Stop The Clock

Last January, as Trump stood on the Capitol steps and made clear responsible leadership was not his thing, I wondered what could be done to hasten his exit from office. Of course, I fully understood the paradox we faced; he was freely elected – at least until proven different – and our democracy depended on him being accorded the rights and privileges of the office. Yet and still, his 16 minute deliverance of our worst fears assured that it was not if but when he would live down to the incompetence, graft and generally wretched behavior that would fully disqualify him from such deference. His visit to the CIA the next day was the when, and we’ve been whenning ever since.

Congress has always been the key to checking a reckless executive because, while representing our ever changing inclinations, good and bad, they are presumably, if not exactly honorable enough, at least imbued with enough parochial diversity in both major parties to save us from ourselves.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Longworth Building, the GOP discovered its heterogeneity of local purpose had been consumed by uniform nihilist grievance. This wave of disdain had been growing steadily since Bill Clinton disturbed 12 years of White House dominance. It started against the usual suspects – minorities, gays, foreigners – but soon became an amorphous hatred of anything defined as destructive to an economic and societal order that was already long gone. This collective pathology actually saw government’s proper ambition as the realization of nostalgia, bringing back a time and place… a feel. And the hucksters who promoted this disorder, in between LifeLock and shares of gold – failed DJs, college dropouts, perennial fringe candidates, disgraced politicos – christened it “Reagan Conservatism.”

Of course the gap between fantasy and reality precluded most of this regressive hodgepodge from anything but lip service at the national level. But locally a cottage industry began to form and succeed, a grass roots movement of towns and then whole legislative districts electing opportunists on nothing more than their promise to get back that feeling, that sense of control. Flyover country was soon awash with pretend legislatures dedicated to turning back time, an entire political class of nihilist Walter Mittys.

Fox/AM was fully engaged defending George W throughout his tenure, particularly on all things nasty, i.e. torture, the Patriot Act, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, etc., but bristled when governance ran up against the Shit River. Anything bipartisan became RINO, and when the economy came unglued, a significant GOP number in both Houses were more concerned with optics back home than saving the world from ruin. Responsible governance had become bad politics.

The sick got sicker with the election of Obama, and the absolute preeminence of going back in time was established. Glen Beck held nightly “classes” on the evils of progress. Cass Sunstein, the otherwise obscure head of the White House Office of Reform and Regulatory Affairs, was vilified as an existential threat and agent of totalitarianism. Throughout the Obama years the GOP base absorbed two fundamental obsessions, Christians (read white nihilists) were under attack, and governance was synonymous with moving in the exact opposite direction of that Pleasantville promised land they now worshipped. The GOP leadership castrated itself in 2010 riding the Tea Party, the political branch of the Shit River, to control of both houses, and codified governance as betrayal for the rest of the Obama years.

So is it really any surprise that the loudest and most unhinged purveyor of regression as governance captured the GOP base’s heart? In Trump they got somebody viscerally committed to undoing progress, to canceling out history, to full retreat. Finally, it wouldn’t just be empty promises abandoned to the tyranny of real world concerns. Trump would deliver, come what may.

And so here we are. A POTUS fully committed to destroying American progress, with a wretched core of supporters, who will accept nothing less. The notion many had that the GOP had a line Trump couldn’t cross ignored a simple fact, right there two inches from our faces, that this is a party devoted, not to ideas, or the rule of law, or even the constitution… it is at its base a cult of followers preoccupied with going backward to recover their piece of mind, to find the safe space they remember as children. All of the pundits have it wrong. The GOP isn’t becoming Trump’s party, its base is simply now convinced he is the real deal, devoted to the war against time’s passing. That’s bad news for those of us interested in Earth as a going concern. BC