Everything We Were Taught About Politics is Wrong

The world is so strange right now because the reality thrust upon us is coming unglued before our very eyes

I wanted to let everyone know that I had the great pleasure of interviewing Dr. Richard Wolff this week over at The Muckrake Podcast. Dr. Wolff is a personal hero of mine and I hope you’ll take the time to hear what he has to say.

As always, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Dispatches From A Collapsing State. It helps this newsletter grow and supports my work. If you have subscribed, consider sending this to a friend, coworker, or family member who needs to hear it. Things are perilous and we need to get the word out.

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I got an email this morning that I’m going to sit with for awhile. This is from “Thomas” (name changed by request):

Dear Jared,

This is going to be a bit of a wild message, so I hope you’ll forgive me and be patient. I’ve been following your work since 2016 and have had a bit of a love/hate relationship with it. I knew your reporting back then was dead on in terms of Trump and the dangers he posed. I’ve bought every book you’ve written and have watched every Bourbon Talk. But here’s where I confess something.

Sometimes I thought you were full of shit. Sorry that that is rough. But it is true, at least until recently. I think for a while what I wanted was a world that made more sense. Or maybe that isn’t right. Maybe a kind of sense that was comfortable? To really sit with the magnitude of it all meant having to sort through 54 years of debris. My relationship with my parents and my friends and my neighbors. Everything a teacher told me. Everything I saw in movies and on television. Just everything.

About three months ago something happened to me that spurred this. I was diagnosed with a long-term illness that I don’t need to talk about in-depth except to say that it changed everything for me. I had been living with this my entire life. It had been affecting me, making me feel a certain way, affecting my moods, my daily life, everything. Now that I know about it, I look back on those 54 years and realize how little I knew about anything. Even myself.

I guess this is just me saying…not sorry, but it felt important to share?

Man, did this hit me.

And I’ll tell you why. I’ve had a lot of similar experiences to this over the past eight years that I’ve been analyzing politics on the national stage. 2016, for a lot of us, was a wake-up call that couldn’t be ignored. I had certainly felt, back in 2000 and then 2003, that something was amiss with my understanding of American politics, history, and culture. Then, it got even stranger and more incoherent.

Since then, I’ve been on my own journey as I’ve tried to understand the twists and turns. The Man They Wanted Me To Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making helped shine light on the scourge of neofascist misogyny, but also started a long, arduous process of starting to understand myself. With American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People I finally learned the true history of the United States that you’ll never find in most classes or history books. And then, my research for The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis revealed to me exactly how capitalism had merged with white supremacy, Christianity, and a whole host of other ideologies to lead us to this moment, thereby revealing the nature of our current moment.

In other words, it has been a journey of illumination that, at every turn, changes how I see the world in ways I could have never imagined. The alternative is not great. Setting anchor with what you believe and refusing to change in the face of challenging information is a surefire recipe to replicate what has happened with the MAGA Movement. Unfortunately we’re already seeing this with some Democratic Party supporters who refuse to take in new information or question what is happening with Joe Biden or any other Democratic politician. Instead, the proposal of a pretty troubling immigration bill is treated as a “master move” to “reveal Republican hypocrisy” instead of what it is: an attempt at consensus in a political system that, Democrat or Republican, has exploited immigrants and treated them rather terribly.

As I discussed in The Stakes Part II, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t vote for Biden, or whatever your conscious wants. What it does mean, however, is that it is well past time to update your understanding of how politics actually work as opposed to the streamlined, overly-simplistic concepts you were given in school that were then echoed throughout culture. Unfortunately, those understandings are not just relegated to the public. They are communicated in our media, by our politicians, in popular-culture, and nearly everywhere else. Real, actual documentation of real, actual facts is hard to come by.

But this isn’t limited to understanding regarding Democrats.

This is framing from The New York Times regarding the chaotic scene on Capitol Hill this week. Notice what we’re being given here. The GOP was “defeated” because the effort to impeach the Secretary of Homeland Security failed, aid to Israel was scuttled, and they declined to push forward Joe Biden’s border deal. Even the caption under the picture gets into the action: “The chaos at the Capitol on Tuesday showed that while Republicans have become adept at thwarting action on ritical issues, they face challenges in addressing any.”

