Civilizations are complex machines, invariably run by people who don’t fully understand them.
They’re generally also equipped with safety devices, in the form of rules, customs and informal understandings, designed to keep things from going off the rails.
Our previous generations of politicians weren’t great.
As Will Rogers said roughly a century ago, this country has come to feel when Congress is in session the same as when a baby gets hold of a hammer.
But most of our politicians were products of political machines, which, whatever their flaws, had a vested interest in society holding together and a deep firsthand understanding of people and institutions.
Then, too, 100 years ago, or even 50, there was some institutional memory of the last time things really broke down, which led to the Civil War — which spread death and economic devastation across America that far exceeded what the nation experienced in the 20th-century world wars.
Nowadays, we’ve lost that cautionary memory. (We even took down many of the statues.)
Politics are driven more by social media than by anything else — and by “driven,” I mean something like “careening, drunk, around twisty mountain roads from which most of the guardrails are steadily being removed.”
This process has been going on for a while, but it seems to have accelerated in the past decade or so.
The passage of ObamaCare as a “reconciliation” bill to avoid a filibuster, followed by Harry Reid nuking the filibuster for judicial and executive appointments a few years later represented major, not incremental, departure from long-time norms.
(Reid left the filibuster in place for Supreme Court nominations, but unsurprisingly Republicans paid him back by getting rid of that, too. Now Democrats want to eliminate it entirely.)
Before that, we had the impeachment of Bill Clinton, who was guilty of lying under oath, though that wasn’t an impeachable offense unless Congress wanted it to be.
The Republican Congress did, which also opened the door for multiple impeachments of President Donald Trump by Democrats for even shakier crimes.
Prior to Bill Clinton, the nation had gone over 200 years with only one impeachment attempt, itself part of the falling action after the Civil War.
More recently, we’ve seen Attorney General Merrick Garland treating parents who complain at school-board meetings as domestic terrorists, and, most recently, we’ve seen other high-stakes departures from norms with President Donald Trump’s indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, to the expulsion of Tennessee legislators after a bullhorn-equipped struggle on the state House floor, to a Texas district judge’s decision to employ the 1870s Comstock Law (last enforced in 1936) to ban interstate shipments of mifepristone, a drug that can be used to induce an abortion, which then drew demands from Democrats, just heard praising the “rule of law,” that President Joe Biden ignore the judge’s order.
Add to this the curious post-2020 behavior on crime from DAs (including one Alvin Bragg of Manhattan), in which even violent crimes often result in weak-sauce charges and release without bail.
And, of course, the news media have become increasingly irresponsible.
Many of these actions are legal — Congress can impeach a president for anything that Congress deems sufficient cause, and the Tennessee legislature can expel a member for pretty much any behavior that a sufficient number of legislators find sufficiently objectionable — but what seems to be missing is a sense of judgment and proportion.
Those old-timey politicians that Will Rogers mocked had a better sense of limits.
When Franklin Roosevelt proposed to “pack” the Supreme Court with additional justices to obtain a majority, most newspapers, and most Democratic members of Congress, opposed it.
Would that happen today if a popular Democratic president made such an effort?
But a packed court is one that many Americans would regard as illegitimate.
And our system functions poorly with an illegitimate jurisprudence (not that that’s stopping many on the left today from trying to delegitimate the current court, largely because it isn’t ruling as they prefer).
We see similar phenomena outside of government, as woke corporate politics and woke education causes the removal of all sorts of traditional restraints.
And the reason for the removal of all these restraints is our ruling class fundamentally doesn’t want to be restrained.
As an intellectual and social monoculture, its members mostly attended the same schools and believe the same things and mostly only talk to each other.
They are thus convinced they are always right, no person of goodwill could disagree with them and any obstacles to their will must be removed.
That the result looks like a giant game of civilizational Jenga, with one support after another for civil society being withdrawn, is lost on them.
The old-timey politicians had a phrase that helped restrain them: “The country wouldn’t stand for that.” You don’t hear that phrase anymore.
Maybe the country should stand for less.
