What a month it’s been. Our black-robed overlords rescued Obamacare (again) and wrote same-sex marriage into the Constitution. Charleston continues to mourn even as the Confederate battle flag suddenly disappears from the public square and from retail shelves. Pope Francis decided he’s an environmentalist. The surviving Boston bomber got the death penalty, as did one of two prison escapees from New York, and police continue to be recorded while mistreating blacks. And it turns out the IRS has been playing games with Lois Learner’s emails — just as Hillary Clinton has played games with hers. All while Republican presidential candidates pretend that gay marriage really isn’t a thing and no one seems too concerned that the Office of Personnel Management suffered one of the most catastrophic, and most damaging, security breaches in U.S. history.
Sigh.
I survey all of this, but am relatively unmoved by most of it; the one truly touching moment was the way Charleston as a community and the families of the victims as a group came together after the church shooting to be, well, adult in the face of evil.
Perhaps my lack of engagement is a twofold function of my disappointment in the reflexive groupthink increasingly ingrained in public debate, and my belief that deep down, Fukuyama is right and the real crisis facing America isn’t the Red/Blue divide but rather the conflict between various elites seeking to colonize the country’s commanding heights. “Partisanship” is a chimera used to render into the binary a sociocultural struggle that crosses many different subpopulations and many different interest groups.
Take the twin colossi of Obamacare subsidies and gay marriage. On the outcome, I am satisfied with the high court’s conclusions. But in both cases, I think the majority opinions are dangerously wrong-headed, and it doesn’t take a law degree to understand the danger in both majority holdings. The chief justice’s dissent in Obergefell outlines why: It wasn’t the conclusion, but the logic model, that sets us up for more of the same. Kennedy’s majority opinion is filled with trite slogans that retrofit a hodge-podge of vague metaphysical assertions about human nature to justify a foreordained policy preference. And despite the acid of his dissent, Scalia’s rebuttual in King v. Burwell highlights that the majority elected to finesse a partially dishonest read of Congressional intent instead of agreeing that words have meaning and that it’s not the court’s job to pass laws that are internally coherent.
Distilled, my discomfort lies with the regrettable predictability of the political process, leavened with my increasing disdain for activists of any stripe. (Yes, I even loathe activists for my own causes. Do, or do not; there is no protesting.) More and more, I care less about the what and more about the why, and it’s an extrapolation of all these little whys that leave me slightly bearish about the future.
A lot happened this month. Inasmuch as some of what transpired might feel definitive, I cannot help but wonder whether all of these matters — gay rights, Obamacare subsidies, pulpit environmentalism, police aggression — aren’t truly concluded, but rather enter a new phase of social discord.
Like I said: Bearish.
