Between Friday's batch of Supreme Court decisions and the likely passage of the unpopular, so-called "Big Beautiful Bill," I'm not sure what to say. They amount to Enabling Acts for authoritarianism, an accretion of power to the office of the President that bodes only ill for the American experiment in self-government.
Many of the people I most expected to react negatively to such a development are instead cheering it on. I've been treated to amazingly unmoored nonsense in unpublished comments, notions not just unsupported by but refuted by observable events.
Republican politicians, the President in particular, are behaving as if they will never leave office, as if their party will always be in the majority. In a functioning Constitutional democracy (using the latter term loosely), turnover is likely; any power one party has granted to officeholders will be available to their successors, even if they're from a different party. The conclusion is obvious.
Most members of the House and Senate appear to be quite comfortable with this state of affairs, nearly every Republican and an apparent plurality if not outright majority of Democrats. Polls of likely voters show the opposite. You'd think that would be a warning flag for men and women who depend on winning open elections, and yet their behavior indicates it is not. Once again, the conclusion's clear.
I don't know what to say. I've been jumping up and down, pointing out storm clouds on the horizon, lightning, walls of rain and tornado funnels, and a lot of people just smile and tell me we ain't never been wiped off the map before, so why worry now? Congress is getting rich playing the stock market while the President is selling tchotchkes and memecoins and U.S. citizenship, playing with tariffs like a child smashing toy trains; the Administration is back to insisting on "official truth" at odds with objective reality and the Constitution is slowly crumbling under the weight of "Christian Nationalism," authoritarianism and kleptocracy. The people who ought to care about it and are in a position to take immediate action, judges and legislators, are smiling and nodding like a heroin addict right after a big hit.
I am without hope for our country's future.
Update
6 months ago
6 comments:
I'm right there with you, and have been for quite some time now.
Well, 250 years, on the nose, was not a bad run as these things go. What came out of all of this is simple: as you point out, there are simply not enough people who care.
Plastic TV president and sitcom audience rule the day, and the soap opera continues...til it implodes. Think 1933.
The frightening part to me is that I get the impression that the number of people who want to preserve what we have/had on either side is a small minority. So now either side is either exploiting power or waiting until they have the opportunity to take their turn. I cannot fathom the certainty of the right that their expanded tax cuts will last any longer than their majorities in congress. Democrats had durable control of congress for decades after this kind of crap was tried about a century ago and was rolled back. I could be wrong about all of this, but if you are actually rich, protecting your wealth might be more important than getting even more.
I have, so some twenty years and more, wondered if all the guardrails, the safety measures, the regulatory infrastructure of the New Deal, even public health...haven't been too successful at making America think that existential realities are just bugaboos of the 2oth century, that there is no reality, there are no consequences of acting like the bull in the china shop and the fox in the hen house....that the dread diseases that use to kill half of humanity by puberty were some elite BS. That hard work and discipline and focus were way over rated and too much trouble. After all, the Orange Clown gets everything just by screaming, waving his hands and assaulting anything that gets in his way. Yes, we shall see.
I've been a fan of your reasoned, informed commentary for quite a while - back when Tamara was posting on TFL.
I wish you were mistaken. You don't seem to be. This, and the second and third order failures are going to destroy a generation.
Murkowski could have driven a stake into the vampiric BBB, but she chose a different legacy. But we’ll have to wait and see if the House rejects the Alaska quid pro quo’s.
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