Then, Now, and Forever: The People Are the Problem
The Hunter Biden Pardon Discourse and our infantilization of voters.
1. Children of God
The Hunter Biden Pardon Discourse is a perfect distillation of our dominant political asymmetry.
On the one side we have an outgoing Democratic president, who did not even run for re-election. There is a robust public debate over his perfectly legal action. Some of his supporters are defending it. Some are criticizing it. Some elected Democratic politicians are criticizing it, too.
Hundreds upon hundreds of columns in the mainstream media are being written about Biden and the pardon. Most of them seem critical.1 Even supposedly nonpartisan analysts took the Hunter Biden pardon and extrapolated it to the moon as a litmus test for the Democratic party writ large.
Meanwhile, the actual incoming president of the United States has signaled that he’s going to fire the director of the FBI for [reasons] and replace him with a psychopath. And everyone just kind of shrugs.
There is no public debate on this move among Trump supporters. Not a single elected Republican has questioned the president-elect’s decision to fire the FBI director—let alone criticize it.
Sure. Whatcha gonna do? That’s just Trump and Republicans. We know they can’t do better and we know that none of their voters care.
How to explain this asymmetry? I have a theory.
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