The Atlantic's Tom Nichols looks at what I would call "A Day in the Life of American Decline." Nichols calls it "The Fragility of Freedom."
A single senator, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, has been holding up hundreds of military promotions for months, endangering the national security of the United States. The acting chief of naval operations says it will take years for the Navy to recover from the damage....
Meanwhile, the House of Representatives is going to open an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. Why? Well, why not? Speaker Kevin McCarthy promised the extremists in his party that if they made him speaker, he would do what he was told. And so he has; the People’s House is now effectively being run by members such as Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene....
Elsewhere, the governor of Florida and his vaccine-skeptic surgeon general are telling people under 65 not to get boosted against COVID. He apparently thinks that anti-science extremism will help him wrest the Republican presidential nomination away from Donald Trump.
And then there is Trump himself, the wellspring of all this chaos. In a country that understood the fragility of its own freedoms, we would see him for what he is: the leader of a dangerous cult who has admitted to his attempts to subvert American democracy....
We might at least expect the media to report on Trump not merely as a candidate but as if they were following the developments around a dangerous conspiracy or the ongoing trial of the leader of a major crime syndicate. Instead, we have Kristen Welker inaugurating the reboot of Meet the Press by leaning forward with focused sincerity and asking Trump, "Tell me—Mr. President, tell me what you see when you look at your mug shot?"
Yes it's bad. Really bad. Truth is, though, Kristen Welker was merely giving the viewing public what they wanted to see. Only politics addicts like me, you and Nichols saw her one-hour extravaganza into perilous irrelevance for what it was.
Which brings us to the essential point. Only in Nichols' lede does he observe that "America is in a state of emergency, yet few of its citizens seem to realize it."
Sen. Tuberville is doing what the citizens of Alabama elected him to do, as are the majority members of the House of Representatives. DeSantis is maneuvering to Trump's right because he correctly sees his party as hopelessly benighted and yearningly authoritarian. Trump saw that years ago, which was what got him elected to the White House in 2016.
That much accounts for nearly half the electorate. The other half, roughly, opposes Trump Inc., but not in a hair-on-fire kind of way. As Nichols asks: "Democrats and their liberal allies claim to be in full mobilization mode to stop Trump and defang his threat to the constitutional order. But are they?" Full mobilization mode means all-out war, yet what we're witnessing is mostly skirmishes.
Hence the army we're left with is overwhelmed. Almost half of the citizenry is battling for Trump, and most of the other half is dangerously indifferent to the "wellspring of all this chaos." It's just politics, the same old politics, or so too many believe.
The essential point — as if you haven't already guessed it and as if I haven't already screamed it innumerable times — is that America seems to have entered its own Dark Ages, one rife with medieval obscurantism and an everyday drudgery of life that chooses to be unbothered by the shenanigans of the ruling class.
We can scream — again — Wake up! But we're a tree in an isolated forest. How to motivate and mobilize the faint majority opposed to Trump Inc.? I really don't know. But their slumber could kill us.