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Lying to Ourselves
We have a problem with our federal government, but it’s not exactly the one we’re used to thinking about. Frankly, we don’t want to think about it all – better to deny the reality entirely. Easier to lie and lie and lie, and blame our problems on everyone else. Easier to blame Liberals, or Wokesters, or (the current favorite among the increasingly reality-averse folks who still cannot face that Trump has immolated himself once and for all time) traitors and sabotage. It is, of course, all lies. Mind you, lies can be useful – especially when trying to avoiding hurt feelings (our own not the least), but they’re still lies. At one time rebellions against ruling monarchs favored the lie “We’re not really rebelling against the King, he’s just the victim of bad advisors.”
The lie we all tell ourselves today is that we are the helpless victims of “The DC Establishment” (or whatever other term you want to use). Synonyms for this include “Wall Street,” “Big Tech,” and a host of others. They are the “bad advisors” we blame for manipulating Congress, for stealing elections, or for disloyalty to Trump (fact check here: the only consistent disloyalty in the Trump administration came from Trump – watching his cabinet members go from vaunted heroes to filthy traitors and sellouts in the commentariat was much akin to studying Soviet photography for disappearing faces alongside Stalin). We are very good at lying to ourselves about why Trump lost this or that political battle, about why Congress is a dysfunctional mess, and about why the “authoritarian ratchet” is inexorable. The truth we cannot confront about it is all is simple, and we all bear the shame of it. We do not really want any of our congress critters, our president, or our courts to lead us out of our morass, we want them to follow us into the pit of our own making. And follow they blithely do.
Why should anyone really attempt to lead? Why should anyone take any campaign rhetoric seriously? I’m not even speaking for the Left here, I’m just talking about the entire right half of the political spectrum. Think of all that we demand:
Repeal Obamacare! But get me my pills cheap! And you’d better not slash Medicare because Granny will be out on the street! Cut my taxes! But don’t touch Social Security, that’s my retirement! Slash regulations! But raise the minimum wage! And punish those rich Wall Street fat cats! No more bailouts! But bail out small businesses! No more stimulus checks… after the next one (and send a chaser too)!
Any time anyone in Congress actually tries to show real leadership he gets savaged. Paul Ryan was sent to Congress and proclaimed a hero as a fiscal wonk. Paul Ryan is now disgraced as a heartless fiscal wonk. Well? Which is it? He was the same Paul Ryan that entered as left – the truth is he violated the will of the voters, and the will of the voters is that the gravy train run to them, but not to other people they don’t like. We hailed the Tea Party a decade ago for demanding fiscal accountability, and then it all wilted when we realized everyone would take a hit, not just the “bad guys”. We wailed about Obama’s fiscal profligacy, then ignored Trump’s (even pre-COVID) because that spending was just better because it went to the right people.
We blame the Republican congress of 2017-2018 for not having a Repeal and Replace plan from Day 1 (nevermind that Trump promised he had his own too – and we never saw any of it). Why would any sane and safe Republican bother to come up with a health care reform plan? Any real plan would gore everyone’s ox, but not equally, and that would be seized on as evidence of favoritism towards whoever was hurt less than someone else – and we would be as happy to denounce it as the Left, just for different reasons. Why bother with specifics? Why bother to stick your neck out? Easier to campaign on an issue and then blame the other side when nothing ever happens later. Keeps the issue alive for a few election cycles, until the voters fixate on something else for a few cycles.
It’s no wonder Congress is stuffed with hacks, charlatans, grifters, sell-outs, and bench warmers. It’s no wonder both parties spend like drunken sailors. It’s no wonder the debt keeps growing and growing – hardly anyone there dares to change the game. When they try, they’re denounced as traitors, or Elitists, or uncompassionate eggheads, or accused of being in some group’s pocket (which, while true, is a problem only because it’s the “wrong” group), and so turfed out. Besides, they know what the voters really want better than the voters themselves: having someone else always around to blame.
It’s no wonder that both sides refuse to actually address electoral reforms too – that’s the gift that keeps giving. That way you never have to take any blame on your side for nominating cultists and loonies. That way you never have to take any blame for running a terrible campaign. Even if you lose, you win! After all, you were cheated! And martyrs are always more beloved than Darwin-award winners, giving you a leg up on fundraising for the next round (that’s where the real money is made – paying your friends and relatives for “consulting fees” while you expense first-class flights). Both sides play the game, and the money rolls in.
The truth of the matter is, Americans of all stripes really do not want reform. They do not want leaders. They do not want any hard choices. They want the status quo, but also want the moral high ground of blaming it on everybody else. And the government they claim to hate so much? It’s just following along. If we really wanted reform, we’d stop blaming the “swamp”, or whatever other excuses we have at hand. Instead, we would admit to ourselves that, like losing weight we are the ones who have to change first.
Published in Politics
Think of the “stimulus” bills as a super-extreme version of payday lending — so extreme that people don’t have any choice about taking out a loan at exorbitant interest rates.
Move to another country. That’s what we always said to Alec Baldwin and other Lefties who whined whenever a Republican won a presidential election.
If you think Australia or Canada or Switzerland is a better place to live, move there.
If you aren’t willing to move to any of those countries and you want to sit on the sofa, consuming the technologies invented by Leftists, you have no one to blame except yourself.
Conservatism <> laziness.
At which point they will be deplatformed, because it is now necessary to conform to an inquisition or create an entirely separate economy to compete in a single economic sphere. That is not how free markets are supposed to work.
