“That’s what drives me up the wall: people can dodge problems by writing them out of existence, defining them off the board, and what can you do then?”
-13 Sept 1994
“[T]he great ‘electronic town meeting’…sounds great, especially to economists, populists and other primates. What we as political scientists know is that high participation levels are associated with high levels of ideology. Do we really want a government that consists entirely of a sort of Ron Dellums-Robert Dornan juxtaposition? Yes please, I want permanent gridlock perpetrated by the kind of yahoos who spend their life dialing up talk shows and flaming each other on tired local computer BBS forums…[P]olitics is rapidly taking on the trappings of spectator sport, with C-SPAN as its ESPN and CNN Inside Politics to keep score. Issues get kicked around, but what matters most is who’s ahead…the scorekeeping approach tends to exacerbate posturing and mindless prattling and gives us stupid statements from Bob Dole, who would otherwise be almost reasonable. It forces people to hew to a bad line and encourages rabble like Newt Gingrich. And it turns people off to politics, where anthropomorphic typhoid germs like Ross Perot and Oliver North can pull huge (comparatively) vote totals…”
“Bill Clinton initially made a good run of shaking things up, but…pissed at losing the pennant after 12 years, the Republican party set about to impede everything Bill tried — and since the Democrats take everyone from Dick Shelby and Jim Cooper to Howard Metzenbaum and Kwasi Mfume, there was no united push behind the President. My feeling? The mistake Bill made was to try to stir the imagination of a public that forgot what imagination is. Personally, I blame George Bush. Not only did he subordinate everything to his approval rating, cheapen the concept of patriotism and reduce political debate to name-calling and childish yammering, he spent all the last dozen years IN government crowing about how awful government is. Just like his baseball-owner son, he cheapened and degraded his product for his own game and now the product is damaged forever. Both baseball and government can be brought back…but it will take time and effort and blood, sweat, tears and sacrifice from people who care more about the sport/process than about themselves…is anyone willing to take the plunge?”
-21 Sept 1994
“I’ve never seen the universe stand still for nothin’. You read and react, you scramble, you keep moving. I have a lot more sympathy for those with a willingness to try something and go on and admit when it didn’t work, Too many people clinging to failure, or just to the past, makes problems…”
-17 Oct 1994
“As long as there is mileage to get from race as an electoral issue, it will be one. If there were no votes to be gained by assailing crime and welfare, race wouldn’t be pushed through such blanketing issues…yes, this anguished sarcasm is my native tongue. It has to be. Look at the last three decades in American politics and you end up like W.J. Cash, shot his own self dead in Mexico somewhere. I’ll be happy when we get something to be happy about.”
-18 Oct 1994
“As early as 1991, I had a second Civil War in the USA by 1998 because I expected this intransigence between sides. If you opponent is not just differently-opinioned but WRONG, there’s no space to come to terms…”
-24 Oct 1994
“EPIPH: Politics is dominated by assholes. You can either lose, or become an asshole yourself and take your chances…George Will had it right quoting Dr. Elshtain on the ‘spiral of delegitimization’ – it doesn’t matter who wins, the results are the same: a continuing loss of respect for the office and for politics in general.”
-31 Oct 1994
“The big consensus from anyone of any brain has been that this was an awful campaign, devoid of any issues other than opposition to tax, crime and the President. I thought 1988 was awful, then I thought 1990 was about as bad as could be, and then 1992 gave us such hope – now we have the worst electoral season on record. What’s worst is that people are being elected – not people lacking ideas, but people who totally abjure ideas and governing. The President is right – how can you expect success and results from government if you go in assuming that you can only fail or do nothing?…Party has become a different sort of cue. Now it’s shorthand for vilification. It’s so much easier to trash your opponent than to establish yourself, and for blank slates with no record or principles, it’s the only option…”
– 8 Nov 1994
“1994 has shown that when a minority is motivated, it can win and claim the force of majority whether it has it or not. Another thing we have to worry about is the governance and regulation of areas by people who know little to nothing about the area – best example, quite obviously, is the Internet…The repudiation of “professional politics” opens the way for government by “common sense” (hah!) in the absence of legitimate knowledge. I think this is an easy way back to the anti-intellectual government of the 1950s, bred not by cold war anxiety but by a cultural unease that feeds on itself…”
-29 Nov 1994
“I’m not really hopeful about our ability to get along…also, Chris Lipsmeyer is right: what is right and how shall we live together may well be mutually exclusive questions…it should be obvious, but obviously it’s not: a community based on exclusion will eventually have to eat its own because it has to define itself in reference to some mythical ‘other’…
-5 Dec 1994
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Twenty-two years ago, I was required to keep a journal for my American Political Culture seminar in the fall of 1994, my first semester at Vanderbilt. Every single quote above is taken, verbatim, from that journal.
