Corrosion Eventually Becomes Irreversible

the paranoid style in leftist politics

Is this how we live now?

I’m working on other posts, but I find that I’m not making much progress, because I keep coming back to the same question. It’s Super Tuesday, and so it’s primary election day in California, and I didn’t wait in line to vote in a near-empty polling center in my deep blue city. Even with mail-in voting, that’s unusual. News reports today are suggesting that voter turnout here is trending unusually low, though I don’t know if that trend will hold. I was personally unenthused about voting, even with the opportunity to vote for a candidate who had 2,600 career hits in the Major Leagues and spent a good portion of his career bravely trying to get Tommy Lasorda to go on a diet, except for when there was product to market.

I’m at least semi-confident that most normal people are just tired of politics. We don’t have debate anymore; we have insane existential psychodrama, like a deadly brawl on a mental ward.

So here’s the thing that keeps distracting me from everything else:

My fear is that this election is our new normal. My fear is that every presidential election will become a manufactured crisis, and Democratic prosecutors will normalize the indictment of Republican frontrunners, and Democratic officials will just go into every election cycle looking for ways to throw their opponents off the ballot. Democrats spent yesterday calling for the dissolution of the Supreme Court, and did so because that court ruled that voters may cast votes for the Republican presidential frontrunner:

See also the alleged “legal analyst” Elie Mystal on the need to inflict harm on the court for not crushing the Republican frontrunner, here and here.

If you’ve been outraged in the past by “Trump’s extreme rhetoric,” that favorite news media theme, what do you think of Democrats calling for the nation’s top court to “be dissolved” because it concluded that the Republican presidential frontrunner may appear on the ballot?

The judicial branch is designed to be antidemocratic, applying the rules of a constitutional republic against the whims of the majority, but Democrats are calling for the Supreme Court to be placed under political supervision because it’s “fundamentally antidemocratic.” This is an attack on core principle.

Democrats arrest their opponents, and expect the courts to play along, and threaten to punish the courts when they don’t. They don’t believe you can disagree with them; they believe that expressions of differing views are just Putin pulling the puppet strings.

The message isn’t new:

The unrelenting atmosphere of rage-inflected hysteria is new. It’s unsustainable, but that doesn’t mean it won’t actually be sustained. What if this is just how Democrats handle elections from now on: arrests and ballot purges and attacks on the courts and OH IS THAT WHAT PUTIN TOLD YOU THINK, NAZI!?!?!?

Will we ever have normal politics again?