Essays in Idleness

I accused the Democrats of colluding to get Donald Trump elected to the presidency of the United States. How could anyone not see it? Everything they did during the last election campaign looks in retrospect, but also looked in prospect, as if it were designed to give people a reason to vote for Mr Trump. The conspiracy was larger, however. The whole Washington Swamp, as it is affectionately called, went to the wall to make Trump electable. The media were enthusiastically playing their part; still are.

It was a put-up job.

And now I accuse Theresa May and the Conservative “remainers” across the water — together with the civil service, the London Swamp, the rightwing media, &c — of colluding to get Jeremy Corbyn into power, for whom no one in his right mind could vote. Mrs May seems to work on this night and day.

A significant portion of any electorate is, of course, not in their right minds, and as I’ve noticed before, they are now the majority; but even as a minority they often constituted the “swing vote.” This helps explain the technique of collusion. All those who are batty, start making demands; the rest of the population forms a closed camp to stop them. Their candidate, too, has the reek of madness; but they hold their noses.

Then the pendulum swings. But here I’m getting ahead of the plot.

To understand what I’m saying, gentle reader must realize that politics have nothing to do with government. A sane country (Switzerland?) would more or less govern itself. Changes would occur, but only from necessity. If they did anything at all, the politicians would be responding to the public will, though resisting it until a consensus were formed, to do the unavoidable. Peaceful government flourishes on consensus; on mom, and apple pie; on knitting, not on pulling at loose ends.

Government in nature works from the bottom, up. Government against nature works from the top, down. Modern politics is contra naturam — no matter which party wins.

Thanks largely to the abandonment of traditional religion, politics have assumed the power of symbol, of religious obligation and belief. Every government decision becomes a symbolic act, to please one faction and affront another. The actual effect of the policy is ignored. The electorate participate in what is essentially a religious war. Finally it escalates to the apocalyptic battle, between two parties that despise each other, psychopathically.

Only at this point can “real change” be accomplished: the country is destroyed.

Another way to put this, is that politics have been spiritualized. Differences between parties have been removed to some cosmic plane, where angels and devils contend. People seek personal transcendence through political action. (Mr O’Rourke in Texas is an especially sad case.) It is a Manichee struggle, in which worldly realities are pushed out of sight. The protagonist, in his heroic gestures, freed from the possibility of self-deprecation, will also lose sight of the fact he is a jackass.

Among my arguments for not voting, perhaps not even voting against the worst freaks, is that one endangers one’s soul. One becomes emotionally “committed” — i.e. fit to be tied. I speak with knowledge of the partisan entanglements in my own soul, but also of political policies that, though fought to the death over, don’t amount to much.

Example: the overwhelming support for stopping illegal immigration at all American borders (that with Mexico is just the most publicized). “The peeple” elect someone who, rather crassly, promises to do something about it — and three years later the problem is much worse.

Yet it was an administrative, not a political issue. No one in his right mind could oppose basic border controls, in the world as we have it. Suddenly it became “a symbol,” and now only crazy things can be done.

What is genuinely necessary, or would at least be helpful? These are things that once could be discussed. Now they are just “triggers.”