Contemplating the Republic

Upon Alito’s nomination yesterday, I was despairing of the future of our country and cursing that each day seems to bring a new nightmare against which we must fight and struggle and battle. I felt tired down to my very bones, and so I emailed the oldest Methuselahan specimen I know and begged him to give me some historical perspective. Tell me, I said, that you’ve felt like this before—that there was a war on, and every day was a new barrage of bullshit, but it, too, did pass. Tell me, I said, anything that’s going to keep me from buying the next one-way airfare to Britain.

Dear old Mannion came through with a post of his usual eloquence on the worst of times. And he’s right, of course, in everything he said. The Republic has always been a mess, sometimes a bigger mess than others, but never perfect, never infallible.

And yet…even this strange optimism, rooted in what might be shorthanded as the chronic SNAFUness of our nation, doesn’t quite reassure me. It's the "other stuff" that's worrying—the media, voting irregularities, consolidation of power, disengaged electorate... Those who, as Mannion notes, "want to live in an aristocracy, a plutocracy, an oligarchy, or even a monarchy, anything but a democracy, because they want power over everybody else," have been presented with the sudden fortune of finding all the things that favor them in place all at the same time. The ability to undermine the Republic thusly feels imminent. It's always been fragile, yes, but has there ever been such an opportunity to strike the final blow by a collection of wankers with the distinct willingness to do so?

Avedon Carol leaves in Mannion’s comments this thought:

In the '60s, we had elite pluralism, but the elites were actually against each other in a solid way. The press was sleepy throughout Nixon's criminal abuse of government power right up until enough people were pissed off at him that they allowed impeachment proceedings to get started.

What's happened now is that all of the powerful seem to be on the same side and there's no one acting against them - it's not elite pluralism anymore, it's one big, unified elite, as far as I can tell.

I suppose this has happened before but with media consolidation and everything else I just don't know if you can say things are not different now. I feel like they are different now.

I think this is the first time I've really believed that 80% of the electorate could vote against those in power and it would make no difference at all.

Somewhere wrapped inside Avedon’s comment, I find my fear—not that those currently in power will do bad things, as surely they will, but that, unlike bad things of our past, we will not be able to undo them, once they are done.