This Is Why You’re Exhausted by Politics
This Is Why You’re Exhausted by Politics
Revolutions are glamorous and breaking things is more exciting than saving them.
Housekeeping: I’ll have a short newsletter tomorrow for Juneteenth and then I’m off Thursday/Friday for Denver and the live show.
Tim, A.B., and I recorded a Dark Side/Next Level mash-up last night. I think the Mistress of Despair and I may have broken Tim. Oopsie.
1. Tired
I am not inside your head, but I am guessing that you are exhausted by politics.
By “exhausted,” I don’t mean sick and tired. Or bored. Or annoyed. I mean the kind of weariness that sits down deep, in your bones, because you’re carrying a burden that you long to lay down.
Is that how you feel about politics in general and this election in particular?
Me, too.
Why is it like this?
There are some obvious explanations. We are re-running a race for the first time in generations. The primary ended so quickly that this is the longest general election campaign in modern history.1
We’re still dealing with the mental and emotional effects of the pandemic. The experience of Covid in America—a million dead, mass economic disruption, social isolation, political schism—was so traumatic that, as a society, we’ve chosen to memory-hole it rather than process it.
But as valid as those explanations are, they’re also superficial. Because you will note that the exhaustion is not universal.
You and I, sitting on the side that would like to preserve liberal democracy, are exhausted. The people lined up across the way, the ones who want to transition to illiberalism? They are energized.
There are two deep explanations for this dichotomy.
Let’s start with why the forces of illiberalism seem to be immune to the exhaustion the rest of us feel.
Last week, Damon Linker had a thoughtful essay on living through the end of an era—and how this is not always a nice thing.
Damon is right that we are on the cusp of something new. But where he sees it as the dawning of a new epoch, I believe we are on the cusp of a revolution.2
If we were merely experiencing a new political consensus, as we did at the dawn of the New Deal, we might expect to see, say, a reshuffling about the role of government, or the ends of foreign policy. And we are seeing those from the Republican party. But those views on policy are merely the ornaments on a wholesale reimagining of government as a tool for minority rule and a rejection of the rule of law.3
Those are revolutionary aspirations in that they reject not a policy consensus, but social and governing compacts that date to the Founding. (Or at least the end of the Civil War.)
Revolutions can be energizing, but often that uplift is tempered by circumstances.
Most revolutions are borne of dissatisfaction. Some revolutions are motivated by ethnic or religious hatreds. Every once in a while, you get a revolution propelled by a belief that something better lies on the other side. In every case, revolutions are desperate affairs because the consequences for the revolutionaries, if they lose, are dire.
The Trumpian revolution, on the other hand, seems to be the product of decadent boredom commingled with casual nihilism.
Circumstances for our revolutionaries have never been better. They are so flush that they parade on their boats. And fly upside-down flags outside of their million-dollar suburban homes. And put stickers depicting a hogtied president on their $75,000 pickup trucks. All while posting angry memes to Facebook on their $1,000 iPhones.
We are not talking about les misérables Américains.
Unlike normal revolutionaries, the Trumpist revolutionaries risk nothing. If their gambit succeeds, then they overturn the Constitutional order. And if it fails? They go back to their boats, and trucks, and good-paying jobs, and iPhones.
Maybe a few hundred of them will see jail time for breaking the law. But those who merely demand that others break the law risk nothing.
What’s more, this revolution has discovered that it gets as many bites at the apple as it likes. All defeats and setback are temporary. The movement lives to fight again. They can lose a dozen times—they only have to win once more.
You can see why this revolution is so appealing. It carries the allure of the glorious struggle, without any downsides, and with as many mulligans as they want.
Trumpist revolutionaries get to tell themselves that they are part of a historic, final battle—but also that if they lose, they get to keep their normal, pampered lives. And four years from now they can try again.
2. Cleanup on Aisle 2024
In the normal course of American life, political candidates arise, are considered, and then are either rejected or accepted by the polity. If they are rejected, they recede to make way for the next candidate.4
That’s not how it’s been for the last eight years.
In 2016, voters rejected Trump at the ballot box, only to have him win the Electoral College in a fluke of vote distribution.
