We’re being worn down by a politics of persistent comfort.
I wrote last week about comfort and discomfort, and the pleasure that follows hardship. But I didn’t quite finish the thought, so here it is: Our dismal, empty, destructive political theater is the result of too much ease and affluence. We’re doing things that people do when life has been too easy.
When do Americans lose patience for the endless march of idiocy, and what happens when they do?
Americans seem to forget how much political violence the country has lived through. Our new republic had three major tax rebellions.
When the Kansas-Nebraska Act solved the debate over the expansion of slavery with popular sovereignty, pro- and anti-slavery forces in Kansas fought for control of the state with swords and artillery. John Brown became famous before the raid on Harpers Ferry by leading an extraordinarily violent attack on a pro-slavery settlement, hacking men to death with a broadsword.
Coal miners in Colorado responded to the Ludlow Massacre with a 10-day war on mining companies.
And so on. Pick your own dozen examples. The Colfax Massacre. The attack on Congress by Puerto Rican nationalists. The political assassinations of the 1960s.
We’ve had relative peace for years, broken by absurd acts of mostly one-sided violence in which Black Lives Matter and Antifa mobs were valorized and celebrated for burning cities. Putting aside Kyle Rittenhouse’s remarkable example, these mostly weren’t violent contests; they were mostly violent displays, given license by idiots in positions of authority. Compared to the artillery fire at the Springfield Armory that tore Shaysites apart, we haven’t had battles.
Alongside our relative social peace, we’ve had the easy affluence of people who, for example, casually expect their student loans to disappear. They don’t want to pay them, so.
People who live in peace, security, and comfort forget about the cycle of — let’s be polite about this — screwing around and finding out. Protesters who burn things and get a pat on the head don’t perceive the darkness they’ve been playing with. Gaige Grosskreutz was raising a handgun when Kyle Rittenhouse shot him, and he purported to be baffled that someone would do something violent to him like that.
In that context, we get to the breathtakingly stupid and reckless jury trial of the Republican front-runner that began this week in Manhattan. Donald Trump faces ludicrous charges, brought in a distinctly performative and political manner. This is needlessly provocative behavior, and provocative behavior comes from fools.
All over the country, Democrats are rejecting basic systems of reasonable order. California Democrats neutered a bill last week that would have made it a felony to try to buy a child for sex and then turned around the next day and killed a bill that required public schools to remove material from K-8 classrooms that “depicts or describes in a patently offensive way sexual conduct and which, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.” It’s important to stand strong for the principle of offering highly sexual material to kindergartners, I guess.
Stack the coordinated anti-Israel shutdowns alongside the offensive and aggressive Trump trials, with highways, bridges, and airports blocked all over the country. People sat on the Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland for nearly five hours as they waited for the California Highway Patrol to arrest the idiots who chained themselves together there. You only do this to people when you don’t expect to pay much of a price for it.
And they probably won’t. For now. But peace and social order are lost the way Hemingway had a character describe his path to bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly.
My best guess is that the absurdity of the Trump trial will take the mask off a uniquely stupid gang of provocateurs, leaving them naked in the court of public opinion. When do Americans lose patience for the endless march of idiocy, and what happens when they do?
I would prefer not to find out. They should prefer the same. We need a path to social and institutional maturity, and we need it quickly. We need some of these people to start perceiving the potential costs of their behavior before the bills start coming due.