The System Is Broken. What Is The Plan?

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There is an alternate timeline where, instead of enlisting in the Army at 18, my parents pay to send me to UChicago. I major in international relations and find work at a conservative think tank, just like I wanted to.

In this timeline I do not meet people who grew up catastrophically poor but instead hobnob with the scions of the incomprehensibly wealthy. I never really learn about how most people live in this country and set about making myself wealthy in accordance with my never-challenged Objectivist upbringing.

I compensate for my hideous insecurity and shame around not joining the military by fetishizing the troops and violence to an even more unhealthy degree than I did in high school. Our losses in Iraq and Afghanistan compound my feelings of inadequacy. I grow furious at our cowardice and weakness in the face of an enemy I both fear and despise. If only we could go back to a different, braver time when America was truly great. If only we could make America great again.

In that alternate universe I am, at this very moment, part of a movement willing to do anything and everything to win. I am happy and even proud to lie, cheat, steal, and exact violent retribution on my enemies. I know that the communists are life-hating ghouls who want to make everything as small and shabby as they are–I have known this my entire life. I ride the wave of my fury and it feels good to win and I will never, ever, get sick of winning because I will never stop being afraid that I am secretly a degenerate and cowardly loser.

I do not live in that universe, thankfully. I live in this one instead, where I watch helplessly as the party that ought to stand in opposition to authoritarian nationalism clings desperately to old rules that Republicans threw out long ago. A party of poetry readings and smug thinkpieces and promises unfulfilled. 

God forbid you point out these failings, either. 1984 may be, as Madison Cawthorn claims, a great fiction novel to read but these days I find myself thinking more about Animal Farm:

It was always absurd, from a temporal perspective, to imagine that Biden could save us from Trump. The 2016 Presidential election did not happen out of nowhere. Biden’s America led to Trump’s America; any effort to return to Biden’s America is simply pressing rewind. Once you press play, the tape inexorably takes you to Trump once more. 

At first, I thought the problems with Biden ran no deeper. Wrangling Manchin and Sinema and Republicans who more closely resemble rattlesnakes than an opposition party would require a level of political genius rarely found in history, and few have ever accused Joseph Robinette Biden of being a genius.

It is becoming increasingly obvious, however, that Biden is worse than incompetent.

On June 30, 2022, six days after the reversal of Roe v Wade, news broke that our Commander in Chief planned to nominate an anti-abortion judge to a lifetime position in Kentucky as part of a deal with Mitch McConnell, the man who infamously refused to strike a deal with Democrats on any Obama Supreme Court nominee for 293 days. And then, despite outcry, Joe Biden moved forward with the nomination anyway, right up until the deal got scrapped–not because of some sudden awakening of principle within our President’s geriatric chest but because Rand Paul, for reasons not yet known, scuttled the nomination. And the reason for the appointment itself? Not some four-dimensional chess move by a political mastermind but a favor for a friend:

The White House has released no contradictory narrative. This, apparently, is a story they find acceptable.

I do not know whether the rumors of Biden’s senility are materially true and I do not care: they are true in every way that matters. Our President believes himself to be the leader of an America that stopped existing decades ago. He is playing a friendly game of chess–the two-dimensional kind–while his opponent actively lights the board on fire.

The nice thing about chess is that, unless someone cheats, the best player wins. Maybe once in  a while the better player overlooks something, makes a mistake, gets caught out, but on a long enough timeline the results are fairly clear. Chess is a system of rules that produces excellent results.

Liberals tend to think of American politics in the same way: a good system that generates good or at least bearable outcomes over time. Sometimes the rules need tweaking, but there are procedures in place for responsible, incremental change. The American political universe arcs towards justice, aberrations like Donald Trump notwithstanding.

But what happens when the system stops producing good results? 

What happens when you wake up to find that six geriatric husks in black robes have decided that half the country no longer has a right to bodily autonomy? When you realize that, with one exception, those venerable monsters sit in the seats they do because their predecessors happened to die during the presidency of the man who nominated them? That even that one exception who should have been Obama’s judge could just as easily have belonged to Trump if Scalia had clung just a bit more tightly to life? That all this happened in absolute accordance with the rules?

There is a difference between caring for the system and placing one’s entire faith in it, and many liberals have crossed over into that second camp. The American political machine, to them, becomes a morality machine that spits out moral results. These outcomes must be moral, because the system produced them. Continue to play by the rules and it will all work out in the end.

When the system begins to fail–when it proves inadequate for present crises or when large swaths of people decide to purposefully break it–those who have faith only in the system experience the death of God. Their responses to the world become more and more unhinged until, in response to the news that the Supreme Court will consider decoupling the electoral college from state popular votes, the most common liberal response is “this is why you need to vote!” That, barring an act of God, the Supreme Court will remain utterly unaffected by your votes long enough to reach a decision that renders your votes useless is outside the liberal imagination. It cannot happen. The system cannot break from the inside like that.

I have never thought this way.