I think people are downplaying the extend to which some conservatives undermined Trump. In some cases it went well beyond criticism and went as far as working with the Democrats, accepting money from the left, and supporting their coup and impeachment efforts.
Be glad I’m lazy. If I weren’t so lazy, I’d move you to another country so I wouldn’t have to listen to your whining. So, as you can see, I do have other people to blame, namely you.
I should also point out that it won’t happen right now. If my analogy holds, we can think of ourselves as entering the administration of James Buchanan.
I think you are downplaying the extent to which Trump undermined himself and people close to him, while deliberately stoking division within the Right.
Here I think you elide the biggest problem for Trumpism: That the vast, vast majority of Trump’s “solidly conservative policies” were enacted as a result of decades-long efforts sunk into institution-building by broad swaths of people not named “Donald Trump,” who showed up 5 minutes before the primaries in 2015 to proclaim himself a Republican, hijacked the party, and has flown it into a cliff.
The Federalist Society, the Republican Party writ large – these institutions provided all of the grunt work which led to cabinet and judicial appointments, policy implementation at the administrative level… You cannot be serious if you assert that the indispensable element of the Conservative actions of the Trump administration was Trump himself, who is an ignoramus who does not read and hasn’t had so much as a national security briefing since October.
The item for which I think the Trump administration deserves the most credit (and one which happened as a result of his peculiar ignorance of what the Overton Window consists of with regard to Middle East policy) is the Abraham Accords.
Everything else is basically boilerplate, conservative and center-right policy which would emerge from a generic Republican Presidential administration, mixed in with some clownishly incompetent and ham-fisted attempts at achieving goals that any decent operators with similar ideas could have pulled off.
Trump could have had his wall and E-Verify, for instance… if he had been willing to regularize the Dreamers. This is what I would have called an easy win, but Trump deep-sixed this because he couldn’t stand to contemplate it, apparently.
Lots of things are “apparently” to people these days.
You forget that the Dems tied the Dreamer stuff to preservation of chain migration and refused to untie them? I can’t stand Trump- but the successes listed all required that the president acquiesce. I heard Jonah Goldberg try to give Cocaine Mitch the primary credit for the good judges as though just McConnell’s and Leonard Leo’s will were all that was required.
In case you ever wondered, this is what art looks like:
I know nothing about this, but this guy is a very dependable source.
I reject being part of this “we”
I have consistently voted for the lessor of two evils because I had no other viable options. I stopped donating to the RNC etc because they always sell out. They sell lies. The Candidates lie. I vote against every local SPLOST. I advocate just stopping government growth at today’s levels.
I did not “ignore” Trump’s spending. I was not happy with it, but I did point out that it did not matter who was President, it was going to go up. Not sure what I was supposed to do/say other than that.
“We” are not responsible, and that includes a lot of libertarians at Ricochet I am happy to cross swords with.
You have to spend to keep the asset bubble intact to get past the next election. It’s been like this for two decades.
This is reminiscent of the law prohibiting blacks from riding in front seats on buses, but many bus companies objected and wanted free seating. There seem to be companies like Parler that want free speech, but the Democrat PTB are making their own laws.
Very good. I say we don’t need to make it so difficult and you up the ante, making it more difficult. Against logic like that, nobody can stand.
Paul Ryan’s plan for reforming spending (as I recall) would have taken something like a decade to reach a balanced budget and was still considered to be too radical by many Republicans. When Mitt Romney brought him aboard as his running mate he insisted that Ryan water the plan down further.
Everyone knows that Social Security will run low on money, but when people are polled about the various changes that could fix the problem: increase the retirement age / decrease the amount paid out per retiree / increase the amount taken out of peoples’ paychecks, people reject every solution. They want the problem fixed but want it fixed without any sacrifice to themselves. I wish I could remember the quote from Thomas Sowell where he says that Washington is full of liars because only liars can become elected. We want to be lied to. We want to be told that government will spend money on things we want but that someone else will be forced to pay for it.
Excellent post, Skipsul.
Anyone who thinks a fighter with manners would not be hated as much as Trump is naive. They would still hate but just use a different excuse .
Hillary was very slow to fade away. I think she spent three years giving speeches where she whined about how she would have won, except for her list of 100 excuses. Do we know that she has finally stopped?
Look at Cruz and Hawley.
At some point the populist nonsense that has infected both political parties must recede. Hard fiscal truths will be revealed, either by honest politicians or the collapse of the unfunded entitlement state. Self-delusion will have an expiration date.
I don’t mind throwing out the populist nonsense as long as we keep the populist virtues.
Often asserted, still wrong. It’s all subjective of course, but my recollection is that pretty much everyone has constructive criticism; it’s nonconstructive or just wrong stuff that gets scorn.
Abrams was the hidden power in the Georgia wins. She worked on it for two years and now hey owe her.
Huh? Has nothing to do with the unpopularity of that idea among Republicans, but it’s just that Trump couldn’t contemplate it? Right. That’s the kind of criticism that earns scorn, mostly because it itself is scornful.
If that isn’t the case, why did he scupper the legislation while it was heading to the House Floor for a vote?
Who scuppered it? I’m not following your question?
He offered this. Plus a path to citizenship for ilkegals. Nancy said no.
Stop rewriting history.
Are they banning Nazi deniers based on their own policy or are they banning them because the government will come down hard on them if they don’t?