Lunatics Take Over the Asylum
December 15, 2024
American politics has long harbored a subculture of crazy. Historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a famous 1964 essay about its “paranoid style.” But that was always pretty much confined to the fringes, the dominant political ethos instead one of civic seriousness. Now however, as the saying goes, the lunatics have taken over the asylum.
We’re all supposed to pretend otherwise; as if this is just one more turn of the wheel of public affairs. Ignoring that the president is a convicted felon, furthermore adjudicated liable for fraud and sexual assault, who previously attempted a violent coup to overthrow his election defeat. And his deranged cult reigns, with a catechism of lies demanding idolatry — that the 2020 election was stolen; January 6 was just fine; all legal proceedings against Trump were themselves criminal shams.
Now the obligatory genuflection extends to endorsing a bizarre zoo of government appointees. Vaccine crackpot RFK Jr and quack charlatan Dr. Oz in charge of health care; flaky tyrant apologist Tulsi Gabbard as intelligence director; conspiracist partisan vigilante Kash Patel to head the FBI; a pair of clowns (Musk and Ramaswamy) to war against government waste (functionality, more likely). And, to run the Pentagon, a loudmouth drunk with histories of organizational incompetence and sexual misdeeds (he paid off a woman who accused him of rape). Whose own mother once told him she has no respect for anyone behaving as he does.
If you’d put all this into a novel ten years ago, it would have seemed too farcical even for the genre of farce. (A counterpoint to Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent.)
That Pete Hegseth nomination for defense secretary has become the test case. No one in their right mind could assent. Yet Team Trump seems to be doubling down on it, just to prove their clout to put across whatever absurdity they insist upon. The whole Trumposphere is circling the wagons around Hegseth. A Facebook post by an Alabama customer of mine had legions of comments all extolling Hegseth and excoriating doubters. Seeing this made me feel like an observer from Mars.
The viciousness is being directed at Republican senatorial holdouts, notably Iowa’s Joni Ernst, herself a military veteran who suffered sexual abuse there. Now threatened with political annihilation if she won’t toe the line. The term “breaking horses” has been used — if broncos like Ernst can be Hegsethized, then they’ll be docile on everything else.
This nightmare won’t end in four years, because it reflects a deep sickness among too many voters. Blind to being manipulated by a giant con, and to the noble virtues that used to undergird our admirable civic culture. Which they’ve thrown in the toilet. Now we’re a classless society — that is, no class.
Meanwhile, South Koreans have impeached their president just eleven days after his attempt to impose martial law. They — unlike Americans — still understand the meaning and value of democracy, having experienced “strongman” rule not so long ago. It’s likely too late for us to learn the lesson.
Stick a fork in America, we’re done.