Dems Promise To Soothe Americans With Lawfare Jihad

In the months preceding a disastrous election, the hot controversies in Washington, D.C., were Donald Trump’s authority to put his name on the Kennedy Center, a bitter back-and-forth over the liner of a reflecting pool, and a massively overlawyered fight over the removal of some trees from a federally owned golf course. With startling precision, the Beltway mostly fought over things that no one else anywhere in the world cared about at all.

Republican control of both houses of Congress and the presidency, with a Supreme Court dominated by Republican nominees, produced no significant course correction as the federal government passed $40 trillion in debt. The people in supposed power were bystanders to the business of the country and its people.

Now, with a massive switch toward Democrat control, the big change being signaled is more punishment and retribution, Beltway-class gamesmanship against Beltway-class enemies.

Democrats embraced this message with remarkable uniformity about 10 minutes after the polls closed: We’re going to get you.

The question in this cycle of narcissistic factional nihilism is whether the imperial green zone has any remaining connection to the country it governs, and can rediscover the existence of the America outside the clubhouse.

I wrote in September that we were having an election about nothing, as Republicans declined to offer a record or an agenda, instead framing the contest as a “contrast election” in which the message was purely negative: Don’t vote for crazy Democrats. But the Democrats did the same, meeting a contrast election with a contrast election.

Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump, they explained.

So the Republican message was don’t vote for weird Democrats, and the Democrat message was don’t vote for Trump Republicans. It was a double-negative election, two messages about negating and impugning.

This descent into the politics of pure negation and repudiation, a politics of what we aren’t that doesn’t have a whole lot of what we are or what we hope to be, is a massive bummer. It’s unpleasant to watch, unpleasant to think about, and deeply unpleasant to join. And one of the effects of such a spectacularly miserable politics is that very few sane, smart, decent people want to run for office.

The single most striking fact of this election was how hard it was on the ears. A bunch of repellent fools won: Troy Jackson just absolutely sucked as a candidate, and Peggy Flanagan just absolutely sucked as a candidate, and Amy Klobuchar’s voice has the precise effect of fingernails on a blackboard, and Arizona reelected a dead-eyed toddler as its governor, and so on. Mary Peltola’s voice is an irritant.

The odd little Talarico man-boy barely seems like a real person. The upcoming freshman class in Congress is made up of a bunch of people who are just dreadful: dreadful as people, human beings whose voices grate. Katy Padilla Stout just won a seat in the House, and she can’t speak. She struggles to form sentences in which the words mean something:

I would bet a kidney that this woman struggles to find the cognitive firepower to complete her order at Taco Bell, and she’s headed for the House of Representatives.

We’re in a lull, a part of the cycle in which the dismal impotence of a system only attracts dismal impotents. Someone occasionally breaks out of one of these cycles, as we saw in 2016, but the sewer seems to have a whirlpool effect that drags people back to the bottom.

When politics is broken, the first thing to do is to decline to be broken along with it. Turn to family, friends, faith, community, nature. Find health and life in other things. Don’t ever stake your sanity on the quality of Congress. Keep your perspective and look for healthy things that you can do. Leave the house and do something. Look to the brilliant example of Erin Lee in Colorado.

We’re probably not headed into an enormously healthy period in national politics. Don’t give it power over your life, and we’ll look for the chance to change it. “Society is in its late or decadent phase,” Camille Paglia wrote about another moment in history. “The ruling hierarchy consists of the senile and the adolescent.” It happens. Keep going.

Chris Bray is a senior correspondent at The Federalist and a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army. He has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles, not that it did him any good. He also posts on Substack, at “Tell Me How This Ends,” here.