The Circus

                We’re in the middle of a full-blown political circus.  Nothing that happens in the next month or so has anything to do with the problems we face or the future we hope to build.  But the circus will dominate the news and draw all the oxygen out of the room until it packs up its tent and leaves town.  Our politics has been trending in this direction for a while.  The lies and misinformation used to be spread by politicians who knew they were lies but told them to rile folks up, thinking they would be able to control the damage once they were in power.  Now the circus is led by an orange mutant, the biproduct of a drunken one-night stand between the Bearded Lady and the Sword Swallower, who doesn’t know that the lies are lies.  This is what it looks like when political cynicism devolves into political malevolence. 

                It’s not that the issues at stake aren’t real and consequential; they are.  It’s just that we live in a political system that has lost the ability to self-correct its tendency to embrace the absurd.  How do you impeach someone who violates his constitutional oath three or four times a day?  Impeachment was meant to be a serious remedy imposed on serious situations involving serious people.  Even in 1974, when Republicans were in the early stages of learning how to do this, that was still true.  Now we’re all spilling around the center ring trying to catch the clown car.  Clinton’s impeachment was already more frivolous than Nixon’s, not just because of the severity of the charges, but because the people directing it had already abandoned any pretense of reality.  In this case, the Democrats are sincere, but they’re too late.

                The show trial in the Senate will be, as one of my former colleagues used to say on underdeveloped student essays, ‘too brief to mention.’  The last thing that the circus can abide is evidence and logic.  We’re going to be treated to kabuki theater at its minimalist best.  We all know how this is going to turn out.  We all know that this is going to be an act of desperate distraction, and we know it’s going to work.  My point is not to denigrate what the Democrats are trying to do; they have no choice.  My point is that we know it’s going to fail because the systems and protocols we used to reference in hushed tones as the pillars of our democracy have crumbled.  Even the night watchman got drunk and went home.

                I think the proper response to all of this is to stay focused on the long game.  We gave the liar a chance to come clean because it was the right thing to do not because we thought it would work.  Our job is to stay focused on what’s outside the tent, the things that we can influence.  What we can do is build and plan for the next election.  What we can do is to give the 53% of the people who think Dumpty should be removed from office a way to follow through on that plan.  Let the House make its case.  Let the evidence pour over the deaf ears of the Senate majority, and then let’s plan for their defeat.  The long game is not just a return to where we were but the formation of a new democracy.  I wrote after his election that Trump didn’t know how to govern, so he would try to rule.  A minority party in a democracy has little else to hang their hat on.  The correct response is not to try to convince them of their errors; the correct response is to defeat them.

                Enjoy the show.  Most of the characters will be so over-blown and extreme that the only response will be laughter.  Watch the circus; stay for the fireworks, and realize that there is going to be a huge pile of elephant dung when this is over.  This is an opportunity.  We are both blessed and cursed to be living through the transition from a formal democracy to a more essential and radical form of democracy.  I don’t presume to know what that should look like, but I’m excited about the possibility of being a part of the conversation.  Don’t fight over what was.  Build what’s next.