Enduring Profligate Idiocy

“This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.”

If the country took its obligations to self-government at all seriously, the presence of Sarah Palin on a national ticket would have been an insult on a par with the elevation of Caligula’s horse. However, the more people pointed out Palin’s obvious shortcomings, the more the people who loved her loved her even more. She was taken seriously not merely because she had been selected to run, but also because of the fervor she had stirred among people in whose view her primary virtue as a candidate was the fact that she made the right people crazy. Their faith in Idiot America and its Three Great Premises was inviolate. Because the precincts of Idiot America were the only places where his party had a viable constituency, John McCain became the first presidential candidate in American history to run as a parody of himself.

You could see it all coming that rainy night in New Hampshire, when all the Republican candidates were alive and viable. They were faith-based and fully cognizant of the fact that they were not running for office so much as they were auditioning for a role, trying for a chance to do their duty on behalf of people who were invested as vicariously in their citizenship as baseball fans are in their teams, or as the viewers of American Idol are in their favorite singer. So that was how it happened that, at one point in the debate, the contenders were asked whether they believed in evolution.

And, in response, three of the Republican contenders for president of the United States, in what was supposed to be one of the crucial elections in the country’s history, said that, no, they didn’t believe in evolution. And the people in the hall cheered. It was a remarkable moment in that it seemed so unremarkable. There was no doubt that the three of them—Tancredo, Brownback, and Huckabee—were sincere. However, since admitting that you don’t believe in evolution is pretty much tantamount to admitting that you plan to eradicate the national debt by spinning straw into gold, it should immediately have disqualified the lot of them. In fact, it should have given people pause about the entire Republican party that a third of its presidential field was willing to admit that their view of the life sciences had stalled in the 1840s. Instead, it was a matter of hitting the right marks, and delivering right on cue the applause lines that the audience expected.

Within both the political and popular culture, as the two became virtually indistinguishable, the presidency itself had changed, and not entirely for the better. Gone were the embattled, vulnerable presidents, like Fredric March in Seven Days in May, who fretted out a military coup that sought to batter down the doors of the White House with Burt Lancaster’s bemedaled pectorals. No modern president could be as humble as  Raymond Massey’s Abe Lincoln, riding that slow, sad train out of Illinois, martyrdom already clear in his eyes.

Even the gooey liberal pieties of The West Wing made way for this kind of thing. The show abandoned its original mission, which was to somehow make speechwriters into television stars. (Hey, that’s CNN’s job!) It gradually found itself drawn into orbit around the character of President Jed Bartlet, who originally was supposed to be a presence standing somewhere out of frame. The show became as much a cult of personality as any genuine White House ever has. One more scene of the staffers in the Bartlet White House intoning that they “served at the pleasure of the President of the United States," and Gordon Liddy might have sprung, giggling horribly, from behind the drapes on the Oval Office set. Even our fictions ceased to portray the president as a constitutional officer who held his job only at the informed sufferance of the voters.

That’s how Andrew Card, George W. Bush’s chief of staff, could get up in front of a group of delegates from Maine during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York and tell them that the president looked upon the people of the United States—his nominal employers, after all—the way all of "us" looked at our children, sleeping in the night, and nobody mentioned to Card that there isn’t a single sentence proceeding logically from what he said that doesn’t include the word “Fatherland."

The important thing about running for president was to make sure that people were willing to cast you as president in their minds. Be smart, but not so smart that he makes regular people feel stupid. Handsome, but not aloof. Tough always, but a good man to toss a few back with after the bad guys were dispatched. The presidency had conformed itself to the Great Premises of Idiot America. Anything could be true, as long as
you said it loudly enough, you appeared to believe it, and enough people believed it fervently enough,

Expertise, always, was beside the point, and the consequence had been both hilarious and dire: a disordered nation that applied the rules of successful fiction to the reality around it, and that no longer could distinguish very well the truth of something from its popularity. This election, which was said to be one that could reorder the country in many important ways, did not begin promisingly.

The byplay concerning evolution in New Hampshire had been preceded by an even more remarkable conversation, in South Carolina on the subject of torture. Surely, there have been few more compelling issues in any election than the question whether the president of the United States may, on his own, and in contravention of both domestic and international law, order the torture of people in the custody of the United States, and in the name of the people of the United States. That the president could do so had been the policy of the U.S. government for nearly five years by the time that the ten Republicans gathered in Charleston for their first ensemble debate. A question concerning the efficacy of torture—couched in a melodramatic, post-apocalyptic hypothetical by the moderator, Brit Hume— was posed to the various candidates.

Speaking from his experience, which was both unique and not considerable, John McCain argued that, in addition to being basically immoral, torture doesn’t work. He was quickly shouted down by Giuliani, who was once tortured by the thought that his second wife wouldn’t move out of the mayor’s mansion in favor of his current girlfriend, and by Romney, who once was tortured by the fact that gay people in Massachusetts were allowed to marry each other, and who announced his desire to "double Guantanamo?
pp. 266-269

Charles Pierce