I would say that I predicted Trumpism and its means and method two decades before time, but I didn’t really. I just observed what was happening around me and said what should have been obvious to anyone paying attention. The road to hell in 2016 was already paved and greased in 1994, but at the time, the Democrats still had a large faction in office that overlapped with the Republicans on ideological metrics and there were still a tiny handful of Gypsy Moth GOPers in the Northeast and fellow-travelers in the Midwest. Hell, when Bill Clinton won California in 1992, it was the first time the GOP had lost the Golden State since 1964.
I would even argue that I nailed the date of the civil war. If you’re willing to consider a Civil Cold War, then 1998 was the Clinton impeachment, which was the Cuban Missile Crisis of our democracy even though nobody seemed to get it at the time. A special prosecutor, appointed on dubious grounds to investigate something that had already been legally pawed over to no effect, kept digging and digging into ever more nebulous terrain until he found something that he could use to question the President of the United States under oath with the intent of drawing him into a perjury trap that could be used as grounds for impeachment. It’s as near a coup as we’ve seen in this country since USMC General Smedly Butler stood up to Roosevelt’s antagonists, and it was driven by a Republican party that was constituted and populated by the same sorts of characters that today offer us a ferret-topped reality show clown as their standard-bearer for President.
And now here we are. Cable news and digital media combined to facilitate a world of politics as tribal sport, with policy as an incidental consideration in the face of the ability to describe and defend one’s own version of reality. Never mind common ground; there’s no common frame of reference or even common agreement on what constitutes fact. When one protestor can hold up a sign, be attacked, someone yells “GUN” and hours later Trump’s campaign is describing an “assassination attempt by Hillary supporters,” what’s the point in even trying to talk about it? Everything I described above adds up to a nation and a politics where that’s not only plausible but to be expected.
I was right. I was absolutely, completely, indisputably right.
The one thing my professor warned me against was a lack of empathy – that I either didn’t or wasn’t willing to understand the other side, somehow. As if I hadn’t grown up with it, observed it at close range throughout undergrad, couldn’t see what was happening around me. The only thing that I can offer in response from 2016 is a quote from Heinlein’s Starship Troopers: “I had no sympathy…and still haven’t. That old saw about ‘To understand all is to forgive all’ is a load of tripe. Some things, the more you understand the more you loathe them.”
I understand perfectly. I understand the alienation. I understand being trapped in a world you never made. I understand having your politics jerked around by The Other. I understand feeling left behind by history and the culture around you. I understand the technology and the music and the culture and the language running away from you. I get it. I lived it. I live it.
But it’s like seeing a snake. There’s things in this world that will scare you so bad you hurt yourself, whether they were going to hurt you or not, and if you do hurt yourself that way, well, that’s a shame. But when you’re scared so bad you choose to hurt somebody else instead, that’s when you have to be stopped. And there’s a whole lot of people who have let themselves be scared that much. We can’t help that you’re chickenshit, but on God, we aren’t going to let you hurt everyone else because you’re chickenshit.
It’s long past time to decide what kind of country we are going to be, and to live by it, but I guess we’re going to decide Tuesday. And then we have some decisions to make about what that means.
What are you prepared to do?