Writing About Politics?

      I'm about ready to give up writing about politics.  There's no longer enough common ground between the two big parties -- and too many of my once-libertarian friends have decided to choose one or the other.

     In and of itself, that would simply give me more opportunities to poke fun and look askance.  As organized parties and bodies of politicians (well, groups of politicians, let's not scare the poor, sensitive dears with figurative language before the first cocktail of the day*), the GOP and Dems alike aren't much interested in ideological consistency, the rules to be found in the U. S. and State Constitutions, history or long-term planning that extends past the next election, but that's nothing new and has long been fodder for commentary.  Nope, the problem is that the parties, pols and voters have all, to a greater or lesser extent, bought into fantasies that are divorced from reality.

     The first and worst concerns the two more recent Presidential races, in which the winner (or putative winner)† is deemed to have won by virtue of his surpassing virtue.  It's a lovely thought but they were close races and loathing appears to have outweighed love; Mr. Trump won in 2016 because he wasn't Hilary Clinton and Mr. Biden won† in 2020 because he wasn't Donald Trump.  If one or the other of those observations makes you angry, I have great news for you: you've got plenty of company, many of them howling or barking mad.

     Secondary effects include "make it didn't happen," found weakly among Democrats in 2016, protesting their woman won the popular vote (true and irrelevant) and much more strongly among 2020 Republicans, with allegations of voter fraud coming from the top down, and the remarkable claim of a "coup" followed by urging state legislatures or Governors to appoint a slate of electors who will vote differently than the outcome of the election has directed.  What makes this remarkable is that course of action is in contravention of Federal and many State laws and would select a different Chief Executive: pretty much the textbook definition of a coup.  (Don't like my links?  Tough.  I try to stick with the ones near the middle-top of the Ad Fontes Media chart; if you're spending lots of time way out to the left or right side of it, you're mainlining mental junk food -- and if you're not aware that yes, even the ones way up there in the green box lean a bit one way or the other, you're not paying attention.)

     The Democrats have their own fantasy, a gentler one: that Joe Biden is a strong, widely-loved figure instead of a run-of-the-mill high-level Democrat, gone a bit frail with age.

     Criticizing either man risks ire from their adherents.  It is massively unpopular to point out -- as I often do -- that the President of the United States is just some guy we pick to go shake hands with crowned heads, autocrats and his elected peers, to sign checks and make sure the heads of the various Departments and Bureaus get to work on time and don't slack off more than is usual in D. C., to pick up the phone in the middle of the night when things go badly wrong and improvise frantically while hoping Congress will back him or her up.  But that is the job; the part of government that decides how taxed, regulated and hemmed-in and screwed-over you will be, especially long-term, is not the Presidency but Congress. Presidents get only four years at a whack; Congress goes on and on, designed to have institutional inertia.

     Nevertheless, it's Presidents who get people all wound up.  Right now, we have an epistemological divide right out of the Daybreak trilogy and there's no room at the margins for snark or semi-impartial observation.  If you don't pick a side, you'll be hammered over to one or the other.  I try and try to encourage reason over emotion, Mencken-style skepticism over uncritical acceptance, but it's an uphill struggle and a thankless one.
________________________________
* Mimosas with brunch, of course.

† I'm going with what the State governments and current vote counts are saying.  Yes, it's not as exciting as the fantasy version.