The National Temperature Mismatch
"our nervous systems can't take it"
Another assassination attempt, another overwrought man-boy. He couldn’t take it anymore, blaaaaargh, so he had to do something. Snore.
The halfwit true conservative Sarah Longwell, who joins the long list of davidfrenchian grifter idiots fighting to save her allegedly beloved Republican Party from Mean Orange Man, is the publisher of the deeply stupid Substack page called The Bulwark, a kind of emergency rally point for a whole dickless culture of panicked man-boys and wine aunts. Like many people, she has a major case of The Feelz these days, and is spiritually intertwined with all the other halfwits who Feel Deeply about Brutal Orange Hitler.
We’re in an endless, and endlessly mismatched, conversation.
We’re $38 trillion in debt, so maybe we should stop shipping a bunch of free money to dumb foreign aid NGOS, and we could look at dialing back the federal Department of Education so states and communities can carry the ball on that topic
OH GOD STOP SLAUGHTERING US TO DEATH WITH YOUR UNSPEAKABLE NAZI REIGN OF TERROR DON’T YOU SEE THAT WE’RE WRITHING IN AGONY AND HORROR AND WE’RE SPIRALING DOWN AND OH WE COULD ALL JUST DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE WHY ARE YOU TORTURING US INSIDE OUR NERVOUS SYSTEMS
It’s like the newspaper is a book of Sylvia Plath poems. OH DADDY DADDY, why are you so orange, A FISH HOOK IN MY EYE. You think politics is about debate over competing conceptions of the public good, and the role of government in addressing basic forms of societal order; they think politics is about “our nervous systems.”
Many hands have done the cultural work of analyzing this moment and giving us a vocabulary to discuss it: Lom3z and the Longhouse, which “refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.” Christopher Rufo and the idea of Cluster B politics, a discourse of of “narcissism, psychodrama, and moral theatrics.” Helen Andrews and the Great Feminization, in which the public sphere is organized by “emotional appeals rather than logical arguments.”
But basically, about a third of the population is just insane. Protesters outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner held signs that said things like “DEATH TO TYRANTS,” after which they presumably weren’t taken to the murderous Nazi tyrant’s death camps.
Were there half-formed Bonhoeffer comparisons after dipshit tried to shoot up a ballroom? As sure as the sun rises.
My suspicion is that helpless victimism accelerates as a growing population takes self-driving cars to their jobs sitting in front of screens while AI does their work. Debilitation and uselessness drive a greater and greater sense of helplessness, which weak minds read as “someone is hurting me.”
But I have a daily sense of being half of a radically mismatched conversation in which I offer inputs that measure one or two, and then I get back responses that measure ten or eleven. Maybe you know the feeling. I don’t think the trend is toward calm reevaluation.
"It’s like the newspaper is a book of Sylvia Plath poems."
Plath might be one of the most, if not *the* most, overrated writers of the past sixty years. I found The Bell Jar to have been a prototype Tumblr in print, just godawful head-up-ass bullshittery and no question the rancid birth lizard of so much of the bilge that passes for "literature" since she took a look inside for that pilot light.
I think we’re in the Fourth Turning, and a lot of the tension and panic comes from the left realizing that progressive globalism has failed and populist nationalism is rising. (Not “fascism,” even though their leftist perspective sees it that way, or pretends to.) The left is out of ideas and is just recycling tired and obsolete solutions like demonstrations and a “general strike.” As if average working people are going to Rise Up Against Bad Orange Man and support illegal immigrants, transing kids, anti-white DEI rules, and the rest of the wacky DNC agenda.
This divide is often blamed on Trump, which is partly true. His political Sun Tzu moves include taking majority, common sense positions (two sexes, no transing kids, deport illegals, crime is bad) and let Democrats take the opposite side. This is “polarizing” compared to milquetoast GOP establishment moderation, but it’s a winning political strategy that unites MAGA and moderates. I don’t see how Democrats can successfully counter it.