Political Incompetence Will Save Us

As I write this, it is the Sunday before Christmas, and I'm feeling strangely calm about the future of the nation. The sources of that calm are the US Congress and the incoming administration. I know, I know, I railed about Trump and his Lollipop Guild of advisors and the effects they could have on society. But watching the House of Representatives wrestle with the seemingly simple task of keeping our civil servants employed and paid during the holidays, frankly gives me hope.

And, Trump himself and the ghost of government's past, Steve Bannon, said things this past week that caught me off guard. No, Bannon said nothing about personal hygiene, but he did call for the new administration to raise taxes on the rich. Yeah, I know, me too.

And Trump himself called for eliminating the debt ceiling. Now that is something I have advocated for years in that it is only used for theatrical power struggles and pandering which result in periodically shutting the government down, and in 2011, costing the country it's credit rating and thusly, costing us all money.

In the 2011 debt ceiling crisis, Republicans in Congress demanded deficit reductions to approve an increase in the debt ceiling. During this time, U.S. Treasury debt was stripped of its AAA rating by Standard & Poor’s—a rating it held for more than 70 years.

And in 2023, during the Kabuki Theatre of voting endlessly to make Kevin McCarthy the temporary House Speaker, and the subsequent nuttiness over funding the government again, another ratings agency had enough.

Fitch Ratings stripped the federal government of its triple-A bond rating, citing big government deficits and a steady deterioration in governance over the past two decades.

I find that last line a gross understatement.

You see, no other country except Denmark has a hard and fast, numeric debt ceiling to play Lucy and the football with. Most all industrialized nations simply have a percentage of debt to GDP limit, usually around 60%. That means you simply wrangle over how to get there, not risk the country's credit rating. But, hey, what's the fun in that?

But now, the American equivalent of the British Official Monster Raving Looney Party (look it up), the House Freedom Caucus, has decided that they can't wait for the inauguration or the opening of the new congressional session to throw sand in the gears of democracy. Never put off to January things you can eff up today.

The group numbers such stalwarts as Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Ronny Jackson, Gym Jordan and are fronted by the most distracting goatee in Christendom, Representative Chip Roy. And they have already announced they'll go to war with the new administration, Democrats, hell, everyone in the coming months.

Roy has also said that Speaker Mike Johnson is living on borrowed time and will face another removal vote followed by another circular firing squad as they go through a list of nonsensical candidates from the shallow end of the intellectual pool until they settle on another non-entity who annoys the smallest number of members.

That somehow comforts me. The inability of enough members to compromise on anything ensures that the coming Congress will be as unproductive as the last, meaning minimal damage to the programs we all depend on.

Add to that Donald Trump's irresistible urge to fire off sophomoric and unfunny jokes about anyone, or any foreign leader, who disagrees with him. Witness the witless yucks about Justin Trudeau and our second-largest trading partner, Canada.

Add to that the unofficial co-President, and chief Twit at the former Twitter, Elon Musk, and his similar penchant for insulting posts when anyone calls out his political observations, posts that sound like the script for "Mean Girls II."

So, basically we have a couple of internet trolls in charge of the country and as long as they are occupied with that, I'm fine. Yes, they will try their best to take a wrecking ball to much of the government, but so much of Project 2025 is such pie-in-the-sky libertarian nonsense that I now doubt they'll get very far.

Oh, Elon and Vivek will bark at the moon in press conferences and hearings, but will they really dismantle half the government? I'll bet you a fancy dinner they won't. Call me in 2028 and I'll tell you what restaurant I want to go to.

Now, speaking of 2028. Will people still vote for this twaddle in our next quadrennial get-together? Will someone remind them that we're not drilling any more than before and that the price of eggs stayed the same? I hope so, because that is my prediction.

You can chant drill, baby, drill until the cows come home, but the only thing that will increase oil production is higher oil prices, which means? Anyone? Class? Yes, Bueller, higher gas prices.

And the President has, let me check, yeah, zero control over the price of groceries, the most beautiful word in the English language according to Trump. No, I don't know where the hell that comment came from either. Probably from some rally riff worthy of Lenny Bruce, if he had been slower and less funny.

But, let's assume that, blessedly, age and the Constitution prevent Trump from another term, so who will they go with? The betting now is the execrable J.D. Vance. And the thing that does actually worry me about Hillbilly-Vanilli is that he is a devotee of this guy...

This is a right-wing blogger and podcaster named Curtis Yarvin. He was a tech guy in Silicon Valley, but now preaches what can only be described as a totalitarian takeover of the country, all while looking like that dweeb in 4th period biology class. Some quotes...

“Democracy is a failed and dying form of governance”

“The masses are too stupid for self-rule”

"Democracy is so decrepit and ineffective, one might ask how it is that America became the world’s great superpower and maintained that position for the last century. My answer contains two parts: first, that nothing lasts forever. Second, while American supremacy may once have rested on innovation and growth, the country, now a bloated empire, has been surviving for decades on the power of myth-making and mass illusions.”

Need more? How about this description in The Guardian...

For years, Yarvin has consistently held to a number of explicitly anti-democratic beliefs: republican self-government has already ended; real power is exercised oligarchically in a small number of prestigious academic and media institutions he calls the Cathedral; and a sclerotic democracy should be replaced by a strict hierarchy headed by a single person whose role is that of a monarch or CEO.

He also thinks that current liberal democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction.

Now, he would ordinarily be dismissed as some sort of fringe head-case, but it seems he has caught the attention of several tech types and our incoming Vice-President.

 “There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin who’s written about some of these things. One has to basically accept that the whole thing is going to fall in on itself. The task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved and then when the inevitable collapse comes you build back the country in a way that’s actually better.”

Yes, that is a quote from J.D. Vance.

Yarvin is the originator of the neo-reactionary or “dark enlightenment” movement. The movement has been funded by tech billionaires, most notably ex-Meta board member Peter Thiel. It has only strengthened since then, snagging more tech billionaires as friends and backers - Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Vivek Ramaswamy and, unsurprisingly, Elon Musk, as well as national GOP office-bearers like Blake Masters and Josh Hawley.

The Guardian continues...

In 2022 Vox called Yarvin the “person who’s spent the most time gaming out how, exactly, the US government could be toppled and replaced”.

Yarvin suggests that a would-be American autocrat should campaign on and win an electoral mandate for an authoritarian program. They should purge the federal bureaucracy in a push Yarvin has anagrammatized as Rage (for “retire all government employees”).

They should simply ignore any court rulings that seek to constrain them. They should bring Congress to heel, in part by mobilizing their populist base against recalcitrant lawmakers. And liberal or mainstream media organizations and universities should be summarily closed.

We've been here before, most notably the so-called "Business Plot" against FDR wherein several top business leaders like JP Morgan, Jr, Irénée du Pont, Robert Sterling Clark of the Singer sewing machine fortune, and the chief executives of General Motors, Birds Eye and General Foods plotted a coup d'etat to remove Roosevelt and stop his "socialist" New Deal. That General Foods exec was Marjorie Merriweather Post who built this lavish place in Florida called Mar A Lago.

Knowing the probable, for now, 2028 nominee subscribes to some guru blogger who advocates another coup is not really comforting. And I say that with some authority as a guru blogger.

But for now at least, I take comfort in the basic incompetence of our current crop of leaders. So, rail on Chip. Keep entertaining us with nonsense, Marjorie. And Lauren, take control of the joystick of government and steer us toward a blissful happy landing of inaction. Or a drink after the play, whichever works for you.

America thanks you.