Alternatives to ordinary politics

For some probably random reason I went over a psychological cliff yesterday. I think it may have been this that sent me over the edge:

If you haven’t seen the movie, Robert Duvall plays Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, who is basically a psychopath who enjoys war for its own sake. If you haven’t read the history, the US lost that war, because it was run by idiots and psychopaths, plus counter-insurgencies always lose, not that this lesson is ever learned by Team America or anybody else.

Everybody here, including me, is bitching about the Democratic party right now, for lots of reasons both good and bad, but at bottom the problem with the Democratic party is that it’s just an ordinary political party doing ordinary political party things, in an extraordinary situation. Blaming it for doing what it’s doing is pretty much the same thing as blaming it for being what it is. It’s like blaming a penguin for jumping off the ice into the sea where the leopard seal is lurking. The difference I suppose is that the penguin has no realistic options and In This House We Believe that the Democratic party does have realistic options.

The reason I keep doing this, besides those sweet sweet Soros bucks, is because of you, the commentariat, because you’re smart and funny and perceptive and engaged, although you can sometimes also be a bunch of complete assholes, like over that one thing I won’t mention now. Here’s a good comment from HOF first ballot LGM commenter Murc, regarding the current “negotiations” between the GOP and the Dems regarding Our Lady of Perpetual Government Shutdowns:

There should be a huge folder dropped on Thune’s desk outlining the price for our votes, including but not limited to:

The end of tariffs.
No recissions.
No money for National Guard units deployed outside their state.
The undoing of all the Medicaid cuts and the restoration of subsidies with no sunset clauses.
Automatic and massive cuts to the DOD and ICE if Trump withholds any appropriated funds.
COVID vaccines for all.

And those should be the MINIMUM asks. Basically the asks should all be “return to governing within the Constitutional order.”

If the Republicans don’t like that, well, they don’t NEED our votes; they’re merely ASKING for them. They can govern without us if they so chose.

I’m getting really tired of these fucking collaborationists. “We’ll assist Trump’s ongoing vandalism of the country in return for first nothing, and second for scraps from his table.” Either extract actual concessions, or withdraw from governing.

That’s completely right, but it’s also, as I’m pretty sure Murc would acknowledge, purely symbolic politics, in that the odds of Thune and Johnson agreeing to even a single one of those concessions can be calculated as zero. Now that’s not a reason not to do it, because symbolic politics are still real politics, and they matter, but my point here is that the Republicans can’t be negotiated with like they’re a normal political party, because they’re not. You can’t keep them from shooting the hostage by being a good negotiator, because not only are they actually willing to shoot the hostage, they’re eager to do so, because people like Mike Johnson, i.e., eschatological lunatics, are in control of the Republican party. (A huge problem on the liberal-left is the continuing refusal to actually believe that a very large percentage of American voters are religious lunatics, who believe that Jesus of Nazareth was and very much is God, quite literally, much like I believe Proxima Centuri is 4.3 light years away from Earth. I believe the latter thing because I trust certain authority figures to be reliable about that kind of thing, while the religious wack jobs trust other, different, authorities, and there’s your postmodern dilemma in a nutshell. This is really another topic though).

My point here is that politics at this moment in this country consists necessarily in part in pretending that things are still roughly “normal,” because that’s the pragmatic thing to do to a certain extent, even though it’s pretending. The Republicans are insane, you can’t negotiate with them, but you have to pretend this isn’t true if you’re the Democratic leadership, because penguins gotta swim and circle of life yo.

Now at some point this won’t make any sense any more and I suspect we’re reaching that point quite rapidly. The question is, what are the alternatives to what can be thought of as normal politics? What do you do when even purely symbolic gestures, like the negotiation kabuki recommended by Murc above, don’t make sense any more?

On the personal level one extremely tempting and highly rational option is to simply check out for the time being, until we can return to our regularly scheduled programming. I was talking to one of my brothers yesterday, who is a highly accomplished and very politically aware quite left person, and I told him I had hit a wall and couldn’t even enjoy things like a big Michigan football game at the moment, because the political situation was so dire. And he wanted to talk about whether Bryce Underwood was really the Kwisatz Haderach or just a talented freshman with a lot to learn (no spoilers). Again this is an extremely smart and politically attuned person — an academic whose speciality is saturated with politics by necessity — and his approach to things right now is to pay literally almost no attention to the news at all. As in stay off the internet unless it’s to check on what podcasters are saying about Bryce Underwood, and under no circumstances ever do any social media.

And really, from the standpoint of personal sanity and wellbeing this makes perfect sense.

But from the standpoint of collective political action, that’s . . . suboptimal. Which brings us back to the question of what do you do when normal politics stop working altogether? What do you do when vote harder and donate and caucus and go door to door and phone bank etc. (not to mention blog) begin to seem like radically inadequate responses to the situation? People are checking out completely from normal politics for lots of reasons, both good and bad — of course a huge percentage of the populace is always and everywhere checked out — but a good reason is what’s the point of playing a game when the other side has, increasingly obviously, no intention of playing by the rules, even roughly speaking? At what point does “win elections” begin to sound like John Roberts’s advice to voters who have had their voting rights destroyed by gerrymandering? (His advice is “vote harder.”).

The other day in one of these kinds of threads somebody posted something like “what are we supposed to do?” and Erik responded “overthrow the government.” And you know what, on some level he’s definitely right about that, even though that may technically be illegal or something (Merrick Garland is still looking into it). But what does that mean, right now, from a practical perspective, besides the evident fact that it doesn’t mean “vote harder?”

One problem I have personally is that I teach in a law school, which at the moment feels a lot like being a professor of Marxist-Leninist political theory at Moscow University in 1991, which is to say my subject matter is getting suddenly much more interesting and in a bad way. But that’s my problem and that of a few thousand of my similarly situaitoned colleagues, although from what I can tell the overwhelming majority are dealing with this situation by ignoring it to the extent possible, which remains considerable.

I’m not criticizing anybody who is still fully committed to doing ordinary politics even now, because at least you’re doing what you can to slow down what’s coming. But I am thinking about alternatives from the full fight or flight menu, and I imagine a lot of you are too.

Last night me and Kate we laid in bed
Talking about getting out . . .

Bruce Springsteen. “My Hometown”