Just One Thing

We came into California through Needles, which is where the desert goes when it wants to prove a point. The dash read 113. The air conditioning fought it to a draw and lost the tiebreaker. Lanying drove. I watched the temperature and thought about how much of this country is now unlivable for four months a year, and how few of the people running it have bothered to notice.

Bakersfield was worse because Bakersfield adds the smell.

Then you climb, and you come down the other side, and there’s Santa Cruz. Fog. Redwoods. 40 degrees cooler. Everybody is composting. This is California’s liberal west, the part that gets written about, the part the rest of the country points at when it wants to explain what’s wrong.

Yesterday I talked politics with a liberal Californian. Decent man. Reads. Votes. Worries out loud, which is more than most.

He got about four minutes in before he said the thing.

“There are extremists on both sides. Good people on both sides.”

I said that may be. I could go on for an hour about what the Republicans have built and broken, and so could you, and we’d agree on most of it. But name me one thing. A single thing. Something the Democrats have done that damaged this country or its citizens.

He went quiet.

I’ve been chewing on that silence for a day now, and it’s less satisfying than it felt at the time. He should have had an answer. The answers are not hard to find.

Bill Clinton signed the 1994 crime bill, which Joe Biden wrote and which paid states to build prisons and to keep people in them longer. Biden spent the 2020 primary apologizing for it. Clinton signed welfare reform in 1996 and cut the floor out from under poor women with children. He signed NAFTA. He signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, which unhooked the safety catch on the banks nine years before they went over the cliff and took everyone’s house with them. In 2002, 29 Senate Democrats voted to authorize Iraq, including those who later ran for president on the claim that they had known better. After 2008, a Democratic administration made the banks whole and left the homeowners to drown. Obama deported roughly 3 million people and built the machinery the current administration is now running with the brakes cut.

That’s seven things, and I’m not straining.

The silence wasn’t a win. It was a man who had never been made to defend his side’s record and didn’t have it filed anywhere he could reach.

None of that is “both sides.” Every item on that list is a party governing badly. Selling out to donors. Triangulating. Believing its own consultants. Getting scared and voting for a war it knew was a lie. Those are the failures of an institution that still thought its job was to run the government.

What is happening now is not a worse version of that. It is a different activity. You cannot draw a line from the crime bill to a president pardoning the men who beat police officers with flagpoles on his behalf. Welfare reform was cruel arithmetic. It was not an attempt to find out whether the courts can be ignored outright. Glass-Steagall was a party captured by money. It was not a party checking how much of the Constitution is load bearing.

The strongest objection is that the damage runs the other way. Mass incarceration ruined more lives than this administration has managed yet. The 2008 collapse took more houses. Both true. Both beside the point. A government that wrecks things while trying to govern can be voted out and made to repair them. That remedy is what is now in doubt.

One side has been a poor steward. The other has decided stewardship is for suckers.

“Both sides” isn’t analysis. It’s furniture. It’s a comfortable chair you sit in so you don’t have to stand up. It lets a decent man keep his seat at his brother-in-law’s table, keep his tone reasonable, and keep his membership in the club of people who are above all this. It costs nothing and settles nothing, and it is the single most useful sentence the authoritarian project has going for it, because it converts an emergency into a debate.

The trick works because it’s half true. There are good people on both sides. I’ve known plenty. That was never the question. The question is what those good people are currently being asked to hold the door for and whether they have looked at it.

He didn’t say any of that. He went quiet, and then he said something about how the redwoods were doing better this year, and I let it go, because the fog was coming in and it was the first cool air in a week and I’m 80 years old.

But the silence stayed with me. Not because I won it. Because he didn’t know how to lose the small argument and win the big one. That is the whole game now.

Further Reading

Lunch at the Lodge The same table, the other half of the country.

GroupThink How both tribes punish dissent, which is a different question than what the parties are doing.

The United States Is Not Polarized. It Is Stratified. Why the horizontal frame keeps failing.

The Man Who Would Cancel November What testing the load-bearing walls looks like in practice.

Nothing Is Wrong Enough The governing condition behind the comfortable chair.

Books

We Used to Be Wise Nineteen chapters on the fifty-year capture that produced every item on the list.

The Art of the Lie The documented record of the other activity.

The full catalog: fiction and nonfiction.