Notes On What Passes for American Politics
New polling shows the Republicans with a huge “lead” as America looks forward to the 2022 midterm elections. And so, exactly as I explained just a few days ago, the well-trained herd of “individualists” who call themselves “grassroots conservatives” or “constitutionalists” will be unable to resist running toward that football Lucy is holding for them yet again. The result will be the same as ever, but they will continue to ignore it when there is a perceived “win” for “our side” to be had.
When will these supposed constitutional conservatives realize, once and for all, that they do not have a side in this Washington charade? Never, of course. If they have not figured this game out yet, then it is folly to imagine they ever could. Nostalgia, the weak-minded deference to immature fantasies of “the good old days,” will sweep them away, election after election — sweep them and their country right into the dustbin of history.
“So you’re saying we’re supposed to let the Democrats win?” they would shout at me now, if they still had the taste or temperament for reading.
Hopeless.
If you saw that your policies were causing immediate and consequential harm to your society and its economic stability, were extraordinarily unpopular with the electorate, and were in some cases precipitating outright resistance in the form of significant numbers of respectable, law-abiding citizens refusing to obey your most radical dictates or “mandates” at considerable practical risk to themselves — if you saw all of this, would you conscientiously reconsider your policies in the name of the public good, or at least calculatingly reconsider them in the name of maintaining favor with the population that elected you?
If you answered yes, then you are not a progressive, or at least not a consistent and “principled” one.
Many Americans on the so-called “right” are criticizing John Kerry for trading leniency on China’s genocidal and slave-labor policies in exchange for some semblance of partnership on climate change. As if concern about climate change had anything to do with Kerry’s devil’s bargain, or with anything else John Kerry does for that matter. John Kerry — like Donald Trump and every other super-rich power player in America — appeases, obfuscates, and flat-out sucks up to the Chinese Communist Party because (a) he craves permanent access to the world’s biggest consumer market, (b) he loves cheap manufacturing labor, regardless of how the cheapness is achieved, and (c) he could not care less about genocide, slavery, or any other tyrannical corruption on this Earth, and would happily condone or construct apologetics for any totalitarian regime that might help him enhance his own power, prestige, and wealth this week.
Oh, and Kerry is a crypto-communist to boot, which makes him, like most of the Democratic Party’s left edge, a full-blown Chinese Communist Party sympathizer. Why would he be interested in antagonizing the government he admires most?
