A solution to stemming our rolling national meltdown, commonplace descent into Stalinist-Hitlerian Big Lies, and now a chilling turn toward violence that large segments of a major political party can't bring themselves to condemn, keeps evading us.
Perhaps it's because there is no solution — not one to be acted on straightaway and pointedly. Only time and withering exhaustion among the ethically vacant may bring a calming. And neither are those a guarantee. Even more Americans are distressingly ignorant of, or blithely indifferent toward, republicanism's virtues, leaving demagogues and shame-incapable snake oilers to fill the psychic void and don the habiliments of power.
We read innumerable articles, editorials, columns and op-eds — and this commentary — decrying the bovine mentality and unconcerned grazing of America's great unwary. Yet none offers a serviceable solution to what afflicts us. See: preceding paragraph, first sentence.
Enlightened-as-possible observers merely note with jackhammering regularity that nation-corroding demagogues are unsustainable without a populace to feed them. The most recent I read muses that Josh Hawley — and by extension, all like him — "is a symptom, not a cause. He is a product of the same underlying forces that brought us President Trump and the present crisis of American democracy."
But then the rub. The columnist goes on to reflect that "unless we find a way to address these" unAmerican scoundrels …
Others opt for a quick and easy kill of the mad king, although, I concede, their rather stupefying writings are forgivable, in that they don't even pretend a proffered solution to quelling the "underlying forces" of "Trump and the present crisis of American democracy." Write, for instance, Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe and former House Judiciary Committee counsel Joshua Matz this morning: "The very pendency of [impeachment] articles — and the possibility of trial and conviction — may itself chill Trump’s worst impulses as he contemplates his final days as president." I disagree, but maybe a third or fourth impeachment might do the trick.
Thus we are caught in an intellectual straitjacket. We can't work at deflating the multitudinous windbags of national degradation, since we're constrained in our incomprehension of how to deflate them. We can't even reach them, entrenched and invulnerable as they are in their own squalid world of unknowing knowingness. The solution? Beats me — and everyone else who cares about this country.
Although, as noted, there is no guarantee, I do believe we'll survive this era of mass decadence. Just give it time, and the exhaustion that will come with it.