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Source: The White House

Contemporary Politics are Exhausting

It is hard to focus.

Steven L. Taylor
28

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Source: The White House

I was looking at some tab-clearing a few minutes ago and was reminded that just last week we were dealing with nationwide anti-Trump demonstrations, a military/birthday parade in DC, and, in case you have forgotten, the assassination of a member of the Minnesota legislature and her husband and the attemoted assassination of a state Senator and his wife.

That was all headline news literally a week ago.

But who has time to dwell on any of that? Trump did his G7 exit, talked about bombing Iran, and then bombed Iran.

Keep in mind that he deployed the National Guard and active duty Marines to Los Angeles just over two weeks ago.

Senator Padilla was wrestled to the floor and cuffed for trying to ask Secretary Noem a question ten days ago.

We are still dealing with dubious deportations, masked ICE agents grabbing people off the streets, the consequences of DOGE, the potential consequences of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” and the whole tariff business.

Worse: I am almost certainly forgetting something (or even somethings).

Update: I forgot flagrant corruption.

I know that some of this is on purpose (Bannon’s “muzzle velocity” shtick), but a lot of it is also essentially an ADHD president who is sowing chaos.

I am a long-time blogger who is a long-term, professional consumer of political news (who is retired from full-time work to boot) and keeping track of all of this exhausting and more than a little depressing.

It makes me sincerely wonder how much of all of this normal citizens know and, moreover, how many of them just tune it all out.

I mean, we had an assassination a WEEK ago.

These are weird and difficult times.

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28 responses to “Contemporary Politics are Exhausting”

  1. PT Avatar
    PT

    Nothing quite takes ones mind off of bothersome issues like democratic backsliding and political assassinations like a light bombing campaign to bring about Middle East peace once and for all.

    9
  2. James Joyner Avatar
    James Joyner

    For sure. Trump has been flooding the zone since January 20, but this is definitely an up-ramping.

    9
  3. Rob1 Avatar
    Rob1

    Steven Taylor:

    I mean, we had an assassination a WEEK ago.

    Which was dismissed or ignored by the entire GOP with the exception of some tepid responses, from which mainstream media took their cue as to the treatment level for coverage of the killings, in respect to significance.

    This in itself, is a measure of how far our entire society has shifted away from a mature regard for our own behavior. Even the media is dancing to Trump’s tune on consequential matters.

    Clearly Trump’s interior world is a tangle of compulsiveness and contradiction. But this dovetails well with his narcissistic need to be the center of attention, and his experience as ringmaster, showman. Heaven help us.

    7
  4. Jen Avatar
    Jen

    I’ve worked in politics and am an avid consumer of news, and *I* find this all to be overwhelming. I’ve had to shut off the news/avoid my daily intake just to be able to work/sleep/function.

    It’s no wonder the majority of Americans tune out, which has dire consequences for our governance.

    6
  5. Daryl Avatar
    Daryl

    He has to do something to distract from his last fuck up, almost constantly.

    4
  6. Sleeping Dog Avatar
    Sleeping Dog

    When I was a college freshman, I was huge consumer of news, read both the NYT and the Boston Globe (it really was a good paper then) daily. A prof I was close to, English Lit IIRC, told me that he got his daily news fix by simply watching the network news programs. I questioned him on how that could be adequate and he explained that as you learn about the world and develop a worldview, you’ll recognize the patterns in the events and can reliably predict what would happen next. Though, I still believe that is overstated, I’ve adopted much of that view and it is helping me get through the TACO years.

    Now I read about half of the Times each day and will scan the Memorandum headlines, but read few of the articles. It is helping me stay sane

    Maybe America will return to normalcy, but in truth doubt it will happen in my lifetime and I fully expect that things will get worse before they get better.

    3
  7. CSK Avatar
    CSK

    The Iranian parliament has voted to close the Strait of Hormuz.

    1
  8. Erik Avatar
    Erik

    Just before the inauguration, and in anticipation of the zone flooding to come, I decided to make a taxonomy of Horrible Shit Trump Does. The idea was to treat each new event as an example of a more general horrible thing so I could point to as few different things as possible rather than getting lost in the flood. So instead of “started another crypto business” and “accepted what amounts to bribes” I could just say “more examples of corruption.”

