Monday
How many times do observers have to say that the current GOP is crazy or that it has lost its collective mind before such assessments become white noise and we just accept its unhinged behavior as the new normal? It’s as though we’re all developing Stockholm syndrome.
Normally reasonable people—I can imagine Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio in another setting being capable of mature behavior—feel that they can only compete if they join the crazy. As a result we have a debate in which candidates compete for who will most vociferously
–argue for doing nothing on climate change;
–advocate deporting 11 million people;
–threaten to shut down the government over funding to Planned Parenthood;
–find links between vaccinations and autism;
–beat the drums of war (not only with ISIS and Iran but also with Russia);
–etc., etc.
And of course, what we’re seeing in the race is little different than what we’ve been seeing from the GOP over the past seven years. I’d like to say it all began when Mitch McConnell decided upon scorched earth opposition to Barack Obama on the even of his first inauguration, including to measures Republicans had once themselves supported (cap and trade, for instance), but he himself was responding to the GOP fringe. I suspect it all comes down to hysteria over the radically changing nature of both this country and to globalization generally.
In any event, it’s as though the party extremists are a huge whirlpool sucking everyone, even moderates, into their vortex. Which prompts me to turn to Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom.”
In the story, the narrator meets an old man—or at least he seems old—who has survived a descent into a giant Scandinavian whirlpool. There are several things to be noted about his journey.
First of all, the maelstrom sucks very large objects into its maw, which we can imagine as being respected governors, senators, and one very remarkable surgeon:
Looking about me upon the wide waste of liquid ebony on which we were thus borne, I perceived that our boat was not the only object in the embrace of the whirl. Both above and below us were visible fragments of vessels, large masses of building timber and trunks of trees…
The maelstrom brings out the worst in people, just as the debates have been doing. For instance, the mariner’s brother pushes him away from the ring he is grasping. So much for the eleventh commandment of not speaking ill about fellow Republicans:
As we approached the brink of the pit he let go his hold upon this [water casket], and made for the ring, from which, in the agony of his terror, he endeavored to force my hands, as it was not large enough to afford us both a secure grasp. I never felt deeper grief than when I saw him attempt this act –although I knew he was a madman when he did it –a raving maniac through sheer fright.
While everything seems confused at first, after a while the mariner adjusts to the new reality, just as the candidates are adjusting to the craziness of the race. The mariner sees the commotion from a detached point of view and tries to predict which floating object–in our case, which candidate–will go down first. Like the pundits, he is almost always wrong:
I have already described the unnatural curiosity which had taken the place of my original terrors. It appeared to grow upon me as I drew nearer and nearer to my dreadful doom. I now began to watch, with a strange interest, the numerous things that floated in our company. I must have been delirious –for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents toward the foam below. ‘This fir tree,’ I found myself at one time saying, ‘will certainly be the next thing that takes the awful plunge and disappears,’ –and then I was disappointed to find that the wreck of a Dutch merchant ship overtook it and went down before. At length, after making several guesses of this nature, and being deceived in all –this fact –the fact of my invariable miscalculation, set me upon a train of reflection that made my limbs again tremble, and my heart beat heavily once more.
To survive, the mariner’s strategy is to float lightly and he lashes himself to the water casket. I noticed that Rubio and John Kasich tried a similar strategy in Wednesday’s debate: while others engaged directly with the heart of the whirlpool (Donald Trump), they tried to avoid direct confrontation.
How will the candidates emerge from the turmoil? For that matter, how will the country emerge from a situation where one of the parties has gone off the rails? Well, here’s what happens to the narrator:
Those who drew me on board were my old mates and daily companions –but they knew me no more than they would have known a traveler from the spirit-land. My hair, which had been raven-black the day before, was as white as you see it now. They say too that the whole expression of my countenance had changed. I told them my story –they did not believe it.
Yes, the story of the GOP as it is currently behaving would be hard for anyone to believe. The party has been journeying in some spirit-land and it’s turning all of our hair white.