The arrival of a new year always brings a heightened level of giddiness, accelerated by blind hope and a largely fact-free belief that things will be better this time around. It’s part of the stories we tell ourselves to get out of bed in the morning and … go out and do exactly the same things we’ve done every previous year.
For Catholics it’s a bit like the “confessional effect” where we go in and tell the priest all the miserable things we’ve done, said or thought, get exonerated and set free in the wild to start all over again.
That said, on this the third day of the new year I’m enjoying my coffee and watching the D.C. press horde scurrying after the Capitol’s new power brokers … Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and, um, Kevin McCarthy. They are the center of attention. Because they are now, for the moment at least, the critical characters in the present (and future) Congressional drama. Put another way good friends, the United States really is reduced to caring what Lauren Boebert has to say about … anything.
No one knows how this election for Speaker of the House will play out, but what is abundantly clear is that the delusional mass psychosis that is Trumpism has not yet been expelled from the Republican party. It’s at least one more cycle of defeat and chaos from exhaustion.
The great natural cycle of rebirth has delivered the same mutant baby. For this moment and likely for the next two years, MAGA narcissism and all the dysfunction and corruption that it engenders will have it’s hands around the throat of the House of Representatives.
But — and here comes the “hope” part — all this chaos points to where 2023 could likely take the Grand Old Party.
For all the accusations people of my ilk hurl at conservatives for their nihilism, their willingness to torch the whole damn ranch in pursuit of some undefined “total victory”, a nihilistic denouement is clearly where “the crazies” are going in this McCarthy/Speaker fiasco.
Related and more significant in the realm of gross nihilism, their intellectual leader, the Orange Former Guy, holed up in Mar a Lago has been hinting broadly that if professional Republicans don’t stop blaming him for the election disaster of last November and being nicer to him, he’ll run as an independent in 2024.
I see a lot of Trumpian logic in that.
Being notoriously lazy and undisciplined, Trump has to regard a campaign free of all the bureaucratic exertions, rules and formalities of a party nomination as immensely appealing. Money wouldn’t be a problem. Hell, he grifted a quarter of a billion off his MAGA congregation for a bogus legal defense fund. If he confined himself to occasional airport rallies, daily Truth Social videos, and all the free airtime Newsmax and Mike Lindell TV will feed to his forever fervent, deeply retrograde “base” he’d easily match the return all that icky, sweaty, expensive hand-shaking people like Mike Pence would have to do to get 1/100 the attention.
Of course Trump couldn’t win election to the White House. But his (currently) assured support from even 20% of Republican voters would seriously confound the strategies of other candidates, to the point they, like McCarthy with his “crazies”, would have to offer him undigestible, self-defeating concessions to preclude him from attacking them. He’d “win” by maki ng them lose. In other words, a narcissistic nihilist’s fever dream.
So, my apologies for the semi-bummer here so early in this new year. But irrational exuberance just ain’t my thing.