group of nihilists, however.  These people have read The Dictator's Handbook way too carefully, and believe that they can cement power in perpetuity if they can scare the public badly enough that they're willing to hand over their agency to somebody who promises to make the bad stuff stop.  Then they can do whatever they want, for whatever purposes they see fit.  Let's refer to this group as the "evil" wing of the GOP.²

Mind you, I don't think that Trump believes he's in either of these two nihilist camps.  Even a stupid nihilist has to have the ability to think about what he believes is best for society, and Trump simply isn't mentally equipped to do that.  However, he is sociopathically self-interested, which makes him a fellow traveller with the authoritarians.  In either case, he's perfectly willing to let both groups of nihilists use the executive branch as their own personal Port-a-Potty.

Both groups have the same basic formula:  First, hollow out the bureaucracy to the point where it's dangerously incompetent.  Then, degrade all norms  and customs to the point where nobody will believe a single thing that any representative of the federal government says.  Then, wait for... something to happen to bring the whole thing down.

Well, something happened.

If the stupid nihilists predominate, I'd expect that they're starting to realize that they've had a failure of imagination, and that plagues, economic collapse, and public disorder aren't what they had in mind.  In that case, some non-trivial percentage of them will reluctantly realize that Trump has to go and we'll get a slightly more competent administration, which will spend most of its political capital trying the repair the damage.  Then we'll see where we are.  This isn't a good outcome, but it's probably the least bad outcome.

I've spent most of the last three and half years assuming that "stupid" was at the wheel, with "evil" doing a bit of back-seat driving.  The rioting of the last few days is making me question that.

In any sane world, a president who's directly responsible for tens of thousands of deaths of the citizens he's sworn to protect, and presides over the utter ruination of the economy, gets voted out of office.  Based on recent polling, it appears that that's where we are right now.

But the one thing that can derail that is fear.  It does appear that the "evil" faction has figured out that they can generate any amount of chaos that they want, simply by turning fanning the (literal) flames caused by the social unrest that's sweeping in as everybody loses their minds from the dislocations caused by the pandemic and its massive unemployment.

And this is why we need an act of faith on the part of Trump's opposition.

Folks, the right wing has you figured out.  Every time you take to the streets, however peacefully, they're going to be there to discredit you and make you look like destructive anarchists.  If you go after voting reforms, they're going to make it look like you're suborning fraud.  The right has finally read Alinsky, and they know what they're doing better than you know it yourself.  They took everything you learned about how to wield identity as a political nuclear weapon and used it to form a white identity that dwarfs any coalition you can put together.  They're good at this stuff.

If you want to win--and if you don't win, there's a very good chance that the evil wing is going to prevail--then you have to believe in the American people.  Don't try to inflame them.  Don't appeal to their outrage.  Don't pit them against each other.

You're going to have to have faith in the American electorate.  I have to admit that the reservoirs of stupidity in the country are much deeper than I could have imagined, but history shows that Americans are pretty good at knowing when they're about to go over a cliff, at which time they briefly come to their senses.

Make your case--it's a slam-dunk.  Make it so thoroughly that it removes the possibility of stealing the election. Get out the vote--it'll be hard, so you have to convince people of the stakes, and then be competent politicians. Watch the polls.  And then, when you win (assuming you do), understand that your power stems from a sense that things have gone horribly wrong, not from some mandate to drive your enemies insane.

But most of all, in the immortal words of a president who I thought was pretty mediocre but now looks simply awesome in comparison, don't do stupid shit.  Don't protest.  Nobody cares about your protests.  Organize.  Behave yourselves.  The more you lower the temperature on the rage stew, the more likely cooler heads will prevail.  If they do, you win.  If they don't, you lose.

Please don't lose.



¹I consider myself to be a libertarian. However, I don't believe in magic. I do believe that freedom and prosperity will flourish if they're given a fairly basic but functional infrastructure on which to build. Things like law enforcement (of not too many laws), public health, defense, and an executor of a foreign policy more nuanced than what a third grader could dream up are pretty handy.

²There are of course non-nihilist conservatives out there.  I'm pretty sure that they won't be voting for Trump--unless his opposition is so feckless that they think he's the lesser of two evils.

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