Our Politicians Are Embarrassing America
From the G-File on The Dispatch
Dear Reader (except those of you defecating us affirmatively and not cleaning it up),
I’m on a brief vacation, which has given me a little critical distance from events in Washington. I needed the respite. But following events from afar has actually made me more dyspeptic about politics. Because outside the fishbowl, things look even more embarrassing.
Look, I usually recoil when people say they’re embarrassed to be an American. Such statements are usually a kind of too-cool-for-school virtue signaling or cover for the real gripe. Sometimes that gripe is ideological, sometimes partisan, and sometimes just snobbish. For instance, people who want socialized medicine often say they’re embarrassed that America doesn’t have it. Some folks who say they’re embarrassed for the country actually just really dislike the current president and whatever he is doing. And, sometimes, people who have a stunning self-regard for their rarefied tastes think it’s unseemly that the country doesn’t share their opinions.
I dislike all these poses for a wide range of reasons, including a certain baseline patriotism. I love this country, full stop. But I also dislike this stuff because, very often, it conflates and confuses one aspect of American life with the whole of America itself. America is more than its government. I have no problem being embarrassed or appalled by any given president or party. But the way to think about it is not that America is embarrassing, but that so-and-so is embarrassing America.
Which brings me to the current moment. It’s embarrassing. This is not a partisan statement. Yes, I’m embarrassed by Donald Trump and his enablers. But I’m also embarrassed by Joe Biden and his. I’m also embarrassed by the inability or unwillingness of people who share this embarrassment from rising to the occasion.
Take a step back for a moment. And forget the “who started it” stuff. Imagine an astronaut who left earth in the 1960s, went into cryo-sleep for a half-century or so, and landed back here today. Instead of discovering that intelligent, talking apes now ruled the world, he arrived this week in our corner of reality. And you had to get him up to speed on what’s going on.
There’s a lot of stuff that would make him very proud to be an American. We beat the Soviet Union without a nuclear war. We ended Jim Crow. Got a lot richer and invented a bunch of cool stuff. Some things would take some time to get his head around, like gay marriage and TikTok videos.
But then imagine trying to explain our political situation. The current president and his predecessor are locked in a statistical tie. The current president is in hot water because many in his own party think he’s too mentally debilitated to beat his opponent, who often brags that he passed a test for dementia. Note, I did not say that they were worried he’s too cognitively impaired to be president, just that he’s too cognitively impaired to beat the guy who brags about meeting the minimum requirements for mental health. (Passing the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test is not a sign of mental superiority, it’s a sign that you don’t need to be treated for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, or some other forms of dementia.)
The party of the guy who passed the broken-brain test insists—probably correctly!—that the incumbent couldn’t pass that same test, but those same partisans also insist that the incumbent president stay in office and on the ticket. They’d rather risk losing to a guy they believe has severe dementia than face a candidate who doesn’t.
Meanwhile, defenders of the incumbent insist that the challenger is such a threat to democracy that he must be defeated at all costs. But the incumbent says that if he loses, so long as he did his “goodest” job campaigning against him, his conscience will be clear.
The challenger, who tried to steal the last election, has denied any involvement with what some call an “insurrection.” But, he says, the people arrested for the violence done on his behalf—including beating up cops with American flag poles on the steps of the Capitol—are “political prisoners” and “hostages.” He says the criminal charges brought against him in relation to that effort are an outrageous affront, the “weaponization” of the criminal justice system.
On social media, that same guy recently boosted calls for televised military tribunals for members of his own party because they refused to go along with his attempt to steal the election or endorse the lies he told in that effort. But he also argues that presidents should have total and complete immunity from criminal prosecution. His lawyers even treated the question of whether or not the president could order the political assassination of his political opponents as somewhat open. Under this theory, the current president could simply order the murder of his rival and be done with it.
I could go on like this for hours. I could concede that the 34 felony convictions against Trump are kind of bogus and evidence of a politicized criminal justice system. But we’d also have to concede that he’s perfectly fine with dragging this country through scandal and embarrassment because he lacks a tiny fraction of the patriotism required to put America first, even though that’s his slogan. We could talk about how both candidates accuse each other of spending so irresponsibly that we are becoming crippled with debt. And how they’re both right!
But you get the point. Democrats behaved so irresponsibly that they make Donald Trump a plausible contender. Republicans have behaved so cravenly that millions of people are willing to vote for a president they believe is suffering from dementia. And everyone claims that they have sole claim to the right of calling their team the “patriotic” one.
It’s just frickin’ embarrassing.
Again, America is more than its government. But in a democracy, politicians respond to the incentives of the political marketplace. That’s not just the voters, it’s also the institutions that guide and shape our politics, including the media, donors, and interest groups. And we’ve all played some part in embarrassing our country.
Various & Sundry
I’m on a short vacation. The beasts are in capable hands. One of Kirsten’s protégés is house-and-quadruped sitting the beasts. They’re all fine. Kirsten still comes by for the midday adventures and they’ve been having a grand time. The Fair Jessica goes home Sunday. I go straight to Milwaukee for the GOP convention. I am not finding it difficult to contain my enthusiasm about that.
ICYMI
—Jonah pleads: Get serious, people!
—We’re on the island of misfit toys..
Weird Links
—There are snakes in my pants!
—Wait, no—there are gerbils in my pants!
—The third Council of Nicaea concerns Looney Toons