Random Observations On The Way Down
When speaking of his various dreamed-of military parades, golden ballrooms, triumphal arches, domestic army deployments, press bans, annexations of foreign lands, gargantuan federal monuments, and government buildings transformed into armed fortresses with snipers, Donald Trump is wont to proffer, often as his central argument for these dreams, the fact that, “We are the only country that doesn’t have/do this! The only country!” It is both remarkable and typical that it should never have occurred to the defiantly ignorant and preternaturally incurious Trump to wonder why this might be, let alone whether the reason might indicate something uniquely impressive about the United States of America as its Founders intended it to be — and as it largely was for nearly the first two hundred years of its history. It also says so much about the coward Trump, with all of his “Make America Great Again” buffoonery, that his big dreams for America are all about making it more like other countries, and hence, ipso facto, less like America, and specifically with regard to aggrandizing and protecting the president, aka himself. He lacks even the slightest appreciation for the pioneering spirit, the unassuming bravado, the self-reliant intrepidity, and the almost flippant intransigence in the face of other countries’ uniformly statist tendencies that was the essence of the American psyche until the progressives took control of the institutions and slowly poisoned the well of American individualism and national independence, inculcating a free citizenry with new, antithetical urges toward a bigger, “more effective” federal government. Donald Trump is the gateway drug to America’s final submission before that self-destructive urge.
Mitch McConnell returned to the U.S. Senate last week after three months in hiding, following some sort of medical emergency that appears, from the brief video clips I saw from his senate appearance, to be ongoing. In short, the way he appeared to respond to other people, and to his formal duties as a voting member of the senate, showed him to be for the Republican Party what Senator Diane Feinstein was for the Democrats during the final year or two of her own sad deterioration. For what it is worth, I ought to acknowledge that a mentally ineffectual, puppet-like McConnell will do far less damage to the senate, and more importantly to his country, than the alive and alert version of McConnell did over the previous few decades — a continuous string of offenses against constitutionalism, republicanism, and genuine American conservatism culminating in his 2016 deliverance of the Republican Party and the United States of America into an era of demagogic idiocracy and progressive authoritarianism embodied in a man and a movement hellbent on bringing down the curtain on that lovely little modern experiment called liberal democracy, i.e., genuine practical freedom on this Earth.
McConnell’s determined turtle crawl toward the abyss is what George Will, a great McConnell defender, repeatedly mistakes for conservative incrementalism; an object lesson in the danger of political thinkers and commentators living and dining among the politicians they are supposed to be monitoring and correcting.
