Counsels of Despair Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshal

Counsels of Despair
Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 3h
I pass this on not because I agree or disagree with it but because I think it captures where a lot of people, a lot of our readers, are at the moment. From TPM Reader DW …

I have lost all faith in people. The Democratic voters are determined to screw this up. If Bernie doesn’t win the nomination, they will pout and say it’s rigged. If he is the nominee, he will probably lose because he will be attacked as being a socialist or whatever. I’m just gonna make my money, take care of the people I care about and pray I can survive six more years of this madness. I don’t know what else to do. I feel like caring too much will make me go insane.

Some of this is of course hyperbole. I doubt DW has lost all faith in all people. DW is a longtime reader and emailer. I have some sense of him and he’s not a fair weather news junkie or political person. So while this email may be dashed off in the moment it crystalizes thinking I’ve picked up from many others – albeit often more vague and impressionistic – over the last month. What I’m focused on is the sense of futility. People sense that the pace of bad acting and outrageous behavior is so unrelenting and seemingly unopposed that their political engagement doesn’t matter. All they’re doing by watching or staying engaged is ingesting a kind of general poison which is bad for them individually and accomplishes nothing civically.

This obviously has a deep self-fulfilling potential. Shifting a robust democracy towards authoritarianism and autocracy is actually pretty difficult. Doable, but difficult. If you’re super popular you don’t need to resort of autocratic means. You just keep winning elections. Autocracies tend to succeed precisely because they drive the opposition into a kind of political quietism. And part of that is simply wearing people down through mind games, sowing chaos and getting away with things.

I’m not saying precisely that is happening. But I do think the last few weeks has been a sort of inflection point for a lot of people. The 2018 elections went pretty well. But Trump’s still there, perhaps even more unbound than he was. Mueller finished his investigation. For people who were expecting Mueller would indict the President or people around him for conspiring with Russia, it clearly fell short. As I think most people have realized by now, beyond that standard we don’t really know what he found or what the report says. Yet it’s almost a month since the Special Counsel’s Office filed the report and we still haven’t seen it. The Attorney General says he’ll release it but only the parts he deems acceptable for release. And this after doing and saying a number of things that give every reason to think he’s being guided solely by the goal of protecting the President. It can be dispiriting.

Obviously that line of thinking all leads to defeatism and political quietism. But I think for many Americans right now, certainly many Democrats and those who oppose Trump and Trumpism, getting past this moment of dejection and enervation is the critical thing. I don’t think the objective situation merits this kind of despair at all. But Trump is having some real success breaking the morale of his opposition. That is something that needs to be challenged as a critical fact in itself.

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