The Trumpian Flood

The deluges of nonsense in our political era are changing the ecosystem of the right, maybe forever.

Dear Reader (and people who won’t let the light of covfefe ever die),

Yesterday, I drove for nearly 100 miles with my hazard lights on—and not for the usual reason that I forgot to turn them off after double-parking outside a liquor store. It rained like one too many chemtrails from one of the planes owned by “Big Air” had finally burnt a hole between our dimension and the water-verse and all the wet from the Earth where everyone has gills was pouring into our reality. I stopped at the Joe Biden rest stop in Delaware—yes, that’s a thing—where I ran in to go to the bathroom and get a cup of coffee (though not the coffee from the bathroom). For a second, I thought the fire alarm was going off, until I realized a gaggle of people around me all had the same shrieking sound coming out of their pockets and handbags. No, I hadn’t stumbled on a stealth lemur-smuggling operation; everyone’s phone was getting the same emergency broadcast warning about flash-flooding. I should have waited out the rain, but my kid got back from a very long trip, and I promised her a burger and a milkshake.

But that’s not important right now, except to explain why I am writing this from my mom’s lair, surrounded by very high–end cats, in an undisclosed location near where Alexander Hamilton, America’s First Rapper, had his last mic drop.

On my long drive, white-knuckling it like Bill Barr monitoring Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, I had a lot of time to think. I’m not sure that time is a river, but I do think events move as if they were floating on one. Canyons are formed by water carving a slice out of the surface of the planet. This process is very predictable until something—a meteor, an earthquake, a dam, whatever—blocks the water’s path, and suddenly the water seeks a new route. It seems to me we’re in one of those moments. Such periods can be brief from our perspective, or they can last so long that the chaos of the flood seems like a new normal.

I cannot catalog all of my objections to the “post-liberal” crowd’s arguments. But one thing I am inclined to agree with is that the old conservative consensus—limited government, liberal democracy, etc.—has indeed broken down, and it’s not obvious to me it will be restored anytime soon.

Things Fall Apart

I have no plans to read Joy Reid’s new book, but I did see this quote on Twitter: