The Age of Impression and Imbecility

Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth…

Orange-coated fascists are on the march. Washington, DC, has devolved into a Reichian state, power-mad despots occupying the helm. Our poor, earnest bureaucrat class is being lustrated en masse. Vital social services, like providing informational pamphlets on intersex rodents in Zimbabwe, have been zeroed out. Quango functionaries are desiccating in the street after their funding well has been purposefully drained. The Trump regime is boarding up our limestone bureaucratic chambers. Yet its deportation arm remains functional, composed of skinheaded, goosestepping Nazoids who, instead of endorsing grandma’s Social Security check, snatch peaceful immigrants off the street. Our perverted Gestapo is outsourcing its gulag duties to a nation with cheaper labor, funding these foreign gulags to pen up our illegal immigrants.

As former President Biden told a conference of disability advocates, “In fewer than 100 days, this new administration has done so much damage and so much destruction.” (He then proceeded to wax wistfully about the good old days of watching “colored” kiddos ride by on segregated buses. All the Tiny Tims and Autistic Andys in the audience nodded in bewildered agreement. Ol’ Joe’s still got it!)

The Democratic Party is thoroughly convinced that Trump’s sequel presidency is far fascier than the first. So they’re going to great, unprecedented, dogged lengths to “resist” the President. From White House sit-ins, to die-ins on Pennsylvania Avenue, to shutting down Congress to stymy his agenda, to organizing continual media junkets, to organizing mass protests all across the country, the Left is brushing off its bruising of last November to do as all clear-eyed defenders of democracy have done throughout history: be an affirming flame in the cold shadow of encroaching authoritarianism.

Oopsie! It appears my word processor was set in “sardonic” mode. Allow me to toggle to the seldom-used “serious but lightly jocular” mode.

Now what was I saying? Oh, yes: The Democrats’ second garb up at being The Resistance™ is going as swimmingly as one might expect for a party that put all its chips on being stalwarts of the swarthy-skinned, only to lose half of Hispanic males to a blusterer promising mass deportations.

Earlier this month, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer paid visit to the Führerhauptquartiere with the intention of discussing “Michigan issues,” a press release euphemism for pleading for federal funds. Whitmer instead walked into a camera-loaded snare. Her sensibly-shod feet stuck in a glue trap, she idled in the background as Trump signed a slew of executive orders, of which two urged a DOJ plumb into two former staffers. Not good, Gretch! Seeing her 2028 prospects drown in a mango-dyed tide before her eyes, Gov. Whitmer did what any steely-eyed, adamantine-spined executive does in the moments that Balzac described “when all your powers are in tune when every chord vibrated and adds its full sound to the harmony.” She gophered, hiding her face behind a folder when the official White House shutterhound tried to immortalize her complicit approval of Trump’s orders.

The gesture—miming an ostrich’s peabrained escape—was as unavailing as it was petty. In that pathetic sense, it was a crystalline synedoche of our politics: our elected representatives devoting their energies to pageantry over statecraft. Ryan Zickgraf writes that the kulturkamp that’s assimilated political deliberation “largely revolves around symbols and digital artifacts.” Republican and Democratic lawmakers joining together to wrestle unilateral tariff imposition back from the executive branch, rebalancing the delicate scales of our constitutional system? Sorry, thank you! Feed me a @catturd2 tweet raging against “mentally deranged” liberals and “RINO trash” instead!

A perfunctorily prosed press release soon followed the guv flub: “The governor was surprised that she was brought into the Oval Office during President Trump’s press conference without any notice of the subject matter. Her presence is not an endorsement of the actions taken or statements made at that event.”

A P.R. hatchetman wielding a rubber bat or one of those cartoon revolvers that shoots a “boom” flag—that’s the best our current political class can muster in our Age of Impressions. But what else can such small people manage other than projecting an outsized glyph of authority? Our elected leaders, in trying to saddle every medium in the mass communication era, stumble in moments of bathetic Baudrillardism.

I’m far from a card-carrying member of Team Blue, so I have no inside scuttlebutt on how the Democrats are really trying to waylay the President, other than chanting a garbled medley of yoga maxims to the Supreme Court, hoping for a permanent injunction. Lawfare was so effectual in coffling Trump last time!

Were I a donkey dispatcher, however, with the absence of scruples such a position requires, I’d think of a better way to outmessage what Rod Dreher calls “government-by-memelords.” Consider the foibles, mishaps, faceplants, and all around galootish deportment of the Trump Administration during its 100-day honeymoon: leaked war plans, countless lawsuits, firing-then-rehiring of bureaucrats responsible for ensuring our nuclear stockpile doesn’t send North Dakota to the moon, hammering the stock market’s all-important profit line with an erratic tariff program, the Defense Secretary’s staff knifing each other like Five Points scene in Gangs of New York.

All elected Democrats have to do to wrest power away from authority-drunk Republicans is present a sensible, simply articulated contrast. What we’re served, in low variance, is the optics Olympics, with senators flying to a foreign supermax prison to vouche for a wife-beating gangbanger.

But it all makes for a good five-minute MSNBC shout-a-thon, which in turn is chopped into a viral Twitter clip, which then gets hearty play on Fox News primetime. And we all witness the spectacle, mindlessly clapping our dorsal fins, barking for more in the entr’acte ads for Ozempic and Taco Bell’s newest combo of beef, cheese, and half-baked tortilla.

Soon, our discourse will be so coppiced of context and streamlined to just be tens of millions of drooling lemmings flicking the middle digit emoji at one another over and over.

Gov. Whitmer may want to save herself the indignity and bash her face in with her binder next time.