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Treating the Body Politic
I’m not a doctor but I know enough about medicine to know that a fever is not an illness in itself but a symptom of a larger underlying problem. And right now, America has a raging fever.
Most fevers are caused by infections. The political and punditry classes have diagnosed the problem as Donaldus Trumpitis, a relatively new disease some are describing as a cancer. But more likely than not, this case of the DTs is not the disease itself but just the manifestation of the fever.
Impeachment is a giant analgesic. The chemists at Founding Father Pharmaceuticals designed this medication so that the only way to administer it was rectally. And the suppository that delivers it is specifically designed to be extraordinarily large and very uncomfortable to the patient. We’re talking the Costco-Extra-Large-Double-Pack-of-Vaseline uncomfortable.
Even if the medication is successfully administered and the temperature is brought down temporarily, what happens to the infection, the real cause of the problem? It will probably spread and in the long run the fever will return, twice as bad as before and more resistant to the Constitutional medication previously forced down our … er, up our … well, you know what I mean.
Before Trump won the nomination there was a lot of talk in GOP circles that the primary process needed to be changed. Trump was looked at as the rash they picked up while sleeping with a skanky Democrat after one-too-many shots of “corn likker” before the Iowa Caucuses. They secretly admired the other party’s superdelegate system that served as a giant condom against STDs (Socialist Transmitted Diseases.) It held back the Bern for a while but they still got a Marxian tumor that’s metastasizing rapidly.
The patient continues to describe the rest of the symptoms: wealth concentrated around the actions of government, stagnation and despair in the heartland, a crushing assault on freedom of speech and intellectual diversity, and a general sense of disconnect in Washington where more and more of everyday life is controlled by a nameless, faceless, unaccountable bureaucracy.
The doctors are refusing to listen. They insist that if the fever is dealt with then life will return to the status quo that they are comfortable with, regardless of the discomfort of the patient. That, put simply, is malpractice.
Published in Politics
And we all know deep in our heart of hearts, there is only one prescription….
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/more-cowbell-with-will-ferrell-on-snl-video-saturday-night-live-nbc/3506001?snl=1
This guy has a fever:
From Politico:
Oddly, I agree with this but not in the way our current climate would like. Just replace russian with marcxist or communist.
My question is what type is the underlying disease?
Is it bacterial, needing aggressive antibiotics to destroy the infection?
Is it viral, where we treat the symptoms while it runs its course, forever being a carrier when it goes dormant and needing to exercise good health to reduce risk of inflammation?
Or is it cancerous, caused by the breaking down of the integrity of our underlying structure?
Or is it old age?
A lot of truth in this. See Mancur Olsen, “The rise and Decline of Nations” There is such a thing as old age, special and powerful interests accumulate over time when there is peace and prosperity, they sink their parasitical rent seeking tentacles deeply into the body and are difficult to kill off. The disease is usually fatal and the fever we’re seeing is always part of the disease. There are ways to shed these barnacles, Olsen says, lose a war to the US so that the special interests are obliterated but not replaced by the conqueror, radical free trade internally and externally and revolution. Revolutions seldom work out well and we can’t lose a war to ourselves. The only one open to us is radical free trade, but in this day and age that probably means something different than just low tariffs and easy trade. It means deregulation, lower and simpler taxes and more freedom everywhere smaller government but radically smaller at the federal level. There are concrete reasons for this latter and it isn’t ideology. The fever comes from the nature of public goods, the size and diversity of our country.
I think waving at him would be great! It would show you’re bigger than he is, and that you won’t be intimidated. And be sure to smile!
Morning EJ, Terry, Kate,
So EJ is suggesting that our fever is mainly a political event. Terry is suggesting our problem is autoimmune, that as we were made to be tribal animals and the cultural and relationship controls which work to keep the tribal families harmonious and cooperative break down when scaled up to the size of empires. Terry also suggests that the success of current economic systems has caused the metaphorical body to become, through the luxury of plenty, obese, weak, diabetic. Kate suggests we may just be getting old, arthritic, sclerotic; the administrative state is our build up of plaque. So we have some models of organic problems, what are the steps we take to treat the patient, what is the medicine, what is the therapy? A fever is the the body defending itself, is Trump, the fever, the way the body politic defends itself against the state? Is the problem not the state but the culture, or are we just old?
Three Days of the Pigeon
I thinking tribal is to race as culture is to ideology or something like that. Where we are does not have an appearance of being ethnicity based. Anglo-American culture may be in the fourth stage of the cousins’ war or the people versus the elite.
“Tribalism” has become a favorite insult of the Nevers here on Ricochet.
Some people like tribalism.
EJ,
Damn it EJ, this Donaldus Trumpitis requires a real specialist. Sure Gary thinks there’s nothing wrong but what does he know. I know exactly the guy that can help and he could probably straighten Gary out too (stranger things have happened but not many).
Regards,
Jim
But I don’t think that use here has any resemblance to historic use of tribe(small in numbers with a tight genetic component). We now have ‘tribalism’ where the essential element is ‘idea’ based, not genetic.
Your suggestions might not end rioting, but they would sure end streaking. Our streaking events were pre-planned so the crowds were huge then. At 5’4″ I really couldn’t see anything but heads bobbing up and down so I can’t give anecdotal evidence to back up my comment.
What do you get for not rehearsing?
Oh, you couldn’t afford it!
Assuming my analogy is remotely accurate, I have no idea how to treat the problem. I keep coming back to the idea of restricting the franchise in some way — voters must be net tax payers / raise the voting age back to 21 / Heinlein’s idea of only veterans allowed to vote / something else that would reduce the number of emotionally-driven or immature voters in the pool.
My wife’s dear great-aunt once told me it was a mistake to allow women to vote. This was a self-made woman who had run her own business starting back in the 1940’s, and who was very politically active, but she blamed her “own sex” (her words) for inflicting Bill Clinton on the country because too many of them voted for the man “they were sexually attracted to.” She said she would gladly give up her vote to deprive it from the hoards of vapid women who would vote for the likes of Bill Clinton. I’m not comfortable with the idea of disenfranchising women, but at the same time I see her point.
Of course, any of this is a complete non-starter, politically, so it doesn’t matter. Maybe we’re just doomed to slow stagnation and decay, like Europe.