The chicken or the egg?

As the nation descends further into unbridled madness and the daily news cycle becomes little more than a stalemated locker room slap fight between two middle school boys after P.E. class, civility and moral high ground are suddenly all the rage. “WHY CAN’T WE JUST TALK TO EACH OTHER?!” a resident Beltway media centrist is almost certainly asking the person next to him while you read this sentence.
           
The diehard MAGA crowd quickly turned Alex Jones into a mainstream Republican (#QAnon), and liberal journalists like Jim Acosta are wandering around the South and Midwest pretending that they’re doing some important service to the world—begging for Resistance retweets because they represent the only remaining validation he seeks to obtain in life. Eighteen months in to this administration, simply showing up at these press briefings and martyring yourself in hopes that a man who framed his entire campaign on how much he hates you will pivot on a dime and stop hating you is not a brave act of truth-telling muckraking. It’s bland political theater irrelevant to 90 percent of the people living outside of the D.C. and New York metro areas and not working in media.
           
Of course, anytime one side accuses the opposition of abusive behavior, incivility or forcing their expulsion from a chicken restaurant in suburban Virginia, the response is already form written.
           
“Well, you started it!”
           
Hillary warriors have been branding the president as Hitler since the moment he was elected, and pardoned felon Dinesh D’Souza’s new documentary film, with the full endorsement of wonderful son Don Jr., claims that the ideology of the current Democratic Party is firmly grounded in Nazi theory. The guiding principles of our leaders instantly go out the window in the interest of ends justifying the means: Chuck Grassley successfully fought tooth and nail to prevent Barack Obama from appointing a Supreme Court justice (I’m not disputing his right to do it, so don’t recite me the refrain about Joe Biden way back when—I’m aware), and suddenly, he’s beside himself over the fact that the same people who supported Merrick Garland are attempting to delay the confirmation process for new nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
 
Perhaps the discourse can’t be saved, and we were naïve to think otherwise. Trump is never going to change. Neither is the non-Fox News national media, so we can all do ourselves a favor and stop asking them to—it’s a waste of breath. Bob Ray isn’t coming back, and neither is an independent insurgency based on equal levels of hatred toward guns and large sodas. We’re stuck with the left-right paradigm we’ve created, and the best we can do is to operate within it.
 
The most instructive lesson of the Trump presidency thus far is that beneath the middle of the road platitudes, this truly is a zero-sum game. Barack Obama set out on a grandiose mission to create a big tent coalition including any voter to the left of Roseanne Barr and wound up with a GOP diametrically opposed to any legislation he suggested, a convoluted health care law that gives even more money to private insurers and will eventually collapse under its own weight due to intentional sabotage and higher premiums for healthy individuals, a hawkish Bushesque foreign policy, expanded drone wars, heavy handed crackdowns on leakers, a massive bailout for failing private industries amidst a stock market crash, a post-government career as a Netflix/VC bro limousine liberal and a starkly divided electorate choosing a wild card who they felt might actually follow through on his promises in 2016. But, as the respectable center will remind you, at least he spoke eloquently and urged us to work toward a consensus that hasn’t existed in 25 years and probably never will again.
 
Was all of the bipartisan bluster worth it? Trump, for all of the things he doesn’t know, knows that he’s never going to win over the most avowed Clinton backers or the big city newspaper editorial boards, and he doesn’t waste his time trying. He knows that if he took on a more restrained, “presidential” tone, reporters would be hounding him about which sedatives his doctors had prescribed. He knows that regardless of what the rapidly unraveling Russia investigation reveals, the people who voted him in to the White House have already been conditioned to dismiss it as a corrupt WITCH HUNT. He may not be familiar with the specific doctrines of John Locke, Milton Friedman, Karl Marx or even William F. Buckley, but he understands the basic concepts of The Art of War.
 
Governance is not a particularly complicated science, and Trump has shown us that over and over. So, as we repeatedly ask ourselves who’s to blame for all of this unprecedented word violence and Internet anger, does it really even matter?