My shadow self and I don’t agree on much philosophically, but we are far from opposites. We both believe in morality that transcends political consensus, however different that morality might be. Human rights, given to us by God or nature or it doesn’t matter what, are ours forever. No government has the right to take those rights away, even if it follows every rule to do so. Systems often, historically speaking, produce catastrophically bad results, and when they get bad enough the people often see to it that those systems fall. As, we both believe, they should. 

Like most of the conservatives howling at the gate today, I was raised to understand from a very early age that there is evil out there–real evil–and that it is our duty to resist it by any means necessary. I cannot remember a time growing up when I did not understand that armed resistance might be necessary to save us all from communism. Sometimes systemic outcomes are unacceptable. Some things are not up for debate. Coming for my inalienable rights? Cold dead hands, bucko.

The ends cannot justify all means, but ends do matter. Conservatives ask, rhetorically, how I can support property destruction in the name of Black Lives Matter but not in the name of Trump’s desperate attempts to hold onto power. The answer: because BLM is a moral movement. Trumpism is not. Conservatives differentiate between BLM and J6 on ideological grounds as well, whatever they might claim. They just do it in reverse. Only a liberal could ever equate the two.

I would vastly prefer to work within a system for all the reasons Hobbes outlined back in 1651. When you throw out the rules of politics, the rules of power and strength step in and life becomes “perpetuall Warre of every man against his neighbour”: nasty, brutish and short. 

Like Hobbes, I have much side-eye for those who rush too quickly to Warre as a solution. We are, however, seeing what happens when one side declares war and the other fails to show up. We can sit and play chess all we like. The board is still on fire.

A blitzkrieg crackles on the horizon. The only question left to the left-of-centers is whether to be Britain or France. 

I do not think liberals do not understand what I have always known: conservatives do not merely disagree with you. They hate you. To them you are not simply the opposition party but avatars of an enemy hell-bent on destroying America: communists or globalists or, increasingly, servants of the devil himself. Not only does the New Right have no desire to compromise with you, they believe it would be actively evil to do so. One does not compromise with Stalin or break bread with Satan. These are things you expunge from the body politic, one way or another. A few on the fringe are taking that logic to its obvious conclusion but that fringe grows a little less fringy every day. For now it is just “Antifa” and “groomers” who should be thrown out of helicopters or run over in the street or arrested for pedophelia. Expect that list to grow in the coming months and years.

Liberals wring their hands and speak of Gilead, which tells me they still think of dystopia as fiction. It will not look like that at all. It will look like paralysis, and shrinking, and astonishment, and the voices screaming VOTE faltering into silence as that right is stripped from us. It will look like finding ways to accept the unacceptable because the liberal worldview provides no way to fight.

It will look like Pamela Paul both-sidesing the removal of bodily autonomy and the medical reality of trans men because if those two things carry the same amount of danger then the first thing isn’t really so bad after all.

It will look like Joe Biden condemning protests outside of Supreme Court justices’ houses and then nominating an anti-abortion justice to a lifetime appointment as a favor to a friend.

It will look like Nancy Pelosi reading a poem and asking you for another $20.

They will tell you, vote. And you will say, the Supreme Court will be a 6-3 conservative body for the foreseeable future, so what is the plan? And they will say, vote. And you will say, redistricting and demographics make it basically impossible for Democrats tol ever gain the 2/3rds majority it would take to actually unfuck this–even doing away with the filibuster is apparently off the table–so what is the plan? What weill we do when the Supreme Court allows for state legislatures to appoint their own electors regardless of the will of the people? What happens when they come for gay marriage, and contraception, and protection against discrimination?

And they will say, vote. Vote! What is wrong with you? Surely you don’t want Farmer Jones back? Vote like your life depends on it.

Voting does matter, at least for now. I plan to vote this November and I think everyone who has the time and inclination should do the same–it could buy time and who knows, maybe the Democrats will somehow find a spine at this late date. Two hours in line is a highly reasonable amount of time to gamble on long odds. Besides, it might be the last time your vote counts. Do it once more, for old time’s sake.

It would be foolish, however, to consider voting anything more than a gamble unlikely to pay off. Between Republican machinations and the failure of the founding fathers to anticipate the inevitability of political parties, the system has failed. No serious will to fix it on a national level exists–we cannot even get rid of the filibuster for God’s sake. As far as I can tell, the war is over. We lost.

The best case scenario at this point is de facto balkanization–a world in which state governments have more power than the federal one. This is not a good solution–it does not preserve the human rights of those who live in red states–but it is the best one on offer. We are lucky that the conservative project has historically involved stripping the federal government of power. I do not think this will last forever but it will last for a little while, and states should take as much advantage of that fact as possible.

Local politics have never mattered more.  

Take that $20 Pelosi keeps asking you for and give it to a state senator. A city councilperson. A municipal candidate. Get active in their campaigns or simply in community outreach. Not only will this make more of a policy difference than any national action at this point, it will force you to get to know your neighbors. You will meet and cultivate relationships with people in your community willing to spend time and effort to make things run correctly. 

As things grow darker, these are relationships you are going to need.

The towering oak tree is hollow with rot. No amount of water or fertilizer or poems or thoughts and prayers can save dead wood.

It is time to nurture the offshoots instead.