Now, I've been through this before. I can recall people having that opinion in the early 1970s when the government was in turmoil following Watergate. And the republic recovered. I have every reason to believe that it will again.
But there are things that are certainly scary out there. Samuelson noted a collection of them in his recent article. Titanic issues that require government action (immigration is one of them, which is a hot topic right now), that aren't being addressed and he feels won't be. Some, well all, haven't been addressed for years and there's good reason to believe that they aren't going to be addressed soon.
And the nation's politicians provide little comfort on this. The President certainly doesn't inspire confidence and indeed inspires contempt in about half of the voting demographic. The Republican Party appears to only be awakening to this as a something it needs to react to publicly now, two years into his term. But in fairness, they're dealing with nearly 40 years of ingrained habit which require them to basically lie to the electorate, and overcoming that length of habitual conduct isn't easy.
The Democrats, for their part, do no better. Leader wise, the best they can come up with is the same aged Baby Boomers who inspired contempt in their own base. The exceptions rising to the top don't offer hope but real concern for anyone paying attention. When Claire McCaskill noted that she didn't understand why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is such an object of political fascination, she's noting something very serious. Ocasio-Cortez is the very type of politician that Jefferson predicated the fall of Democracies on, i.e., loudmouth populist brats who offer their constituency money separated from the pockets of others. Michigan's female freshman Congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib's first notable comment to the press, in which she claims to have recalled a recent conversation with her son, is disturbing:
Great. So with the new "women's Congress", which is overwhelmingly male in spite of what pundits are gushing about, two of the new female firebrands already show themselves too immature to be in Congress, or indeed on any sort of board, while the nation's oldest political party puts its hopes in the hands of those who are decades past their prime and the second oldest seems to be conducting a multiyear behind the scenes rearguard action that it can only semi control or admit."Look mama, you won. Bullies don’t win"“You’re right, they don’t. And we’re gonna go in and impeach the motherfucker"
No wonder Beto O'Rourke actually looks like an adult in this atmosphere.
Well, I'm not ready to conclude that thing are hopeless yet, but I will note that for those with historical memories a lot of this is really distressingly familiar. There was an era when European democracies saw the serious adults leave the room and only the shouting demagogues of the left and the right were left, together with their true secular believers who were long on fantasy and brash verbiage but short on intelligence. That lead to disaster. Democratic institutions failed completely and cranks from the left and right, with their base in the radicalized dispossessed, rose to the top. Disaster was the result.
If we can take any comfort from history on this it's that the established democracies didn't take that route, although at least one of them very nearly did and a quasi established one in fact did. But the flip side of that is that it took a titanic economic crisis in the democratic states to bring the adults back into the room and get to work. We can only hope that things aren't anywhere near as broken as they're starting to appear to be, that the rifts in the populace of the republic aren't as wide as they appear to be, and that isn't the prerequisite to a return to sober behavior. We might likewise hope that Samuelson is wrong.
I suspect he is, and that the hope is justified. But reading the headlines wouldn't give a person any reason to think so.
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