After the crisis in 2008...
Both parties were slow to grasp how much credibility they’d lost. The coming politics was populist. Its harbinger wasn’t Barack Obama but Sarah Palin, the absurdly unready vice-presidential candidate who scorned expertise and reveled in celebrity. She was Donald Trump’s John the Baptist.
Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves Trump’s footmen.
Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.
Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end.
from George Packer, "We Are Living in a Failed State"
I would love to see someone develop a "Man in the High Castle" type counterfactual TV series in which the North finally gave up in the Civil War and let the South secede. I think that the South would have likely become to the North much as Mexico is now. Except in religion, the South shared more the premodern social imaginary of Latin America than it did the dynamic, modern imaginary of the North. And had the South been left to go its own way, it would not have been good for the Blacks who lived there, but they were pretty terrible anyway after the collapse of reconstruction.
I think that had the South seceded, it would have evolved into a third-rate banana republic with a weak economy and so a weak Latin-American style military, and the North, for better or worse, would have continued to evolve into a world power. But while the North clearly would have had its own demons to struggle with, it would have evolved on its own terms without having to deal with southern obstruction. I'm not sure what would have come of that, but it would be an interesting thought experiment in a Netflix TV series. Someone ought to do it.
But the South didn't secede, and instead it has played an enormous role in shaping U.S. history since the end of reconstruction, and it's hard for me to think of in what ways it's been positive. If there's anything good that's come from the South, it's music and literature. There are things I admire about Latin American culture, too, but I wouldn't want to live there.
In the meanwhile, Southern Republicans are foisting what's worst about traditional, white Southern thinking onto the rest of the country, and I'd just as soon be done with them.
There's an op-ed in the Times this morning entitled "How Would You Like to Live in the Nation of New England", and I wonder if in the long run something like the U.S. breaking down into regional confederations isn't likely. The U.S. is too big and complex; people ought to be allowed to govern themselves and then live with the consequences.
But people in Blue America can't do that; they can't even experiment and learn by trial and error FDR-style because of gridlock and governmental paralysis engendered by morally stunted, soul-shriveled human beings like Mitch McConnell, who could care less about what's good for the country so long as he retains power. Cultural conservatives in red states justify voting for these mean-spirited politicians because they think Democrats are worse. Well, let them live without the mitigating influences brought to them by the Democrats. Let them find out what life would be like in a world where the McConnells and Cruzes funded by the Kochs have their way without any resistance. Let Blue and Red America find their own ways instead of continuously obstructing one another.
If people are foolish enough to vote for McConnell, Ted Cruz, Brian Kemp, and all the rest of the Republican cult, then they should live with the consequences. The rest of us shouldn't have to. Yes, Trump is a New Yorker, but New Yorkers didn't vote for him, and he wouldn't have won if not for so many southerners' buying his snake oil. Yes, the red counties in northern purple states played their role, too. But hopefully those purple states will turn blue later this year. The folks there are persuadable in a way that folks in the south just are not, mainly because of grievances that date back to the 60s--both the 1860s and 1960s.
Democracy in America will prove a complete failure if the Republican cult and the foolish Americans who support it continue to play such an outsized influence in our national destiny. Lincoln, in his refusal to let the south go, thought he was saving the Union and its unprecedented experiment in self-rule. Lincoln always believed that a minority of hotheads caused the South to secede, and that most southerners were sensible folk who never really wanted to. I think he was mistaken, and I wonder if in fact his insisting to go to war to prevent their seceding didn't instead insure the inevitable destruction of what is now, but may not long be, the world's oldest modern democracy.
It will be a tragic historical irony if the party founded to save the Union turns out to be the party that inevitably destroys it.