In 2018, voters rejected Republican candidates across the country.
In 2020, voters rejected Trump by an even wider margin than they had in 2016.
Then, Trump tried to overturn the results with lawsuits and had to be defeated in scores of legal challenges.
Then Trump attempted a coup, and had to be thwarted by the Capitol Police.5
In 2024, Trump was given yet another chance to attain power. If he is defeated at the ballot box five months from now, he will then have to be defeated a second time in legal challenges to the results. And then a third time as he attempts to substitute legitimate slates of electors with alternate electors.
If, by the grace of God, Trump loses all three of these gambits, he will be the Republican nominee in 2028, and the forces of democracy will have to beat him—first at the ballot box and then in the courts—once more.6
In sum: While the revolutionaries get to have their glamorous Götterdämmerung, over and over, the forces of the status quo have to defend against wave after wave of challenges. And it doesn’t matter how many authoritarian attempts are beaten back. There’s always another one looming.
That is why you’re exhausted.
And let’s be honest about human nature: Breaking things is fun. Especially when you don’t experience any consequences. But running around putting out fires, and cleaning up broken glass, and asking people to stop breaking things? That is not fun. It is enervating.
So while the revolutionary feels like a hero, you feel like a scold.
Stop trying to break the rule of law, you twits. Don’t you understand what happens once that’s gone?
This is not how I had hoped to spend my writing career.
There is some hope for us scolds.
Real revolutions usually succeed. To paraphrase Mr. Cobb, once an idea has taken hold in society, it’s almost impossible to eradicate.
But the Trumpist revolution’s weakness is that it has no ideas. It has goals, but these are motivated by nothing more than will-to-power. There is no logic—not even a faulty logic—behind them.7
A revolution based on boredom and nihilism is vulnerable to boredom and nihilism. At some point the revolutionaries might simply move on to the next thing.
Maybe their avatar dies and they aren’t as interested in his successors. Maybe a new charismatic leader appears, who takes them in a different direction. Or maybe they transfer their passions to some other activity, like pickleball or macramé.
Of course, that assumes they keep losing. Which is not an assumption I’m willing to make.
How do we fight the exhaustion?
First, we try to have some fun while we are scolding the twits and defending the imperfect status quo.
Second, we remain fearless about the fight and clear eyed about reality.
Third, we organize and build communities to rally normal people to the cause of democracy.
We aim at all three of those targets here at The Bulwark. Every day.
Come with us.
3. Social Media Is Terrible
This WSJ piece about a teenage “influencer” and her audience of grown-ass men is troubling.
The mom started the Instagram account three years ago as a pandemic-era diversion—a way for her and her daughter, a preteen dancer, to share photos with family, friends and other young dancers and moms. The two bonded, she said, as they posted photos of the girl dancing, modeling and living life in a small Midwestern town.
The mom, a former marketing manager, oversaw the account and watched as the number of followers grew. Soon, photographers offered to take professional shots for the girl. Brands began sending free apparel for her to model.
“We didn’t even have the page for a month, and brands were like, ‘Can we send her dancewear?’” the mom said. “She became popular really fast.”
The mom also began to notice a disturbing trend in the data that showed up on the account dashboard: Most of the girl’s followers were adult men.
Men left public comments on photos of the daughter with fire and heart emojis, telling her how gorgeous she was. Those were the tamer ones. Some men sent direct messages proclaiming their obsessions with the girl. Others sent pictures of male genitalia and links to porn sites.
Sometimes the mom spent two to four hours a day blocking users or deleting inappropriate comments. At the same time, more sponsorships and deals were trickling in. . . .
The daughter loved coming up with creative posts. She told her mom she wanted to become an influencer, a “dream job” she could pursue after school and dance practice.
“It wasn’t like I was trying to push her to be a star, but part of me thought it was inevitable, that it could happen someday,” the mom said. “She just has that personality.”
The mom was torn. To reach the influencer stratosphere, the account would need a lot more followers—and she would have to be less discriminating about who they were. Instagram promotes content based on engagement, and the male accounts she had been blocking tend to engage aggressively, lingering on photos and videos and boosting them with likes or comments. Running them off, or broadly disabling comments, would likely doom her daughter’s influencer aspirations.
