Last week, Joe Biden conducted a two-hour news conference, during which he was bombarded by questions about his plans for reelection, the legitimacy of his presidency, his honesty, and his mental competency. He responded with courtesy to hostile journalists, defended his record, and, toward the end of the two hours, hesitated in his answers long enough to give ammunition to anyone wanting to portray him as an Alzheimer’s victim. He seemed to be struggling with his thinking, searching for words, and now and then forgetting the questions.
Biden will be eighty this November. He was clearly exhausted by the time the news conference ended, but he’s not demented. A good many of his critics could not have performed as well as he did behind the presidential lectern, Donald Trump among them. Give Biden credit for being saner, smarter, more truthful, more able to understand complex issues, and far more conversant with human decency than his predecessor. As an old man facing a bunch of press bullies, he held his own.
Still, courage, human decency, and a willingness to tackle complexity do not win elections. I expect this country to succumb once again to Republican rule, now that Republicans have shown themselves willing to say anything and do anything to get and keep power. They have sworn never to lose another election. They are changing voting laws, enforcing partisan justice, and corrupting the electoral process so they won’t have to lie about voter fraud next time.
I don’t think Donald Trump will be elected president again, because the people who want permanent autocracy in this country don’t want him as king. They want his base, but he himself is too erratic, too apt to turn on allies, too easily distracted, too lazy, and too unselfconsciously self-destructive for them to ever trust him as their leader. He may not have dementia, but his other pathologies—an abuse-damaged self, paranoia, deficits of attention and comprehension, a refusal to accept ordinary human limitations—mimic it. That’s why the Republican party is conducting an informal primary at the moment, throwing up one candidate after another to see how well Trump fends them off.
We can expect a chump-of-the-month going up against Trump, but whoever leaves the former champ on the canvas won’t be the Republican candidate in 2024. It will be somebody above the fray, unbloodied, clean, respectable, with a patriot gleam in his ungouged eyes, able to legitimately cut the Gordian Knot of constitutional government.
I’m thinking it will be the still-undefeated Neil Gorsuch. It won’t matter that he’s never been in the ring.
You heard it here first. Gorsuch has all the characteristics needed to get the stench of the Trump years out of the nostrils of respectable, cloth-coat Republicans, even as they reconstruct the voting realities of the Jim Crow South. He’s a patrician right out of Central Casting, and he’ll appeal to the suburban women turned off by Trump’s history as a rapist. Trump’s working-class base will recognize Gorsuch as a spoiled rich kid, but a spoiled rich kid who will buy the keg, supply the girls, and talk to the cops and make them go away when they try to bust the party at his parents’ house. It worked for Brett Kavanaugh.
I know, I know. If you want to make the gods laugh, become a pundit. Neil Gorsuch could be dead of Covid tomorrow. I am confident, however, that the next Republican presidential nominee will look like him, be similarly unscarred, and get elected. He’ll be white, male, and sexily paternal—but not in the too-literal Trump way.
He’ll know how to wink and nod and dog-whistle at racists who claim not to have a racist bone in their bodies. He’ll exude all the smarmy class of a prep-school graduation.
He will be conversant with all the subtleties of the American caste system, know which ring of which Pope to kiss, and understand the difference between Mormons and Evangelicals, between Southern and Western Good Old Boys, between East Indians and Indians. He’ll have the support of union leadership, if not the rank-and-file. The factory farmers, if not their undocumented employees. And the financial industry, if not the people paying rent and eating fast food.
For a time, monarchy will appear to coexist with democracy. The electoral machinery will serve up the occasional Democrat courtier to a Republican Congress and Republican Supreme Court.
Government will be static ritual. Real political power will reside in the councils of the wealthy, but Davos and Jackson Hole and the Bohemian Club and the Federal Reserve will not make any decision that threatens the patriarchal oligarchy that has ruled this country from its beginning. Unspoken consensus will replace reasoned debate.
One of the reasons such a consensus can be reached is that it will stem from a world view rather than specific events or circumstances. That’s why Republicans seem impervious to reason or scientific fact—they’re living in a universe where those things don’t matter. What matters is the cosmic hierarchy, its permanency, and its perceived justice, so that the people at its top never have to feel guilty for being there.
It used to be a joke among liberals that the Republican Party was determined to repeal the Sixties, but this winter it’s more accurate to say that they want to repeal the Enlightenment and restore a kind of Medieval hierarchy, complete with the human equivalents of (in descending order) the Heavenly Father, Son, Holy Ghost, seraphim and cherubim and nephilim, men and women, devils, demons, and ghosts, slaves, lepers, and the remaining non-extinct beasts of the remaining forests and the surviving fish of the toxic seas.
All of this is a bit short-sighted. Nothing is permanent or just in a world run by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Future historians, if there are any, will use a stultifying Republican monarchy to explain why our empire succumbed to pandemics, resource and energy depletion, melting ice caps, overpopulation, nuclear pollution, and ecosystem destruction. But I’m not sure that if the Democrats somehow managed to revive our democracy, bring mortal enemies together in common cause, and pull off a WWII-style mobilization against a lethal future, the result would be any different. Existential threats, once you’ve got them up and running, destroy not just world views but worlds, no matter what you do.