    But I do have a job, so I quite literally did not have the time to catalogue the new examples from each day. I’d love for a journalist to take up the task so instead of the horrible things being reported in a vacuum the first line of the article could repeat the general offense before the event de jure

    4
  9. Kathy Avatar
    Kathy

    The time between January 2017 and January 2021 felt like a very long decade. These next four years will break that record.

    4
  10. CSK Avatar
    CSK

    This is so cheery:

    http://www.cbsnews.com/news/terrorism-advisory-bulletin-threats-us-iran-strikes/

  11. charontwo Avatar
    charontwo

    This, I think, is highly readable and very relevant to the topic of this post:

    “Programmable Mutter/Henry Farrell”

    Many of the past constraints on Trump have disappeared. Much of the US foreign policy apparatus, for better or worse, is supposed to ensure consistency, across the different branches of the federal government, so that different agencies and departments don’t trip each other up and across time, so that the U.S. is able to stick to long term goals. But as all the above suggests, Trump sees little value to internal consistency. It constrains him from acting with the flexibility he wants.

    It’s no surprise that the National Security Council, which is the part of the US policy apparatus that specializes in ensuring consistency, has gone through so much chaos and upheaval in the first months of Trump’s term. So too, for many other parts of the government apparatus. Every administration is trying to build the plane as it flies. This may be the first adminstration that is yanking random pieces out of the engine, and chucking them out of the cargo bay in mid air.

    Some of the downsides of this are already widely understood. Internal inconsistency across the government means that there are going to be many blunders, and different bits of the government working at cross purposes. Inconsistency over time provides a lot of short term flexibility, but it forecloses strategies that are based on long term predictability.

    For example: if you aren’t going to stick to deals over the long run, no-one will want to make deals with you if they have any choice in the matter. And if they do make deals, they will likely be empty of real content, intended to distract rather than to bind. More subtly, you are going to have a hard time deterring others from doing stuff that you don’t want them to do. Deterrence is all about making binding commitments ex ante to do things that might be costly for you ex post. If you set a red line, that someone might cross over, you deter them by making it clear that you will punish them for it, even if delivering the punishment is painful for you. It will be hard for you to convince others that your threat is credible, if your policy style is all about bluster and endless revision.

    I think that there are two other, subtler ways in which policies based on boundless flexibility are self defeating. First, unless you are extremely canny, you are likely to lose your flexibility over time, by creating facts on the ground. This is what Dan Davies calls the “slate heap” problem. The side-effects of your actions tend to heap up into giant piles of slag. The Trump administration’s decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites is likely to trap it into further actions that it doesn’t want to take. Second is that others may create facts on the ground for you, dumping slag in places that will force you to go in one direction rather than another. That helps explain how Netanyahu succeeded in making Trump do something that he’d likely have preferred not to do.

    The slate heap problem is an argument about how side effects accumulate. As Dan describes the operation of slate quarries:

    At the very start of a quarry operation, it must seem like it hardly matters what you do with the waste material; the site is wide open and there isn’t enough spoil to interfere with anything. As time goes on, the heaps get more noticeable … a while after that, they have become bigger … they’re increasingly an important constraint on the business. Finally, you reach the point at which you have to accept that you have huge mountains of unstable rock, which can collapse without warning if blasting work is carried out nearby and which can’t be moved; … the whole quarry is now too dangerous to operate.

    As Dan points out, solving this is an inherently complex problem – you simply cann’t know at the beginning of a complex project how things are going to look at the end. Equally, some approaches will be much worse than others. Specifically, if you build your entire policy process around a principal who always demands maximal flexibility in the moment, without any strategic vision for how to preserve flexibility over time, you are going to find it really hard to avoid massive unstable heapings of side effects eventually hemming you in from all sides. Indeed, you will have a hard time even seeing the slag heaps piled up around you, until they have started to collapse.

    Bombing Iran is piling up great heaps of unexpected consequences that will merge with each other and possibly fall on America’s head. Again, I’m not an expert on the Middle East, but there are many intersecting piles of likely consequences – retaliation from Iran, other governments rushing into the power vacuum, breakdown of national authority, spreading instability, and uncertain energy markets for starters. Dealing with any or all of these will require further actions, which may in turn set off further cascades of unexpected consequences, requiring further action and so on. The road to sticky foreign policy quagmires is paved with temporizing immediate decisions.

