One of the things I have always struggled with in regard to my participation in politics is reconciling my strong feelings about what should be and what is just with my cynicism about what is possible.

I cannot remember a time in my life since I first became aware of politics when I felt elected officials were truly trying to do good. That’s probably because I was 7 years old when the Watergate scandal surfaced, spent my early childhood with Walter Cronkite giving the daily body count in Vietnam, and I followed Doonesbury instead of Peanuts on the comics page of Newsday.

As I got involved in local politics around issues that directly affected me (school budgets, for example) and then in campus politics at UW Madison, I recognized that to most people politics was like a sporting event. As with professional football, it seemed people picked a side based on where they lived or who their family supported (unless they were eager to be contrary for subversive reasons) and that was that. They would cheer for every play their team made and boo every success of the other team, regardless of how brilliant or elegant their performance was. And as a player, it seemed it didn’t matter what team you were on as long as you were in the game and scoring points.

Reagan knew this. It was in his DNA. He switched sides to get a better chance at going national.

In other words, American politics is like sports fandom in that it has always been about “vibes only” and rarely about substance. Little Bonespurs is the final form of that. The main difference is that in sports, at least we have referees who are theoretically impartial to enforce rules. And that is no longer the case in American politics.

The Supreme Court has been politically affected since before Dredd – Scott, but those umpires have been increasingly compromised beyond “tradition” since Reagan.

We’ve had the protection from purely vibe-driven insanity offered (sort of) by a mostly professional civil service and administrative court system enforcing regulations and executive compliance with law since the late 19th century (not terribly long ago historically), but vibeness was king for much of the first century of American government. The only thing that has protected us from government conspiracies is the utter inefficiency of the bureaucracy—it’s a feature, not a bug.

That protection is not absolute. Vibeness has resurfaced regularly, with building strength and frequency like a poorly designed suspension bridge over a windy chasm.

We have now reached the point where a century and a half of laws, precedent and governing tradition that was never enshrined in law, along with the Constitution itself, are being pushed and twisted to the snapping point. Trumpism is all about cynicism, destroying faith in institutions and norms to create a new normal with oligarchs atop the heap.

It has been 160 years since the last real structural test of American government , which similarly was driven by one side gradually coming to the side of justice and the other defending the economic value of injustice for a relative few wealthy people who had convinced the rest of them based on vibes only. We can embrace what is just and right this time, or lose everything we tried as a nation to make the new baseline after 1864, and in every other great national struggle since then. Civil
rights, labor rights, human rights, all can be washed away by the current “vibes only” government.

I know what seems possible in this current climate runs hard up against what is just and right. But that is why we need to fight against realpolitik now, once and for all and overthrow centuries of racism, emergent fascism, and a long tradition of anti-fact, anti-science vibes that a very small number of people benefit from. That means we need to stop picking one of the two teams we’ve had to choose from for the past 160 years or so and building a new way that isn’t just a sporting event.

TL;DR: Fuck vibes, let’s get fucking real about saving the country and the world.