kookery or seriousness?
what are we doing?
My first political science professor required undergraduates to subscribe to The Wall Street Journal for the term. It was another era when no one would have thought to protest political bias or anything else. I grew up reading a variety of newspapers (that was one thing we always had as my dad wanted us to know about the world, regardless where we lived) so it was just another paper to me at the time but, I truth, I found it boring beyond words. I knew I wasn’t going to be a business major so I failed to appreciate its much value. Ah, callous youth.
No longer. I only get a hard copy for the marvelous Saturday edition which includes the best style section in ‘Off Duty’ (even my keenly aware Gen something-or-other daughter would enjoy their array of topics), along with ‘Review’ which has the best book review section. I never agree with everything I read in any newspaper or anything else but The Journal invariably makes me think hard. I respect that alone.
Today ‘Review’ included a devastatingly biting piece by Kevin D. Williamson entitled ‘Election 2024: You Asked For It, America’. The wretched characterisations Williamson uses about the candidates and us, as voters and citizens, are painful but worth pondering. Depending which side one of the political circus one is currently on, the author nails the criticisms raised about the other side. It’s ugly, just unsparingly ugly. (The problem, he alludes to but never really states, is that we assume only the other side doesn’t admit some truth to his characterisations.)
It’s not just the powerful writing to include ‘…but 2024 is going to be the least patriotism-inspiring election in American history so far, a reminder of what a depraved, decadent, backward, low-minded, primitive, superstitious and morally corrupt people we have become. Don’t blame ‘the system,’ you gormless weasels. You chose this.’
Well. That is cheery.
Williamson goes on to bemoan pretty much everyone in U.S. society and politics: university presidents failing miserably to do their duties, ‘the family-values guys over in the evangelical Christian world are showing more loyalty to Donald Trump than he ever showed any of his wives’, Kevin McCarthy, Mike Johnson, ‘a sizeable portion of Republicans are Putinists’, and Democrats challenging vote-rigging and machine tampering in 2000, 2004, and 2016. He leaves no one unscathed.
He pushes us to think through the implications of the forewarned interest payment on the debt outstripping our de facto enormous military expenditures. Similarly, ‘we are spending more money refinancing Medicare subsides for dentures your grandad got 20 years ago than we are spending on things like infrastructure, scientific research or…building aircraft carriers and making sure all those nuclear weapons we built back in the Reagan years still work’. Zing zing zing zing zing.
Every paragraph unsparingly drives us to examine our—OUR--tolerance for ridiculousness across the political spectrum. I would call it self-justification, much of the time, but it most of it has kernels of truth. As Williamson draws to a close, he throws down the gauntlet that ‘[D]ealing with any of the urgent issues before us is going to be hard in the best-case scenario. And say what you will about Donald Trump or Joe Biden, nobody outside of a few daft cultists believes that either of these…represent the best-case scenario.’
He argues that the crux of our obsession with ‘pure, uncut democracy’ is at the heart of our choice and our overall obsession. I will certainly remind all that the 1974 ‘Watergate reforms’ opened the door to the caucus system driving candidates to the fringes of their parties while we did eliminate ‘back door deals’ of the old white male pols (cue Richard Daley uttering anti-semitic slurs at the 1968 Chicago debacle labeled a ‘Democratic Convention’). I will also note that these further ideologically driven candidates, supported by voters in each party, vilify compromise—and the other side. Is that really democratic?
It certainly evidences Actions Creating Consequences. I don’t buy all of Williamson’s purported consequences but I definitely agree that ‘critical national priorities will be taking a back seat, for the foreseeable future, to utter kookery’.
How will that go with the climate change that drove temperatures to unsustainable levels across Texas and the south for weeks this summer? How about the favourite policy question you consider dangerously ignored by our fellow citizens. Will screaming more loudly about that topic get the change you desire? I doubt it. Remember our Congress passed twenty-two—TWENTY-TWO—bills this past session, the second fewest in the history of the body. Lots of skullduggery occurred, however (which qualifies as kookery for me), didn’t it?
Is democracy our objective or is it a means to something else? Have we thought about that? Do we need reconsider that as a society? How would we start that examination? What would be the benefits or downside of doing so?
What are you willing to compromise on? What is an ironclad issue you cannot ignore? Are you supporting a candidate on policy question regardless of his other positions? Or is this Williamson guy (and me for raising his piece) exaggerating our problems considerably? I look forward to your thoughts.
I appreciate you considering Actions Create Consequences today and any other day. Please feel free to circulate if you see it as of interest to someone else. Please consider a paid subscription if you find the topics and arguments valuable as I appreciate your support so much. In any case, I truly welcome your thoughts.
The morning evolution was sublime in the Chesapeake. Here are a couple of indications.
Be well and be safe. FIN
Kevin D. Williamson, ‘Election 2024: You Asked For It, America’, wjs.com, 16 December 2023: C1-2.