Democrats are learning that a president has more power to destroy than to build. Republicans will learn how little power a monarch has, and how quickly that power can disappear. Democrats are complaining that democracy is dying. Republicans will complain that since the Internet went down it’s hard to know what’s still out there beyond the Washington, D.C. suburbs. But they’ll decree that the country will still exist as long as country clubs do. They’ll decree that everything is all right.
Everything is all right. Words for America’s tombstone.
It’s tempting, once you start assuming the end of this particular civilization, to imagine yourself ahead a thousand years or so, to a time when everything really is all right. Clean fusion power plants are supplying electricity too cheap to meter, and everyone has an electric vehicle that flies, and a just, speedy, and benign artificial intelligence has taken over all but the most ceremonial functions of government. The population of the planet sits at a comfortable, species-preserving half billion. A birth is allowed when somebody decides to die. CO2 occupies a mere 300 ppm of the atmosphere and glaciers and polar caps are growing again. Nuclear weapons no longer exist, except for a few at the base on Ceres, a safeguard against earth-orbit-crossing asteroids. Houses are free and recyclable. A bunch of extinct species have been reconstituted from bits of fossil DNA. Rich ecosystems have been restored as the planet has cooled, and a small patch of lifeless desert is preserved at Kew Gardens as a reminder of what most of the planet was like before weather control. Covid is still loose in the population, but the latest variant renders its victims leaner, more intelligent, and full of Spidey-strength. Human decency is an ingredient in multivitamins. Playground bullies and their adult equivalents are gone. Nobody knows where they went. Nobody asks.
It’s a utopian dream, and it leaps to mind as a kind of bizarre negative of the world we’ve got. It’s a world where things have gotten fixed, not so different from Eden if humans hadn’t screwed up that sweet deal from the get-go.
Almost everyone has a version of it, although the details vary. Elon Musk, for example, dreams of a Mars where humans have gotten things right inside their domes. Everything is an engineering problem, including human behavior. China is trying something similar here on earth. Russia wants to recreate ancient Sparta, a dwindling garrison-state surviving on the backs of its slaves. Republicans are busy bringing back the antebellum South. Democrats, perhaps because they know they’re doomed, haven’t thought that far ahead.
Neither has anyone else, not really. Utopias require repeal of that pesky old Second Law, and I don’t think that will happen, no matter how advanced science becomes. The world a thousand years from now will be subject to the same limitations our world is, which means that humanity, should it still exist, will be trying, in the face of fierce resistance, to keep warm, keep fed, and somehow defeat old age and disease.
A thousand years is how far we are from the Mayans. A thousand years hence, anyone thinking about America is apt to look at our current political situation the way we might look at one Mayan city-state attacking another, killing its king and enslaving its inhabitants, and then, not long after its victory, succumbing to drought and anarchy. Our ruins will reveal the fate of our dreams.
It is comforting to measure time in increments of millennia when you read of Madison Cawthorn polishing his pistol during a House Veteran’s Affairs Committee meeting, or Ted Cruz taking off to Cancun when his constituents are freezing to death, or Josh Hawley encouraging the January 6 rioters, or Donald Trump opening his mouth about anything. In a thousand years, all these people will be sleeping with their ancestors, and their dreams will be as much dust and ashes as the rest of them. Joe Biden no doubt thought as much during his recent press conference, and it was one of the reasons he could sit through the question period and exhibit a modicum of civility.
It may be that the true division in our country is not between left and right, but between those who know and respect the human tragedy and those who pretend they are above it. Joe Biden is old enough and has suffered enough to know what it is to be human. For that reason alone, he should be president-for-life. He probably will be, given his age and the stress of his job.
I, of course, will end as dust and ashes, too, and it won’t take me a thousand years to get there. But I do hope that if humans are alive that far into the future, and if they can read English, and if they’re mildly sympathetic to the people who bequeathed them the brutal conditions of their lives, that they will find this journal.
Should this civilization last a few more years, I’ll print my journal on acid-free paper, place it in a sealed aluminum box, wrap it in layers of polyethylene, and bury it somewhere in the Sawtooths. I’ll pick a spot near where a house might go, because I expect that sometime in the next thousand years people will settle the high peaks. High Central Idaho will be one of the few livable habitats this far south. They’ll discover my journal when they’re trying to collect topsoil for a garden.
I hope its discoverers will take from these words the knowledge that some of us knew what we were doing was unsustainable. We understood by the year 2022 that industrial civilization was a failed experiment, and that civilizations all have a shelf life.
My future readers will know that for a brief period, even ordinary humans lived a life so privileged that we must have all been kings and queens, and that some of us knew how lucky we were. I’ll even put my name on the manuscript, so no one will confuse me with Neil Gorsuch.