Fantasy Island

when i hunger, justice demands that a cheeseburger should appear

Try this. Pick a politician and look. Let’s do California’s new senator, Laphonza Butler. Here’s her LinkedIn profile:

She’s a career activist: lobbyist, political consultant, organizer. She’s never made a product or offered a service, or sold anything. She’s never produced anything that didn’t exist before she made it. The couple of brief visits to the private sector on her c.v. are deceptive; a profile at Politico explains it this way: “Butler also parlayed her organizing background into helping Airbnb navigate political dynamics.” Her life is this: she shows up once the pie is baked and tells you how she thinks it should be divided. She doesn’t bake pie.

You’ll find this in other countries, too. Karina Gould caught my attention recently, as a representative of the Canadian political party that consistently called peaceful protesters Nazis, by standing in the House of Commons and saying that hey, we should just forget that thing where we gave a standing ovation to an actual soldier of the Waffen-SS:

Here’s Karina Gould’s LinkedIn profile.

Don’t let that short stint as an “investment specialist” fool you into thinking she visited the private sector. ProMexico is a government office.

The governing class, around the world, is made up largely of debate club kids who went from high school to college to government, with little side trips into non-profit activist jobs. Their training and enculturation has prepared them to go to meetings and give speeches with an eye toward the optics of the performance, end of statement. See also this recent short essay from Richard Fernandez on “Life as a Rubber Stamp.”

So. What did I think of the last Republican presidential debate, or of the vote to remove Kevin McCarthy from his position as Speaker of the House? I mostly didn't think of any of it at all, regarding it as spectacle, though I’m willing to amend a portion of that opinion if it delivers a leader in the House who…does something.

But in general, my view now is that we have problems that exist outside the realm of the performative spectacle of “politics,” and those problems will be solved by math and physics, probably in ways that turn out to be extremely painful. Toward that end, I earnestly ask you to give a full hour of your life to Rep. David Schweikert, a politician with an MBA and a business background, as he explains those problems and their implied trajectory in great detail, with a mid-stream assist from a colleague:

This is what matters. Math will overcome personalities, and the cosplayers of the empty political class will be delivered to their destination like fluid running through a pipe. We’re going where we’re going.