Our Broken Politics

How about a little Matt Taibbi with your morning coffee? There, that will wake you up. The following analysis, from Taibbi’s Substack column, offers a compelling analysis of America’s current political chaos. He calls out Democrats for being the worse, but does not find too much to love in the GOP. 

Given that these thoughts appeared on Substack, a subscription service, no links are available.

Taibbi begins by noting that the vaccination program, facilitated by the Trump administration, advanced by the Biden administration ought to be a source of national pride. That is, it would be, if it was still acceptable to feel national pride.

He writes:

… the vaccination program developed under the Trump administration via Operation Warp Speed, and subsequently administered by the Biden administration, has been an incredible accomplishment we should all be… happy about?

So, our politicians are playing it for the politics, but the reality of the situation does not force them to do so. Taibbi counts the ways the vaccination program has succeeded:

A year ago we were all going to bed at night wondering if we’d wake up drowning in our own pleural fluids. Now, 346.9 million doses of a vaccine have been administered as of this week, with 164.9 million Americans fully vaccinated overall. A full 191.8 million Americans have received at least one dose, including 70% of the population above 18 — we missed Biden’s target of 70% by July 4th by weeks — and an amazing 89.9% of the population above 65. The sheer breadth of the achievement, for which both parties can rightly take credit, is a big reason Covid-19 looked to be in retreat as recently as a month ago.

But, he continues, this side of the story has been drowned out by partisan bickering:

But the overall story, of an unprecedented pandemic threat answered with a vaccine rapidly developed and administered across two administrations and implemented aggressively by both Republican and Democratic governors, saving hundreds of thousands of lives at home (and millions more overseas) during a period of utter disunity and political chaos, is the version heard least of all. The narrative barely interests people. Ask most Americans about the pandemic and they’ll either rage out on some theoretical unvaccinated person in another state — grr fuck him derp! loser! — or they’ll shake their heads in despair, like the hopelessness of everything has just been revealed to them.

The fault, Taibbi explains, lies with our dysfunctional political parties. Most of what each party has proposed and promoted these days is slandering the other party. He correctly lays the lion’s share of the blame on Democrats, but he is not letting Republicans escape responsibility:

Covid-19’s comeback is Exhibit A for why America needs sweeping changes in the way we organize our lives and our politics. We have the worst and most useless political parties in the world. Neither of our reigning brands is capable of articulating a positive vision for the country, because neither has any identity anymore apart from tireless slander of the other. Democrats, worse on this front, are a rat-hair away from describing the whole GOP as a terrorist organization in need of outlawing. They’re perpetually miserable because being visibly happy while Trump still walks the earth is “normalizing.” Republican leaders meanwhile may still be caught between the Sophie’s Choice of backing Trump and appealing their post-2016 firing as Washington’s most trusted handmaidens of corporate influence, but they at least seem happier in public, probably conscious of how lucky they are to be in office despite a total lack of coherent message.

As we have said here, America is broken. The political system, designed to overcome partisan divisions in time of crisis, no longer works. Don’t say that the Obama presidency was not transformational:

For all America’s multitudinous problems and injustices, its two political factions were once always able to “manufacture consent” toward optimism in an emergency, whether of the self-created variety (e.g. the invasion of Iraq) or of the unexpected sort (e.g. Hurricane Katrina, or the Deepwater Horizon disaster). Our policy responses in these moments ranged from incompetent to criminal to, at times and especially at the ground level, heroic — think the firefighters after 9/11, or the first responders during this pandemic — but until now, the corresponding propaganda effort never malfunctioned to the point where political leaders stressed defeatism and mutual hatred as a patriotic imperative in the middle of a crisis. Yet this is happening now.

Today, in the middle of a crisis, political parties have overcome the patriotic imperative and have been selling defeatism and mutual hatred. Most of the blame falls on Democrats, he adds:

Neither party has shown much inclination to move past the culture war, but Democrats are utter addicts in this regard. The victim of a throw-the-bums-out movement in 2016, they crawled back into power by using the media to declare an ongoing state of emergency, identifying both Trump’s Napoleonic presidency and the dangerous radical movement of mitten-clad Bernie Sanders as vessels of foreign contagion.

They kept that state of emergency going for five years, screeching warnings of everything from treason to concentration camps to a rapist on the Supreme Court to fascist coups to at least ten different “existential” threats to “democracy itself,” including a proposed voter identification law that the president of the United States said with a straight face “makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle.”

So, the Democrats have nothing to offer but hatred of Donald Trump. They have indulged the most irresponsible rhetorical hyperbole against Trump, and little else:

We’ve had five years of this escalating hyperbole because without it, the Democratic establishment knows it has no argument for power beyond not being Donald Trump.

