Oh, Boy!

     Who isn't excited about the Iowa caucuses?

     Well, me, among others.  We may get a surprise; some of the pundits have been rather wishfully reading signs in the tea leaves that Mr. Trump might not do as well as expected, and Ms. Hailey or Mr. DeSantis* may do better.  But it's not much of a surprise: the differences among the three are largely of degree, not of kind.  A firehose of chaos, a stiletto of exclusion, a bludgeon of social engineering?  No thanks.

     I miss the day when high-up Republican politicians were mostly worried that Joe Sixpack was going to track mud on the carpet, or his younger, left-leaning co-worker might make off with the good silver.  They just wanted you to keep the shades down and not be loud about it if you were going to be different, and show up for work on time in the morning.  It could be sniffy but it had a certain honesty and a degree of looseness their current coalition of Christian nationalists and Evangelical fellow-travelers,† conspiracy-theory nut jobs and barstool broservatives entirely lack. It makes the contest a lot less interesting.

     While President Trump II would undoubtedly be an unhinged revenge tour, I don't think the various flavors of Trumpservatism Lite the remaining GOP contenders have to offer is any kind of prize by dint of being less short-term worrisome.  We have in this country now a political party akin to European Social Democrats, and another party that revels in authoritarianism, trade barriers and social re-engineering.  Irking the other side is increasingly a major goal -- and however much fun that might be for the ones doing the irking, it's not how you get things done.  It's not going to take us back to the Moon, get cheap nuclear fusion working, end wars or unfuck the messes that send people scurrying from ill-run kleptocracies to the bigger, better-off nations in large numbers.
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* Or however he's spelling it these days.  And yes, I gave none of them their current or former titles.  If you don't know what they are by now, perhaps you shouldn't bother to vote.
 
† I'm not criticizing anyone's religion here, but the "Christian nationalist" weirdos have been close students of the free-pass-for-ostentatious-religiousity that the Taliban and ISIS got from plain old ordinary Muslims, and they are working a Christianized version of it as hard as they can.  Fall for it at your peril.