Y’all, I listen to a lot of political podcasts, and the general consensus among Democratic podcasters is that Biden is having a bunch of successes and things are going great and it’s just unfair that the media isn’t helping him get his message out.
Yesterday, I went to the Sonic on Clarksville Pike. Their ice cream machine was down. Their soda machine was down. They couldn’t take cash unless it was exact change, and only the drive-thru was open. The workers seemed to be in OK spirits, but I can’t imagine spending my Saturday shift on a warm summer day having to tell everyone that there’s nothing cool. Like, either fix shit or put the place out of its misery.
Also, MNPS has put chain-link fences around the schools in my neighborhood, but they can’t pay staff living wages. It’s a crapshoot whether there’s going to be milk at the grocery store. And authorities just pulled a gaggle of fascists presumably on their way to attack gay people out of the back of a U-Haul. Not to mention gas prices.
It’s no Siege of Leningrad out here or anything, but so many things feel rundown or neglected, just a little harder than they should be. Everything sucks a little bit.
Of course, Biden isn’t responsible for the Sonic, or how much Nashville pays school employees. He’s not causing the explosion of white supremacist activism we’re seeing. Gas prices are high the world over. These things — objectively — are not his fault.
But it’s like, for example, if a friend tells you he has a broken foot and can’t afford to go to the doctor to get it fixed, and you tell him that the weather’s lovely and he should just get outside and move around some and he’ll feel better — you are going to sound clueless and disconnected, and you shouldn’t be surprised if he gets mad at you.
There are so many frustrating things about Trump, but one of the most frustrating is that for the rest of our lives, if we are able to sustain some semblance of a country, the bar will have been set so low for politicians that being somewhat sentient will be a great achievement.
Biden is not a good president. Obviously, he’s not the worst president in living memory, because one dude tried to stage a coup. But Biden is objectively out of touch with the fact that most of us are living in The Great Suck, and whatever it is he’s doing to make things better, they don’t seem to be changing people’s day-to-day lives.
When the Democrats get their asses handed to them at the polls this fall, voters are going to catch the blame for it. But voters put a Democratic president in office and gave him a Democratic Congress to get things done, and even then, nothing happened. We apparently need to vote even harder. Now they don’t need just a majority, they need a filibuster-proof majority. Whatever. Joe Manchin is a gift to Democrats — with him, they don’t have to do anything.
I don’t know, y’all. I was going to continue to rant, but I’m stuck on a couple of questions. First, do you think a country can be too large, with too many constituencies, to be governed by democracy? The point of a democracy is supposed to be that the people elect representatives to make decisions that enact policies that the people who elected them either support or benefit from. But we’re in a situation now where many politicians don’t feel beholden to voters. Do you think Sen. Marsha Blackburn loses even one minute of sleep worried that not being available to constituents might hurt her? I don’t.
Or it could be that Blackburn sees her constituents not as people who live in her district, not even as people who voted for her, but as the people who give her money. But I don’t think that changes my question. Is there just some limit to the amount of people any one person or group of people can give a shit about? Because it seems like politicians use all kinds of ways to winnow down the number of people they have to pay attention to. It’s an asshole move, but maybe it’s an asshole move with roots in biology. I don’t know. Maybe a country this big can’t function as a democracy because people can’t care about this many people?
It’s depressing to think about, but it certainly explains the resurgence in white supremacist Christian nationalism — this is a group of political ideologies committed to actively shrinking the number of people most Americans give a shit about through demonizing out-groups, and then actively shrinking the numbers of people most Americans don’t give a shit about through violence.
Maybe we’re failing because we’re too big? But that’s not satisfying to me, because there’s never been a point in our country’s history where all of us have been represented. We don’t even know if it would work, let alone if it’s failing, because we have never fully tried it.
But this brings me to the next thing I can’t quit thinking about: Do you think white people are more committed to the U.S. as an as-of-yet not-fully realized democracy and beacon of freedom than they are to the U.S. as a white supremacist country? In other words, will most white people sell out democracy in order to keep power? I think we’ve seen that the answer to this question is yes. On both sides of the aisle.
And I think the hard lesson I’m having to learn, and maybe you are too, is that even with my relatively advantaged position in my community — I have a job, I own a house, etc. — I am not worth consideration for most of the politicians who represent me.
But I’m not entirely sure they realize they’re drawing a circle around the small subset of the people they should be serving and focusing solely on them.
I mean, when Biden’s surrogates say, “Things are going so much better for you, why aren’t you happy?” do they know they’re not talking to all of us? Do they even realize how many of us are invisible to them?
