Those of you who enjoy science fiction will almost certainly have heard of “Ender’s Game”, which was made into a movie in 2013. The sequel to that book is “Speaker for the Dead”, which takes place a few thousand years in the future, when humanity has colonized 100 worlds that are collectively ruled by a distant and largely dysfunctional “Starways Congress”. It’s an excellent book, if you at all enjoy science fiction.
A distant and largely dysfunctional Congress is very much on my mind these days. I wrote about that back in Episode 14, right after Kevin McCarthy was finally elected Speaker, at which point I predicted:
“There’s going to be a motion to vacate the chair about every 300 milliseconds in this Congress- that’s my revised pessimistic expectation.”
So, things weren’t as bad as I thought! We didn’t get our first motion to vacate the chair until 9 months in. That’s roughly 24 billion milliseconds. Shouldn’t have been so pessimistic!
Of course, I also wrote:
“Instead of an earnest effort to be productive together and advance sensible conservative policy, what they opted for was a lot of infighting and showboating for media exposure. So effectiveness from that group looks like it’s going to be pretty elusive. Perhaps I’ll be wrong about that; I’d love to be wrong about that, frankly.
But I probably won’t be.”
Nope, wasn’t wrong about that one.
Ladies and gentlemen, let’s have a really short conversation about government- in particular, how regular, everyday people conceptualize government. Regular people conceptualize government in a very simple way: they view it like they view running water. When a person goes to their kitchen sink and turns the faucet on, they expect that running water will just come out without a problem. They likely have no idea where that water comes from, and they likely have no idea how the water gets there. And more importantly, they don’t WANT to know where it came from or how it got there. What they want is for the running water to just work, and work in such a way that they can continue not ever thinking about it. When the running water *doesn’t* work, that’s immediately disruptive and stressful, and people get super unhappy super quickly.
That’s how people view government: most people have very little idea how it works, and more importantly, they don’t WANT to know how it works. What they want is for government to just work, and work in such a way that they can go on about their daily lives and continue not ever thinking about it. And whenever either party loses sight of that basic fact, the voters get unhappy and quickly punish the offending party for it.
For instance, the primary reason I have a fighting chance of winning the election I’m in is that the Democratic party here in California has started managing housing in a way that is disruptive to people’s lives. They’re also managing homelessness that way. And public safety. And education. And wildfire and water and power and infrastructure. People are starting to have to think about this stuff a lot now, and they do not want to do that. And it’s just a matter of time before the Democratic party starts paying the price.
Unless, of course, *our party* starts making people think about government even more than the Democrats do. By, for instance, chopping off our own head and then flailing for the next 40 days until the federal government runs out of money and shuts down. Then a lot of people will be thinking about government in a way they do not want to do, and they will be really mad and looking for someone to punish, and that “someone” will almost certainly be us.
And if it does end up being us, we will have earned it all by ourselves. I pray God holds this party in the palm of His hand.
Well said Gus! Loved Enders game will definitely check out the sequel
Great comments Gus!!!