As related by novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace, TV news crews covering John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign called them the Twelve Monkeys: "the most elite and least popular pencils in the McCain press corps," the "dozen marquee journalists and political-analysis guys from the really important papers" who "never smoke or drink, and always move in a pack, and always cut to the front of every scrum."
Perhaps the monkiest of them all was The New York Times' Peter Baker, although he's long since been elevated to a kind of sedentary, press-anchor role in which once a week he sits at his word processor and Thinks Big Thoughts. No more day-to-day elbowing to get to the front of every scrum for Mr. Baker, no sir. These days he reclines and soaks up the divergent dispatches from the front, whereupon he pieces together the complex puzzle of American politics — which then reveals the famed Big Picture.
Baker's latest communiqué: "The country has grown accustomed to chaos in the capital. Dysfunction is the new normal.... Government shutdowns are a modern phenomenon.... The seismic change came in late 1995 and early 1996, when House Republicans set off back-to-back shutdowns during a budget fight with President Bill Clinton.... What made this prospective shutdown different from those that came before was that it was less a fight between Democrats and Republicans than a fight between Republicans and Republicans."
Then, from Baker, comes this observation: "Yet as absorbed as Washington was by the game of political chicken, there has not been much of a popular uprising." This logically follows, since "the country has grown accustomed to chaos in the capital." The larger point, however — or rather the problem I have with Baker's assertion — is that his "yet" should have been "because." Because of the new, fratricidal game of Republicans vs. Republicans there has been no popular uprising.
Inadvertently, Baker offers the reason why this was the case. A YouGov poll, he writes, "showed that 29 percent of Americans blamed House Republicans for the standoff." That compared with 27 percent who blamed either House Democrats or President Biden, and "nearly a third considered everyone equally at fault." In other words, roughly 60 percent of those surveyed misplaced the blame.
Why was that so? The "nearly a third" who opted for the lazy "both sides" argument did so because they were too indifferent to political events to seek the right and relevant answer, and the 27 percent who blamed House Democrats or President Biden were, of course, hyperpartisan Republicans. Less than a third of those surveyed grasped reality and blamed the conspicuously blamable party.
Explained more pointedly and from a different angle: Because the imminent shutdown was a game of congressional Republicans vs. congressional Republicans, Republicans at large were happy to remain mum. Nothing to see here, folks. This deliberate ignorance then spilled over into the non-hyperpartisan crowd. Put in yet another and probably the most accurate way, these days only the (usually) chronically irritable, habitually indignant and perpetually enraged — Republicans at large — are capable of fomenting popular uprisings.
Partially reinforcing my hypothesis that only Republicans are able to outrage — to raise up — the country is political scientist David McLennan of Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C.: "There is no demographic group where the majority of people think things are going well in the country. Partisans, Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters all think things are going poorly." McLennan has a name for this: "the contagion effect."
Yet McClellan misidentifies the contagion's source. In Baker's words, the analyst sees "the cascade of once-rare eruptions in Washington — shutdown, impeachment, criminal trials, internal revolt" — as having "fed into a broader sense of disenchantment with the direction of the country." But whence the cascade of eruptions now so commonplace in politics? Republicans. It is they causing the disenchantment, not the disenchantment causing the eruptions.
As another analyst told Baker: "Our expectations have plummeted, and we have become dangerously numb to the failures of our government." That would be failures planned and failures intentionally executed. These partisan misadventures have sclerotically diseased the thinking of the American body politic. The broadly known source, the origin, the genesis of the Great American Morbidity was singled out 11 years ago in a scholarly way by the Brookings Institution's Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein: "Let's Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem."
That, Mr. Baker, better explains the root of your column's headline, "To Many Americans, Government Dysfunction Is the New Normal."