A year ago, to the day, I wrote a column (“Americans really need to relax and stop taking national politics so seriously”) in which I argued that modern Americans are far too concerned with politics and too emotionally invested in what politicians say and do.
It was around Thanksgiving and I had heard about families tearing themselves apart over political disagreements and felt that it happened precisely because of unreasonable levels of anxiety with respect to what is going on in D.C. specifically.
My argument in that column was that when some politician is elected, whether it be for president or Congress, the decisions that they make during their terms don’t really affect us all that much. Our lives continue without catastrophe for the most part.
In one sense, that claim is plainly false. When they choose to fund or defund some program or another, that impacts (sometimes strongly) the lives of millions. When they choose to go to war, they place the physical and mental wellbeing of many on the line. The fallout of some policy decisions impact quality of life for decades.
What I had in mind though was that Americans, for the most part, live better lives than the vast majority of people who have ever existed. While the decisions coming out of the capital are obviously consequential, it seemed a bit silly to me that some individuals were shunning their siblings because of politics.
Relax, I said. Everything will be fine, I assured the toiling peasants from my ivory tower, naive and jolly, hands brown but never soiled. That is at least how many of our readers received it.
It must be clarified that I too belong to the lower rungs of society. If we were in India, I would be an untouchable Dalit. It pains one to be treated as an out of touch elite when one is in fact a serf – you live the insolvent life, never enjoying the ignorant bliss of elite pleasures while being unfairly ejected from the brotherhood of indigence.
Silk sheets played no part in my naivete, I merely suffer from optimism and this reckless, devil-may-care attitude found it so easy to be comforted by one simple inductive inference: it has been fine before so it’ll be fine now.
With that said, we are now seeing how wrong I was – Trump’s second term has been an ugly disaster. We have acquired a self-inflicted wound in the form of a global trade war. This administration is spreading medical misinformation, weaponizing the Department of Justice, destroying the separation of powers, and blatantly selling political favors. Ex high school benchwarmers are roaming the streets abducting mestizos.
If we may say a word in defense of naivete: while Trump and his allies at The Heritage Foundation made their agenda quite clear, how could one have predicted that the rest of government would immediately roll over?
Yes, we knew that he would appoint loyalists to high places and that they would do his bidding unless they wanted to lose their jobs, but it was not so easy to imagine that all republicans in Congress would transfer their constitutional authority to the president and ignore even the worst abuses of power.
At the time, it did not seem all that plausible that the Supreme Court would turn into an automatic rubber stamp for the White House irrespective of what is stated in the Constitution. At most I expected a flexible interpretation of the Constitution, not outright indifference to it.
It didn’t seem within the realm of possibility that they would rule that presidents are completely immune from prosecution, that they would cripple their district courts by limiting nationwide injunctions, and sanction racial profiling by immigration officers.
Even with all of this evidence of the failure of my inductive inference, we may be starting to see that it wasn’t wholly misguided. It seems that the beating that republicans received during the elections earlier this month got their attention.
Republicans rebelled against Trump during the shutdown by rejecting his calls to get rid of the Senate filibuster. Republicans led by Thomas Massie ignored Trump’s insults and moved to force the DOJ to release the Epstein files. Republicans in Indiana have refused Trump’s calls to gerrymander their congressional districts.
Conservative Supreme Court justices have also begun to wonder whether they are giving a future Democratic president too much power, questioning whether the president should be allowed to levy whatever tariffs they want by simply declaring an emergency.
Republican subservience is slowly beginning to wane.
According to a YouGov poll, Trump’s approval rating among voters under 30 fell from 50% in February to now 20%.
For those who have suffered under Trump’s rule, silver linings may be hard to find and calls for optimism may seem like deliberately cruel delusion.
As much as I am blameworthy for downplaying the damage that Trump and his pals were capable of, the message that “this is a time to appreciate your loved ones despite whatever flaws you believe them to have” remains as true as ever.
Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. He is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.