Those who read and look at newspapers, websites, Substacks and social media platforms receive a steady rat-a-tat-tat that Americans citizens—legal and illegal—are at war with each other, and that anger is the most dominant emotion in the country today. All the but the dopiest and ill-educated dismiss comparisons to the Civil War, but the “polarization” so often bandied about is the every-single-day topic of essays devoted to this “wretched drain on democracy.” I’ve been dubious about this inflammatory rhetoric from the get-go, starting in the Obama years, but now I’m convinced that all the yelling and name-calling, mostly online, is just a lot of fun for participants. The national pastime.
I see videos of protests, most recently the wave of #NoKings rallies across the United States. Aside from a number of deranged people (like those who deface monuments and buildings with anti-Semitic slogans), most of the participants appeared to have a gas-gas-gas. What’s wrong with that? They were strumming guitars, probably badly, singing Joni Mitchell songs, wearing costumes, spitting out rote invectives about Trump, waving multi-colored flags and lining up for the food vendors who, embracing capitalism, made a mint. There was an “emergency” nude bike rally in Portland, OR on Oct. 12th protesting ICE, and while those videos weren’t for everyone—who needs to see a fat 50-year-old’s flopping dick or woman’s sagging tits?—I won’t criticize another person’s recreational activities.
As I wrote earlier this week, I’m not in favor of the heavy-handed ICE raids, but judging by the media you’d think this was happening in every city with a population over 100,000. It is difficult to talk politics, no matter how respectful, with friends whose views are in opposition to yours, but that was similar in 1980 when Reagan was running for president, and really ramped up after George W. Bush won the 2000 election. It’s a sport that can turn nasty if you’re not careful. Online jousting is different: posters call one another “scum,” “racist,” “Hitler-lover,” and hope for premature deaths of their opponents. Almost no one talks like that in public.
I believe, without any meaningless polls at my disposal, this is true.
And that’s why when a columnist/cable pundit like David Brooks writes his 500th essay on America’s crumbling democracy, and how much it troubles him, a very wealthy (and in some quarters, respected) man who’s built a lucrative career lecturing to his moral and economic inferiors, it no longer bothers me. Brooks, on Oct. 23rd was in typical form, fretting about “regular” people who don’t care about their “democratic rights.”
His conclusion: “Yes, Trump is launching an assault on democracy. But worries me more is what has happened over the last few decades to the rest of us. There has been a slow moral, emotional and intellectual degradation—the loss of convictions, norms and habits of minds that undergird democracy. What worries me most is the rot creeping into your mind, and into my own.”
High-caloric junk food punditry, but it’s pretty funny. Brooks doesn’t expand on the “rot creeping” into his “own mind,” since that was merely a throwaway few words to prove that we’re all in this together. It’s condescending, but no different that what you find on most editorial pages today. I was relieved that Brooks, in his cliché-a-thon, didn’t bring up Trump’s demolition of the White House’s East Wing in favor of a ballroom—to create a diversion from the Epstein Files!—that caused a social media three-day stir about Orange Man/Cheeto/Hitler/Stalin defiling the presidential dwelling, because, goddamn, that house belongs to the American people. When my family and I took a tour of the White House in early-2001 there were so many guards and roped-off areas that it sure didn’t feel like my house.
I don’t know if Brooks and Times colleague Maureen Dowd are buddies (don’t see it: Brooks is too gauche for the gauche Dowd), but she picked him up with a ridiculous column pegged to the East Wing—no pretense of fair play, either, she spoke only to late-stage TDS victims, like David Axelrod. Her conclusion: “Congress is adrift. The White House is a shipwreck. Trump is marauding in the Caribbean [she got that one right]. James Comey and Letitia James are being forced to walk the plank, and next up could be Jack Smith and Adam Schiff. We are awash in nautical metaphors as the president plunders and pillages. He’s a pirate—and not the fun Halloween kind.”
It could be that Dowd’s as unwell as UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and maybe she tapped this one out compromised by blurry double vision. She has sympathy for Adam Schiff, James Comey and Letitia James, but doesn’t acknowledge that litigation-as-retribution (just ask the “pirate,” a moniker Trump undoubtedly relishes) is SOP in Washington today, East Wing or no East wing.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023