I saw my first and last episode of Real Housewives tonight. Well, I say I saw it. I lasted about 63 seconds before realizing I only wanted to see these people getting devoured by sharks. Or maybe Galactus. Anyway.
It struck me that these shows have been running continuously for twenty years. That there are so many variations (yet just the same) that I never want to hear a word about superhero fatigue ever. That there is an audience for this, and worse, that there are people who consider this aspirational. And even worse, there are people who consider it real.
And this is the world we live in now. This is the same ethos that sits in the White House and drives the government and is busily engaged in driving America into the blades of the wood-chipper. This is what you have to work around if you’re lucky, and what’s making your life hell if you aren’t. And it’s all because 49.6% of the voting electorate affirmatively believed that reality is whatever you insist it is.
Think about it. Four years of constant cringe. Four years of incompetence. Four years of shameful fiasco capped off with a pandemic that ran wild and killed 400,000 Americans before we could change leadership and ended with a mob invading the Capitol to overthrow the results of the election that made that change. And yet within a month, the GOP was lining up to offer their distended red buttocks in submission, and a little over three and a half years later, people had completely forgotten about it all and were willing to believe it would somehow be different, or even better, despite absolutely no material evidence it would and tons that it wouldn’t.
Maybe you can blame racism. Maybe you can blame sexism. Maybe you can blame a press in thrall to spectacle (you absolutely can). But in the end, it doesn’t matter at all. One-third of the US voting population chose to run it back with an older, more senile, more racist, more criminal, more incompetent version of a President who had already failed once.
One of the first gifts my wife ever gave me when we started dating was a fridge sticker that said “You Can’t Fix Stupid”. It was a reference to my IT career at the time, but now it’s a sign of the world at large. We are at the mercy of the affirmatively, aggressively stupid, aided and abetted by the people dumb enough to believe that it didn’t make a difference who they voted for or that staying home was anything other than surrender. And the problem is, you can’t reason with stupid. You can’t lead it to the light. You can’t show it a better way, because if they could see a better way, they wouldn’t have been stupid enough to do this in the first place.
So the big question now is: can you assemble a majority coalition? One that is willing to vote to contain the stupidity, and to prioritize containing the stupidity over any other individual issues for a generation.? One that is willing to hash out its issues in the primary, but vote the straight coalition ticket every November until the damage is remediated and the harm is constrained?
Because that’s what it’s going to take. You have to lock it down forever. A lot of people will not get what they want, and maybe we don’t move the ball as fast as we should in some areas, and maybe the “mainstream Republicans” just have to suck it up and eat shit for a decade as penance for thinking they could make a deal with the devil.
But there’s no going back to how things used to be.