This article in the Boston Globe is excellent, because it looks at two different ways of considering interoperability. On the one hand you have NATO, which relies on standardization agreements – and thus you have half a dozen different national rifles but one cartridge and one magazine type, and thus troops can all go into battle together with shared resources. On the other, weather forecasting works because we have a common shared temperature scale, common measurements of barometric pressure and standards for sharing data.
A lot of people are comparing the current state of political affairs to Watergate, and that’s an obvious comparison at this point, but this administration has an advantage Nixon could only have dreamed of: twenty-five years of crafting a media ecosystem in which your loyalists have your own sources of information and feel entitled to their own opinions AND their own facts. Between the velvet coffin of the Fox News bubble and the ironclad gerrymander, the House GOP can hold the line for Trump a lot longer than it ever could – or would – for Nixon.
And that’s without taking this House into account. Consider: 75% of the Republicans in the lower body have only been there since the 2010 elections or later. Their entire Congressional career has not only been post-Fox, but post-Tea Party. They have never passed a budget in regular order, never had to confront the world outside the axis of Breitbart. They’ve been part of two government shutdowns and the unprecedented near-default of sovereign debt. They’ve voted over fifty times to repeal Obamacare. Their entire MO is tribal loyalty and their entire range of issues is Benghazi-birth certificate-EMAILS, and they’ve never had to actually govern. And now they are the frontline troops for an accidental amateur President. When Trump says he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his followers would cheer? The ones he means are the ones in the Capitol, because those are the only ones he needs. And they don’t know how to do anything but moo for their side.
Ultimately, this was a big part of where Obama went wrong. He should have looked back at 1992-94 and seen a GOP in opposition that went scorched-earth on any Democratic initiatives. He should have heard the rumblings about the biggest GOP goal being to make him a one-term president, heard Rush Limbaugh openly rooting for his failure, heard about the famous Inauguration-eve dinner where the Republican leadership pledged itself to one long unceasing NO for as long as it took, and he should have adjusted his strategy and tactics accordingly. Maybe he didn’t think he could. Maybe he had more belief in the American public than that.
But Hillary Clinton had been there and done that, and no chance she would have let things slip away by relying on the willingness of Confederates to come reason together in a spirit of harmony. She’d lived through the 1990s. She knew better. But now her watch has ended. In a world where people will argue with a straight face that Lebron James is the greatest basketball player of all time – as if Magic and Michael and Dr. J never happened – it’s not surprising that people don’t respect a past further behind them than night before last.
Left, right. Past, present. Sense, sensibility. When nothing interoperates, the parts start to break. And you know what comes next.
Of which.