Idiocracy

In the 1990s, I spend a few years working intermittently from Australia’s capital, Canberra. At the time, I was the media and telecommunications reporter for News Limited—Rupert Murdoch’s dominant Australian print-media group—and would glide in for a couple of days here and there, interviewing politicians and staffers and trying to figure out just what federal governments get up to. What I found wasn’t encouraging, and I was reminded this week with yet another bat-shit crazy development in the halls of Congress.

At its core, a functioning democracy is a thing of beauty: the fair election of serious fellow citizens to represent the views of their constituents in the management of a nation. It’s a wonderful notion. But the teetering future of democracy as we know it is another topic for another time. What depressed me in those Canberra sorties was the way this most important of duties had instead been reduced to something quite different. For the politicians and, especially, the journalists covering them, it was all a game. And it had just two players: those with power and those without.

This week’s “impeachment” of US President Joe Biden is pretty much peak democracy as entertainment (although Mike Judge beat everyone to the punch by almost two decades with 2006’s Idiocracy). Here’s the back story. Biden has a troubled son, Hunter, who by all accounts has traded on his family name to make his way in the world. That’s a little sad and a little sordid (paging nepo babies Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Trump Jr.; Liz Cheney; Robert Kennedy Jr., and a million others), but endless, frantic investigations have found … nothing, and nothing implicating Hunter’s dad.

Yet Republicans in the House have power right now, and that’s especially true of a handful of truly moronic (right) wingnuts like Matt Gaetz. They, in turn, have put the screws on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who projects an illusion of power (yes, this shiver in search of a spine is indeed the third most powerful politician in the country) but is actually being squeezed by the short and curlies by Gaetz and the crazy brigade, who managed to help deliver McCarthy his dream job after an embarrassing 14 failures not by voting for him, but by not voting against him.

Anyone with a semblance of seriousness knows the “impeachment” is a joke, which explains its embrace by everyone from Rudy Giuliani to Louis Gohmert (formerly the dumbest guy in Congress, which is an honor given the depth of competition). But it’s not about the serious exercise of one of the gravest steps in US democracy. It’s about sticking it to Biden because Republicans can, and because they’re still peeved that Democrats twice impeached Trump for … er, behavior that flatly demanded impeachment.

But this is where the world’s alleged cradle of democracy is today. And it’s the result of a decades-long erosion of the serious business of doing the people’s work in favor of doing very little work but relishing the game. A quick note: I detest false equivalence, and there’s no equivalence on this one. Democrats have, overwhelmingly, sought to govern and govern seriously (except Joe Manchin—more on him below); Republicans have sought to block and obfuscate and just be petty assholes. While my employer has a “no asshole policy”; Republicans appear to have an “assholes only” one.

All of this is aided and abetted by the US media, where a few crazy things have happened. First, the need to fill airtime across multiple news channels has resulted in the amplification of the “who’s winning?” narrative, to the detriment of both the discussion of serious issues and the core media function of holding the powerful to account (if I see one more chyron declaring something that happened two days ago as “breaking news,” I’ll scream). Second, truly crazy outlets like Newsmax get White House press accreditation. Of all the Constitutional amendments, the first is nearest and dearest to my heart—and Newsmax can say whatever it wants. What it’s not entitled to is the imprimatur of the White House (and Congress, for that matter) giving whatever it serves up a veneer of credibility. Because it ain’t news.

Third, the US media persists in showing bizarre deference to people in power. You notice it most when foreign media get a chance to ask questions of the president or other senior US politicians, which inevitably results in US journalists tut-tutting about the rudeness of these interlopers or admitting they wish they could ask questions like that. They can. They just choose not to, in a complete inversion of the fact in a functioning democracy the whole point is the president and every single politician in the country works for you. You’re their boss, and you can and should ask them whatever the hell you want to.

Finally, there’s the excruciating suck-up fest known as the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. I was a journalist. I know how hard it can be to cultivate contacts, and you’re always balancing what you need from someone against the extent to which you can criticize or push them. But struggling with the need to speak truth to power is quite different from guffawing with Joe Manchin as he systematically undermines legislative efforts favored by majorities of the American people in favor of his personal investments, coal buddies, and probably whoever buffs his Maserati. By the way, it’s no surprise that it’s comedians who most reliably hold truth to power—but just look at how Stephen Colbert’s truly brilliant 2006 speech was received by the audience. And then tell me if anything he said was wrong (spoiler: it wasn’t, but no one in the Washington media likes the truth).

I was reminded of Manchin’s particular odiousness this week not by rumors he’s toying with declaring himself independent and potentially running for president, but data showing child poverty in the US more than doubled from 2021 to 2022. As Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted, this “wasn’t caused by inflation or other macroeconomic problems. It was instead a political choice. The story is in fact quite simple: Republicans and a handful of conservative Democrats blocked the extension of federal programs that had drastically reduced child poverty over the previous two years, and as a result just about all of the gains were lost.”

The prime Democrat who ensured this? Manchin, along with Arizona senator Krysten Sinema, who herself quit the Democratic Party last year to go independent. All you need to know about Manchin is summed up by his response when asked this week if tossing a few million kids into poverty may somehow give him second thoughts. “It’s deeper than that, we all have to do our part,” he said, presumably about to drive the Maserati to the $250,000 houseboat he lives on while in Washington. “The federal government can’t run everything.”

One final thing to note amid this week’s lauding of Republican senator, former governor, and one-time presidential candidate Mitt Romney: he also voted to eliminate the tax credit (along with every senator from his party). That’s why I’m also struggling with the headlines accompanied Romney’s “statesmanlike” decision this week to retire, urging Biden and Trump to follow his lead.

Has Romney made some principled decisions in recent years? Absolutely, and we’ll take any vague display of principle in a system going to hell in a hand basket. Did he make them knowing full well the ultimate outcome would be unchanged given the stance of his colleagues? Absolutely. Has he voted with his colleagues on odious measure after odious measure? Absolutely. And would many of those votes contradict any objective reading of any religious text, including those of his Mormon faith? Absolutely.

Romney may have sorta kinda ended in the right place as it pertains to Trump and the trajectory of the Republican Party, but his career was marked by, you guessed it, the shameless pursuit of power. He was “not unlike the colleagues he criticizes, willing to say whatever it took to win power, even if it meant smearing nearly half the country as essentially unproductive and opening the door to some of the most corrosive forces in American political life,” Times columnist Jamelle Bouie reminded us this week.

So, that’s where we are. The serious business of running a nation has instead been reduced to an exercise in winning and losing. Or, more accurately, who’s a winner and who’s a loser. Republicans defending the decision to begin impeachment proceedings against Biden like to claim it’s all the Democrats’ fault for “weaponizing” the process by going after Trump. But the chain of events resulting in Biden’s impeachment began decades ago, and it’s hard to see what may change the narrative.