That was a reason to say no. There were also reasons to say yes. The mom felt the account had brought her closer with her daughter, and even second- and third-tier influencers can make tens of thousands of dollars a year or more. The money could help pay for college, the mom thought.
The mom said yes. And with that, she grew to accept a grim reality: Being a young influencer on Instagram means building an audience including large numbers of men who take sexual interest in children. . . .
Instagram makes it easy for strangers to find photos of children, and its algorithm is built to identify users’ interests and push similar content. Investigations by The Wall Street Journal and outside researchers have found that, upon recognizing that an account might be sexually interested in children, Instagram’s algorithm recommends child accounts for the user to follow, as well as sexual content related to both children and adults.
That algorithm has become the engine powering the growth of an insidious world in which young girls’ online popularity is perversely predicated on gaining large numbers of male followers.
“If you want to be an influencer and work with brands and get paid, you have to work with the algorithm, and it all works with how many people like and engage with your post,” said the Midwestern mom. “You have to accept it.”
Read the whole thing. “I am pimping my daughter in front of pedophiles because it brings us closer together” is not a sentiment I have heard before.
I try very hard not to judge other parents. In this case, I’m failing.
In reality, this campaign has been ongoing since January 6, 2021. Anyone with sense understood on that day that Biden-Trump II was the most likely matchup for 2024. So we’re not in month five of the general election. We’re in year four.
This may be a distinction without a difference, but when I think of political eras I think New Deal, or Cold War. I see this moment as a category difference.
You can’t get much clearer than J.D. Vance saying that we needed to “litigate” the 2020 election “politically,” irrespective of facts and the law.
This is not true always and everywhere. At lower levels, candidates use losing campaigns as training grounds.
Also by Mike Pence, a handful of brave Republicans, and a Democratic congressional delegation that took its duties seriously.
Unless he is called home by the Lord, of course.
I am sorry, but Claremont’s and Oren Cass’s attempts to retrofit intellectual scaffolding around MAGA are a joke.
Had not thought to this: the softest revolutionaries ever: cosplay revolution but return to their cloistered worlds.
Love this article, but I wonder if the characterization of the right’s revolution as lacking ideas – and that their motivation is nothing more than the “will-to-power,” based on “boredom and nihilism” – is seriously misguided.
MAGA does have one powerful undergirding counter-idea (for what is more aptly called their COUNTERREVOLUTION.) Their counter-idea is, to paraphrase Orwell, that “All people are created equal but White Males are more equal than others.” (Ask yourselves why white male billionaires are flocking to MAGA even though the Biden stock market has hit all-time highs. It seems that the idea of White Male Privilege reigning supreme is even more powerful than making millions/billions for these white men.)
But our ideas on the Progressive Left are stronger. America birthed a radical revolution based on the novel ideas that all people are created equal, and that Rule of Law should be the law of the land. NO ONE SHOULD BE ABOVE THE LAW. These ideas were premised on the Enlightenment principle that there was no such thing as the Divine Right of Kings. But as I write, the Supreme Court MAGA Majority is poised to reinstate the Divine Right of Kings to the presidency. The unspoken, unacknowledged fact, perhaps unable to be seen by the Left’s white males, is that going forward, the King/president will always be male, and he will always be white.
White male supremacy. One mega-MAGA idea to rule them all. It undergirds The MAGA counter-revolution’s Project 25 which is chockful of counterclockwise ideas. They want nothing less than to throw the rest of us back into a pre-1776, pre-Enlightenment state of poverty and servitude with no rights whatsoever. Authoritarianism writ large.
To prevail this time around, we must overcome the gaslighting being done by the narcissistic, powerful, wealthy white men in the Republican party. But even more than that, we must overcome our own reticence to accept the fact that racism is the biggest, on-going threat to the sacred idea that we are all created equal and that no one is above the law.
This means that we must have the courage to see and acknowledge MAGA’s mega-IDEA – that of reinstating white male supremacy – for the true threat that it is to the American, Democratic way of life. #VoteBlue #VoteBidenHarris