    Perhaps this will all shake out into a better world, but that is not what I’d bet on myself. Given the evisceration of the National Security Council, and the incredibly short time between Israel’s initial bombing, and the decision of the U.S. to dive in, I’m prepared to bet a lot of money that there hasn’t been much serious analysis or wargaming of what might happen after the bombing. That in turn means that the U.S. will be less able to anticipate when things start to go pear-shaped, or to react usefully if they do. Current actions will pile upon past ones and the responses of others, until the whole thing possibly topples over.

    This is, very obviously, not the product of accident. Netanyahu clearly anticipated that the U.S. would be pulled in if he started a war. In a sense, he built his own slag pile, calculating (or gambling) that it was placed so as to force the U.S. to go in one direction rather than another.

    That reflects another downside of flexibility. If a country has institutions that oblige it to be consistent, it will miss out on some short term opportunities. Equally, it will be better able to resist some forms of external manipulation, committing in advance that it will behave according to some predictable logic regardless of what others do. If the U.S. had had a clear Iran policy, it might have been better able to refuse Netanyahu. That, in turn, might have made Netanyahu less likely to take a risky gamble on unilaterally starting a war that Israel could not succeed in winning on its own.

    All this may possibly have broader lessons. In a world where the U.S. prizes consistency and is at least somewhat willing to live up to its commitments, it will lose out on some short term benefits. Equally, it will be able to withstand some efforts by soi-disant allies to pull it into conflicts that are not in its interests. It will be able to wargame out some (far from all) of the likely consequences of big dangerous actions.

    In a world where the U.S. does not value commitment, few others will truly bargain with it, although they may go through the motions of pretending to. What is the point of making deals with a country that may renege unexpectedly on the president’s momentary whim. Instead of negotiation, they may try other means of constraining the U.S, creating facts on the ground that it has to respond to, in the hope that the response will point in the right direction.

    The latter world seems to me to be worse for America and worse for everyone else. It is the world we are now living in, and it continues to go down hill.

    5
  12. Scott F. Avatar
    Scott F.

    I am a long-time blogger who is a long-term, professional consumer of political news (who is retired from full-time work to boot) and keeping track of all of this exhausting and more than a little depressing.

    It makes me sincerely wonder how much of all of this normal citizens know and, moreover, how many of them just tune it all out.

    I don’t suspect I can claim to represent “normal citizens,” since I frequent political blogs like this one.

    But, a week ago yesterday, I was at the No Kings rally in San Diego in the midst of 60K+ Americans celebrating what is great about this country and protesting what is wrong with its leadership. I was uplifted by the epic showcase of civic pride. The Trump parade flop brought some schadenfreude as well.

    Today, I want to curl up in the fetal position and weep for the future. If I am any indication, the “flood the zone” shtick works.

    5
  13. Scott F. Avatar
    Scott F.

    @Sleeping Dog:

    Maybe America will return to normalcy, but in truth doubt it will happen in my lifetime and I fully expect that things will get worse before they get better.

    I see a potential silver lining in the way our current political culture’s abnormalcy is inextricable from it being exhausting. People have a tendency to normalize the abnormal over time, so there is always a danger that the citizenry will become accustomed to the numerous uglinesses of Trumpism. But, Trumpism is also unnatural and only works by being in people’s faces relentlessly, so tuning out can’t always shelter one’s sanity. The cocoon will be breached.

    The hope is that Americans’ fundamental laziness will win the day and they will grow tired of being exhausted sooner rather than later. They will seek a return to normalcy even on the off chance that Trump delivers some outcomes they like. The American electorate apparently won’t rise in defense of democracy, but I believe they will stand for some relief to the constant disruption to their everyday lives.

    2
  14. Andy Avatar
    Andy

    Keeping up is nigh impossible. I’m focusing my attention on a couple of areas and filtering out most of the rest.

    4
  15. Sleeping Dog Avatar
    Sleeping Dog

    @Scott F.:

    That is one avenue, but a cold comfort.

