If you haven't read Steve's take on this singularly awful Brooks column, or that of Eric Levitz at New York Magazine, you might want to look at them first.
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| Edmond van Daele as Robespierre in Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927) |
Or, 'Tis 30 years since: A look back at the Warren presidency from the imaginary future.
Few could imagine in the second decade of the 21st century that our divided country would ever find peace and unity under the beneficent rule of the Moderate Liberal Party that has now held power for 25 years, though one of them was certainly me, I mean one of the imagineers, for I had always retained my faith in the essential goodness of Americans.
For others, however, there was a crisis of legitimacy. Many people had the general impression that legitimacy was not what it had once been and was now something different. Others felt that there was too little, or too much. It can't have had anything to do with the United States for the first time electing a president with African ancestry at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, although undoubtedly some people said that other people thought that was illegitimate, because that's how divisive and hurtful they used to be, and then the ones it was said about felt bad.
For many decades before that, politics in the U.S. had worked with two parties, a good one, the Republicans, and a bad one, the Democrats, but now people began to suffer from a conviction that the old order was corrupt and incompetent, and an inchoate desire for some radical transformation, and so in 2016 the Republicans were suddenly taken over by the most corrupt and incompetent man of all, a wealthy former real estate developer and television star called Donald Trump, who won the presidential election.
Well, the less said about that the better! I haven't got all day! More importantly, some of the Democrats also decided the old order was corrupt and incompetent, and longed inchoately for some radical transformation, and were gradually taken over by a famous opponent of debt slavery called Elizabeth Warren, who won the 2020 election hands down, as well as gaining a slight majority in the Senate, even though people didn't really like her very much, in my opinion, and nobody I knew liked her at all, except I suppose for my ex-wife and the kids, whose judgment is suspect, and some of my colleagues at the newspaper.
After that election, Trump was instantly reviled by everyone, while the rest of the Republicans embarked on a long, steady decline. Republican voters, mostly older, were dying out, and they weren’t making new ones, since they were mostly past childbearing age, and for the next two decades nobody heard from them, which sounds like Chekov's gun on the mantelpiece, doesn't it, that's going to be used in act 3, but I'm writing this much too fast to remember it and bring them out by the time I get to the end of the column.
The Democratic party was now divided, in any event, between Progressives and Liberals. Progressives believed that our nation was founded in 1619, when the first enslaved people arrived in Virginia, rather than 1621, when white people decided to build a shining city on a hill in Massachusetts, and called for more structural change to things like the Supreme Court, the Electoral College and the basic structures of the market. Liberals had a basic faith in the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, and capitalism, and inherited Frederick Douglass's view that America is the last best hope on earth as well as millennial nationalism and classical liberal philosophy, which are all the same thing.
The American educated class celebrated the Warren victory by calling out to the down-and-out all around the world to invite them for a brand new treat, because summer was metaphorically here and the time was ripe for dancing in the street. But President Warren rejected all the Liberals from her cabinet and staffed the government with inexperienced Progressives, and when she tried to pass her legislative agenda, every proposal failed in the Senate: Medicare for all, free college, decriminalizing undocumented border crossing, even the wealth tax, because the power given to underpopulated rural states under the Constitution means Senators from those states can block anything no matter how much people want it, which is the way the Founding Fathers and Frederick Douglass preferred, obviously.
And then not only did these bills all fail but there was a recession as well, for some reason I haven't worked out yet, but surely it's bound to happen even though all the economists say it will come in 2020. The Warren presidency had already failed, and it was still only 2021!
Things got ugly. This meant two failed presidencies in a row, Warren's and that other one, I'll remember the name in a minute, and it had a devastating effect on American morale. Now there was only one party, the Democrats, but three political tendencies, the Conservative Populists, the Progressive Populists, and the Moderate Liberals, and nobody could put together a governing majority, because we seem to have started using a parliamentary system on the way, by dream logic.
And then I woke up and wrote one last paragraph or two about how the Moderate Liberals won the 2024 election thanks to the immigrants, who hate universal healthcare, free college, and undocumented border crossing. And then culture war, class war, and demographic war ceased, and I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea, take that you climate change nuts, and the United States devoted themselves to the creation of a New Moderate Man! Because we Moderates don't fuck around.
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