Well. No shit.

None of this is new information. The GOP isn’t in Washington, D.C. to solve anything. They’re there to literally bring the federal government to its knees until it can be turned into an engine for authoritarian intent. They’re not there to address any issues, especially if it’s during a Democratic presidency.

The idea of “losses” is a purely subjective idea. (Again, if you haven’t read Part II of The Stakes now would be a good time) This is old, old D.C. mindset. A real Chuck Todd perspective that used to rein for years and years as the Beltway punditry weighed wins and losses every week to the delight of dozens of viewers and readers. It was cocktail hour bullshit that distracted from what was happening outside that very specific bubble in favor of a privileged few who made a living gossiping about the political entities they relied on for their wealth and prestige. In other words, the same cable news reality that most people don’t care about anymore.

Republicans don’t care about “losses” because there is no such thing anymore. This isn’t a game. There aren’t standings at the end of the year like in the NBA or NFL. They don’t trudge out after the contest and say “we gave it our best out there, we’ll get back after it tomorrow.” The construction of Fox News and the entire Right Wing media ecosystem (replete with influencers, grifters, and a slew of scams) has completely made that stuff extinct. Republicans can reject a bill pushed by Joe Biden because it was pushed by Joe Biden. That’s an instant win. Pointing out their hypocrisy doesn’t do anything. In fact, it only helps.

After all. Their hypocrisy is a selling point for their base.

Because they don’t care about “wins” or “losses.” They don’t care about “principles.” Those are loser ideas. This is the same group that has rejected the teachings of their supposed messiah Jesus Christ because they were “too weak.”

What they do care about is power. Or, more specifically, the power to make the lives of their enemies worse by any means necessary. If this means stealing an election, lying, acting in contradictory ways, or committing violence, then so be it.

These are not the rules we were told or the way it was supposed to work. We were educated for a world that was supposed to exist but actually never did. And here’s the reason why: it felt good.

This story regarding the Republican “defeat” is out there because it feels good. It makes readers of The Times feel like the GOP is coming apart. In fact, the GOP is undergoing a radical transformation that’s been going on for a long time. We’ve talked about it extensively here at Dispatches From A Collapsing State. This wasn’t a “defeat.” It was yet another step in that transformation to full-blown fascism.

Our concepts regarding American history are mythologies. The story we tell ourselves about “Western Civilization” are also mythologies. They’re there because they make us feel better. They allow us to go about our lives without having to think too much about what’s going on or what has to happen for us to live our lives. Because of them, we’re invited not to consider the ravages of modern life on the environment, on countries outside our own, on people of color and vulnerable communities. We’re invited to believe that we inherited a flawed but ultimately good system. And, because of that, we can desire change but not really fight all that hard for it.

After all, there are people out there fighting for it on our behalf.

It is easier to believe, much like QAnon/MAGA adherents do, that your heroes are actually playing “five dimensional chess” whenever they do something that seems, on its face, problematic. When they move outside of your values, it’s easier to believe there’s a secret reason for it. A plan. If you only knew the plan! And, on top of that, there are a whole lot of influencers who have podcasts and newsletters and products they want to sell you, and they’ll tell you whatever you want to hear to assuage any of your worries.

In essence, exactly like what the GOP has in regards to their hypocrisy.

Healing involves stepping outside of these good feeling fantasies. One of the reasons I’ve been able to do the work I’m doing is because I’m trying to continue to heal, much like many of you. And that involves trying to see the world as it is as opposed to how I want it to be. I can look at the part others play, but also the part I play in it. And my foibles and follies almost always intersect with how I try and imagine there are things that are better than what they are. Because it feels better that way.

Politics are weird. They’re not as simple as we’ve been led to believe. They’re not football games where you can look at the scoreboard. There aren’t all these rules. It’s all made up and fungible, especially when authoritarianism is concerned. When capitalism is concerned. And within these circles and these activities the human mind and human desires come into play. And then things get weirder. Because this isn’t what we were led to believe it was. It’s a messy, bizarre thing.

The good news is that the first step in getting better is admitting there’s a problem. And right now, in this mixed up, dangerous environment, there’s no denying anymore that there is most definitely a problem.