    1
  16. Connor Avatar
    Connor

    @Andy:

    What is your opinion on the most likely Iranian response? I’ve listened to all the talking heads, and it was all Captain Obvious stuff. Except one.

    1
  17. Connor Avatar
    Connor

    Exhausting?!? Sounds like candidates for a low octane job.

  18. Rob1 Avatar
    Rob1

    @charontwo:

    Every administration is trying to build the plane as it flies. This may be the first adminstration that is yanking random pieces out of the engine, and chucking them out of the cargo bay in mid air.

    Thanks. Good post. Shareable.

    2
  19. Moosebreath Avatar
    Moosebreath

    @Sleeping Dog:

    “Maybe America will return to normalcy, but in truth doubt it will happen in my lifetime and I fully expect that things will get worse before they get better.”

    I agree. Biden ran on restoring normalcy, and generally delivered on it. If we had kept Trump from winning a second term, it would have been likely we would have stayed there.

    If and when Democrats return to power in our lifetime, they will point to the Biden Presidency as what they don’t want to do, since Biden got no credit for simply restoring normalcy. Instead, they will justify making the same abuses to our system that Trump did to get what they want accomplished.

    Maybe this settles into a new normalcy in our lifetimes, with all sides agreeing on what is and is not legitimate. I doubt it, and think what comes of it will be worse than what we had before.

    3
  20. Andy Avatar
    Andy

    @Connor:

    That’s really hard to answer. All we have to go on is looking at what Iran is actually capable of and guessing. My guess is some kind of strikes against US forces in Iraq or Syria, likely using short range missiles, similar to the retribution they took after we killed Solemani.

    2
  21. wr Avatar
    wr

    @Connor: “Exhausting?!? Sounds like candidates for a low octane job.”

    Has anyone else noticed that our Three Major Assholes have simultaneously decided to quit even pretending to argue for or against any issue and and started to nothing but snark out with the lamest of schoolyard taunts?

    Is this because they’re so confident that their side is winning it’s not even worth attempting to say anything? Yeah, that must be it. No way it could be the opposite… not with all the winning going on.

    7
  22. Steven L. Taylor Avatar
    Steven L. Taylor

    @wr: Other things that are exhausting: trying to figure out WTF Connor and some others are even trying to say.

    6
  23. JohnSF Avatar
    JohnSF

    It has to be said, Trump is rather smart about using the limited time-horizon and desire for headlines/clickbait of the media to his advantage, politically.
    But the entire “kayfabe, baby” assumption base is liable to catastrophic collapse when encountering problems and counter-parties that do not vanish just because MAGA wishes they would.

    2
  24. just nutha Avatar
    just nutha

    @Steven L. Taylor: I just ignore them in a time-/energy-/effort-saving move. It’s not like they’re saying anything important.

    3
  25. Steven L. Taylor Avatar
    Steven L. Taylor

    @just nutha: It is the prudent move.

    1
  26. JohnSF Avatar
    JohnSF

    @Connor:

    Exhausting?!? Sounds like candidates for a low octane job.

    Oh rlly?

    Octane levels aside, Trump’s performative dancing is really rather silly.
    This is what the West used to expect of dimwitted dictators, not the President of the United States of America.

    2
  27. charontwo Avatar
    charontwo

    Trump is obsessed with being the center of attention, of getting more attention paid than anyone else. So he is constantly doing stuff that grabs attention, nothing concentrates people’s attention more than being unpredictable.

    Doing stuff that affects people is coercive, forces attention to be paid. Enduring all this crap can be pretty exhausting.

    Lots of drama queens in politics competing for attention, e.g. Kristi Noem and her cosplays, MTG, all sorts of others.

    1
  28. charontwo Avatar
    charontwo

    Trump is obsessed with being the center of attention, of getting more attention paid than anyone else. So he is constantly doing stuff that grabs attention, nothing concentrates people’s attention more than being unpredictable.

    Doing stuff that affects people is coercive, forces attention to be paid. Enduring all this crap can be pretty exhausting.

    Lots of drama queens in politics competing for attention, e.g. Kristi Noem and her cosplays, MTG, all sorts of others.

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