Staying on the Safe Side of the Fence

If you read the news and believe it, the one big thing you know is that Donald Trump is very extreme, and very dark, and he’s full of hate. He uses wild rhetoric! He’s a destabilizing force in American politics! He doesn’t respect our political norms! And so, you see, you have to vote for Democrats to fight against extremism and protect our normal political system. Meanwhile:

Chevalier is probably headed for the House of Representatives, having won the Democratic primary in a heavily Democratic congressional district that covers Upper Manhattan and part of the Bronx. She’s all the usual DSA stuff: a police abolitionist, a prison abolitionist, and a permanent grad student. You can read a long interview with her here in which she says things like this: “I am not OK with any deportation. I think all deportation is wrong because I think it is an incredibly cruel punishment that is really only relegated to people on the basis of where they were born.”

See also the final exchange in which the interviewer repeatedly tries to pin down a self-proclaimed prison abolitionist on the problem of what she would do with murderers, a question she word-salads to death without answering. (“You know, again, I’m talking about this question between the distance between the world we want to see and the world that we’re at.”)

So the total eradication of Western civilization is sensible, calm, well-ordered, thoughtful politics, well inside the boundaries of the normal and the acceptable, but the restoration of a reflecting pool is an existential crisis for America that shatters the soul of the nation: “This doesn’t reflect well on democracy.”

1. A profoundly evil literal Nazi spent the shockingly enormous sum of $14 million on a piece of public infrastructure, which is a major crisis

2. Calling for the eradication of Western civilization is warm and kind, and a promise that restores hope to a troubled world

The signaling function of major legacy media — the “permission structures” function — constantly herds and corrals: If you stand over here, you’re very dangerous and extreme, but if you stand over here, you’re a high-status person who is warm and good. The performance of those signals is becoming comically insane, but the signals persist. They have power when they don’t have sense. They’re like a fence that falls down, erodes into debris, blows away, and still keeps people from crossing in the spot it was built to barricade.

The stories don’t mean anything, but they still work. Stand against extreme positions: Open the border, end all deportations for all reasons, eliminate police and prisons, be kind and decent.

You can watch these mechanisms work in places like Los Angeles, where tens of thousands of homeless people living on the sidewalk are an example of kindness, and the desire to get them off the sidewalk is a dark, angry vision. Major media exist to point at X and call it Not-X; consumers of major media say that yes, X is Not-X. It’s working. It works.

There’s an odor of shame to the exchange, like people are choosing to degrade themselves by staying inside the ruined fence, but they’re staying inside the ruined fence. They seem to like it over there.