The Unbearable Vacuity of the Moment

When nothing seems to matter

On the New York Times Opinion page today, an extraordinary moment occurs in a conversation between Michelle Cottle, David French, and David Wallace-Wells. With remarkable equanimity the three opinion writers readily agree that the United States has just lost a war with Iran: “We learned that Iran, with its cheap drones, could match the U. S. military. … We’ve learned something about the humbling of the American empire and what we can do in the world.” Fair enough. But then Wallace-Wells observes that the public—We the People, in other words, we sensitive arbiters of the res publica who so magisterially rose in righteous anger over the price of eggs under Biden and the bailout of bankers under Obama, empowering the populist revolt—remain strangely unmoved by this “humbling” wound to our imperial amour-propre: “It is not a Topic A conversation on the news,” Wallace-Wells rightly remarks. “It’s not the leading item in newspapers like ours. It is not dominating social media. And you see a sort of growing awareness that this is the kind of bad imperial behavior that the U.S. engages in without any real outrage about it.”

This is extraordinary, but it’s by no means the most extraordinary comment in this piece on our contemporary torpor. Wallace-Wells goes on to say this:

That alone is a kind of depressing, distressing development: that the public could come to hold those two thoughts in their head at once, to say, “We understand that this is irresponsible imperial behavior by a madman president, and we’re not even paying all that close attention to it.” [emphasis added]

To which Cottle responds: “Yeah, we just shrug. ‘Yeah, whatever.’”

Let me be clear. I’m not disagreeing at all with this view, shocking though it is. I agree that the United States has just lost a war with Iran. I agree that this loss was the result of “irresponsible imperial behavior.” And I agree that this irresponsible behavior was authorized and intermittently overseen by a president who, while he may not be a “madman” in any sense recognized by DSM-5, is nevertheless so feckless, corrupt, ignorant, and consumed by petty grudges and grandiose obsessions that a mad king might well be preferable to the concupiscent kingpin with whom we are currently saddled.

And yet, and yet … We the People remain strangely unmoved. We just shrug. Perhaps this is because we are convinced that retribution is just around the corner, that the democratic process that has brought us to this juncture will soon correct itself—doesn’t it always?—and reintroduce the vaunted checks and balances that have lately gone missing.

And yet if we believe that this confidence in ultimate vindication explains our torpor in the face of such extraordinary events, we owe it to ourselves to explain why we seem able to shake off our somnolence long enough to protest vociferously the lapses of judgment on the part of the young activists who recruited a candidate as flawed as Graham Platner to run for the Senate in Maine. Of course, if we lose Maine, our chances of retaking the Senate plunge dramatically, and if we don’t retake the Senate, what chance have we of halting the “irresponsible imperial behavior by a madman president”?

Could an empire of this magnitude—”like nobody has ever seen before,” as the “mad” president likes to say—really have been brought this low by a handful of twenty- and thirty-somethings drunk on the notion that the way to the People’s heart is to find a candidate who can put on a flannel work shirt and swear like a sailor? Isn’t the more pertinent question to ask how a polity with a constitution like that of the United States, with its myriad veto points, and a central government structure designed to place numerous institutional hurdles in the way of any executive, no matter how mad or irresponsible, could have been so thoroughly and rapidly commandeered by this lamentable band of rogues? Were they exceptionally ruthless and cunning, or have the termites been eating away for decades now at barriers that once seemed as solid as the doors of the Capitol before January 6, 2021? I incline toward the latter theory; the rogues in question, with a few notable exceptions, resemble the Three Stooges, not Ocean’s Eleven.

If institutional decay has brought us to this pass, we need to know more about where the wormholes have developed. This strikes me as a question in regard to which liberals and conservatives might find common ground. No one, right or left, has an interest in licensing irresponsible behavior by an unhinged executive. Everyone, right and left, has an interest in rousing the public from its dogmatic slumbers, its complacent belief that “democracy will provide,” as if We the People don’t from time to time need to hear words of wisdom whispered in our ears, even if the whisperer isn’t wearing a flannel shirt or sporting a pectoral tattoo. Perhaps the problem lies not with the judgment of the candidate recruiters but rather with widespread beliefs about what kind of candidate needs to be recruited. Donald Trump won the working-class vote despite, not because of, his sartorial choices and suspect grammar.