Because Trump promised to Make America Great Again, Democrats have stressed being conscious of the country’s flawed legacy, adopting a clipped, “Build Back Moribund” tone. On the other hand, they’re not fixing the health care system or breaking up predatory monopolies or ending idiotic interventions abroad, or really changing anything at all — that was the plan of the internal faction they spent the 2020 primaries crushing. Their argument is competence in crisis, so we must never be without one.

True enough, Taibbi continues, the pandemic has played perfectly into the Democratic narrative. This is especially true because the Democrats, which I have called the Girl Party, have emphasized their empathetic ability to care for people, to provide health care for people, to dispense charity to the disadvantaged, to fight against all of those boy toys, like guns and the free market.

The pandemic in this sense has been a godsend, playing to all their pretensions of technocratic superiority while also offering myriad opportunities for the double-faced fuckery for which Clintonian Democrats are famous. The Biden administration crows about its limitless rectitude when it comes to mask-wearing and social distance, but a little over a year ago, when finishing off the Sanders campaign was more important than a few lives here and there, they quietly went full steam ahead with in-person voting for (among others) the Wisconsin primary, causing a “large” spread of Covid-19 that included 52 cases among those who voted or worked on the polls.

The rhetoric surrounding the pandemic has been all about Trump. Democrats used it to malign Trump, and thereby they have undermined the nation’s response to the crisis. They have forgotten the salient point, namely that attacking Trump entailed attacking the President of the United State-- and thus, was constantly verging on the seditious. The same people who are crying out against Trump for trying to render the Biden election illegitimate just spent four years crying out that the Trump election was illegitimate.

They have been undermining confidence in the nation, its institutions, its history, his accomplishments-- because their goal-- to get Trump-- overwhelmed their already limited rational faculties:

There’s no question that with any other president cracking a whip on a vaccine program — if Biden himself had been in office last year, or Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama, or even George W. Bush — the storylines then would have been about a heroic cutter of red tape who pulled out the stops to get shots in arms. Not so with Trump, whose supporters were explicitly told that their man was rushing a dangerous product to market. Biden and his running mate spent a long summer cynically raising such concerns about the safety and “transparency” of the same vaccine they’re now blasting Trump supporters for not taking. Only in a totally dysfunctional political system would this be considered logical, or okay.

So, today’s Democrats want to take full credit for everything that works well while placing full blame for everything that goes wrong on Trump. Of course, this has required a litany of lies:

Moreover, having labeled the entire lot of Trump supporters treasonous, white supremacist, insurrectionist scum, the “Fed Up” Party has committed itself to a narrative that has to deny any Republican role in the vaccination program. To say this has complicated outreach efforts is a massive understatement. It’s been a constant, duplicitous theme of the pandemic story, the textbook example being Kamala Harris’s claim that there was “no national strategy or plan for vaccinations” before the arrival of the Biden Administration, despite 20 million people receiving their first doses before Inauguration Day.

Consider the question of the vaccination holdouts, the people who do not want to take the shot. The way we have not been dealing with it shows that we are not a normal country and that many people are not acting rationally:

If we lived in a normal country, the issue of holdouts would be dealt with rationally, as a logistical issue. Leaders would ask: what percentage of that infamous 29% of refuseniks is really holding out just to “own the libs”? Are any of them people who’ve already had Covid-19 and believe they’re protected by natural immunity? How many are waiting for full FDA approval, and as a corollary question, why are we still waiting for that approval 340 million shots in? How many just have reservations about vaccinating their children, and how necessary are such vaccinations, especially given that countries like the U.K. are hesitating on that front? And they would charge out with sleeves rolled up and billions in walking-around PR money to take on the problem.

Taibbi then calls out the Democratic Party for its disgraceful and unconscionably bad behavior:

Democrats have spent the last five years so consumed with removing the scourge of Trumpism that they’ve become their own poisonous part of his story. They’re now Ahab to Trump’s whale, and their revenge trip is whirlpooling us downward even in would-be moments of national triumph. Writer Walter Kirn talked about how the dull old Time magazine where he once worked tried to ground the American mind in a “moderate, shared reality,” but our leaders refuse on principle to allow any shared American experience, forcing us to stay on this interminably exasperating jihad instead.

Can we get off this boat? Is it possible to switch these people out for a party that just governs? People might even listen to leaders like that.

A party that governs needs people who are capable of governing. Today’s Demcoratic Party seems populated by idiots like AOC and Cori Bush, while Republicans seem incapable of doing anything to stop the coming train wreck.