Mark Twain made fun of a common enough fantasy: imagining your own death and what people around you would say about you. That fantasy is kin to another that you often bump into on social media: imagining what historians of the future will say about your time. Unsurprisingly, these future historians will mouth the opinions of the fantasizer. If you hate deficits, you will imagine future historians all in a fluster over deficits. And so on.
But you don’t need a historian to know which way the wind blows. Especially when you have the newspapers.
This is why I think that Chuck Schumer’s interview in the NYT is not only a grim portent of what is to come (spoiler: Trump triumphs, Dems roll over), but a window into what went before.
Imagine the first decade of this century – the century of the American maladjustment. It begins with an election that the Democrats won, and then graciously let the Supreme Court decide against them. Thus, we begin with George Bush, who soon enough shows an incompetence even beyond our imagination by fundamentally letting 19 rednecks from the Middle East hijack planes and ram them into the WTC and Pentagon. Bush was warned, but he was not going to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, Clinton, and do the elementary work of paying attention to warnings issued to him by the CIA. Not our rancher.
And so we were off on both the global war on terror and Bushonomics – in which Bush did follow his predecessor, Clinton, and basically staved off the recession that would have followed the collapse of the tech bubble by a combination of tax cut driven deficits and using the expanded and deregulated credit powers of the financial sector to allow each and every individual household to pile up on its own deficit. And thus, like Vulcans, America fucked up Afghanistan, Iraq and its own domestic economy.
The 00s were a uniquely flatline when it came to the rise of American incomes – the only rise was in the incomes and wealth of the top ten percent.
Now into this abyss of mismanagement and murderous externalities, think back to the resistance. Doesn’t bring anything to mind? Oh surely you remember the Daschles, the Gephardts, the Dem party in full ham mode! In the midst of this was the senator from New York, Chuck Schurmer. Who, as we know from his interview, was just backslapping and getting views from his Republican colleagues as they exercised in the Senate gym. A pastoral scene in the midst of Bushian bliss.
Here’s the Senator himself: “The last time he [Trump] was president, which is the closest experience we have with him — and admittedly, the world has changed some, particularly on the media side, how it works — we kept pushing and pushing and pushing and chipping away. And when he went below 40 percent in the polls, the Republican legislators started working with us. He was at 51. He’s now at 48. We’re gonna keep at it until he goes below 40. Look, I talk to a lot of these Republican legislators. I’ve worked with them. Some of them are Trump devotees. But many of them don’t like him, don’t respect him and worry about what he’s doing to our country. Right now he’s so popular they can’t resist him. I mean, so many of them came to me and said: “I don’t think Hegseth should be defense secretary or R.F.K. should be H.H.S. But Trump wants him. He won.” The Republicans would like to have some freedom from Trump, but they won’t until we bring him down in popularity. That happened with Bush in 2005. It happened with Trump in 2017. When it happens, I am hopeful that our Republican colleagues will resume working with us. And I talk to them. One of the places is in the gym. When you’re on that bike in your shorts, panting away next to a Republican, a lot of the inhibitions come off.”
This is a rather incredible summing up of our current history by a man who played a role in it. And that role is, ostensibly, that of a politician. But the astonishing lack of urgency, or a sense that politics is anything more than a game without serious stakes, played between GOP and Democratic boys in the gym, is what flashes out.
Why is Schumer even in politics?
It makes you wonder. Did something, perhaps, happen between 2001 and 2005? Well, in Schumer’s account, what happened is: his GOP colleagues started working with him, over at the end there. That’s all that counts!
I lived through the Bush years and spent way to much time thinking about the things that count. It drove me a little crazy. And what drove me even crazier than Bush was the Democratic Party’s complete and utter lack of urgency. It was revelatory. The Democratic Party emerged from the Clinton presidency with no discernible ideological project. And the Democratic appartchiks seemed to be happy with that. From Schumer’s account, they were just waitin’ around for their GOP buddies in the gym.
Which is what I thought, way back then. It is as if the firemen in the firehouse decided that their main job was to play cards, and to heck with all those people rushing in reporting fires. Fires come and go! Don’t get your pants in a wad. Now say, what should I do with this full house? Maybe bet fitty cents on it?
At random, I’ll quote this story from October 7, 2002 from the Houston Chronicle.
“Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said the Democratic-led Senate, over the next week or so, will overwhelmingly approve a resolution giving Bush the go-ahead to invade Iraq if necessary to eliminate any effort to develop or use weapons of mass destruction.
"We've got to support this effort," Daschle said during an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press. "We've got to do it in an enthusiastic and bipartisan way." Daschle said the vote would be lopsided, with roughly 75 senators or so supporting the resolution.
But lawmakers are nervous about handling the issue correctly, Daschle said. "This is the first pre-emptive, unilateral authorization of the use of force that we've ever passed."
Luckily for all of us, Daschle had only two years left in the Senate gym, when his place was taken by a Republican who walloped him in the Senate election that year. But those two years – they actually went by. Historians of the future will note that two years is 730 days. 730 days of watching the Republicans clobber Democrats whose only belief was in the corny rhetoric they’d been taught by consultants was the cat’s meow, really moving to the voters, those “hard working people” (never ‘not so hard working people’ – those latter, also called your billionaire donors, don’t get a shout out in the speeches).
In the aftermath of the 2004 elections, I wrote something that I feel was touched by the spirit of the future, not that I knew it – writing does have that automatic, channelling side:
“This was more than an election – this was the reversal of the Civil War. Jeff Davis, through one of those ironies of history, won through the party headed by his old enemy, Abraham Lincoln.
So what does it mean that the strongest power in the world, at the moment, is the Confederate States of America?”
My summing up of the CSA was that it meant inevitable badness. And the CSA party then gave birth to the CSA party now, led by Trump. There was little good news as the boys in the Senate gym were sweating out their fundraising dinners. But I did find a little good news. Which, God willing, we will find reproduced in 2028:
“Even I see one 'ray of hope' in the election -- Tom Daschle, a leader of utmost smallness, a stunted mediocrity whose instincts have lead the Democrats from defeat to defeat, was defeated himself.”
God bless us every one.
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