A hopeful requiem
by Tom Sullivan
“The swamp,” that crusty, unresponsive Washington establishment people love to hate. Donald Trump was going to drain it as president, return it to the people — his people. And here we are after the most tumultuous week in memory. Investigations. Convictions. Chaos. Treason, or suggestion of it, from a federal judge. Allies betrayed. The stock market in free fall. Topping it off, a Christmas shutdown of the government over funding for a ridiculous border wall.
“The Democrats are trying to belittle the concept of a Wall, calling it old fashioned,” Trump tweeted, later tweeting a cartoon image of an allegedly “totally effective” Steel Slat Barrier. “The fact is there is nothing else’s that will work,” Trump went on, “and that has been true for thousands of years. It’s like the wheel, there is nothing better. I know tech better than anyone…..” His will be a beautiful wall. A great wall. (He knows China better than anyone too.)
There is light in the darkness even now.
One aspect of the swamp that makes Washington Washington is the types of people drawn to the allure of power for its own sake, not to mention to the money that flows like Potomac through the town. The institution’s ballast is the rules and protocols surrounding seniority and how long it takes both to learn the rules and to gain a firm legislative foothold and real power. It takes years and the kind of patience that, in normal times, wrings the idealism out of many of the players willing to serve in the trenches long enough to eventually direct the battles.
I wrote of the Democratic variety:
Young politicos jump into the game the same way the New Agers did: to pursue a passion. They begin as Young Democrats and interns. They cannot wait to attend political functions and rub elbows with high-profile elected officials. They angle for selfies with the “poohbahs,” as one friend put it, and can’t wait to get the pictures up on Facebook to show family and friends just how connected they are. Perhaps they graduate to a legislative assistant position for some state representative or senator. They transition to employment with another one. Or perhaps, even to a permanent position with a committee in the legislature or Congress.
By the time they decide to run for office themselves, they have an established network of party friends, colleagues, and former employers with endorsements and fundraising lists to kick off their first campaign. Unless a party insider smoother, better looking, or better connected enters the race, they become their party’s default candidate right out of the gate. As a known quantity and trusted, they are already an establishment candidate and haven’t seen the first dollar of PAC or lobbyist money. Although this is not true of everyone, the need to maintain those professional relationships and a team-player image limits the range of policies they can entertain.
Thus, spreads the swamp. However idealistic they may have started, many — and by no means all — whose ambitions tempt them to acclimate, to learn the swamp’s rhythms, to be seduced by power’s soothing burble, slowly become the kind of politicians people love to hate. And once they achieve power, they’re not leaving. You see that in the faces of those still there after decades.
So, the promising news. A whole crew of new sheriffs is coming to town in January. With them comes the promise of reformatting the game.
Think Progress reports, noting Democrats’ aging leadership:
Of the 59 newly-elected Democrats who will be joining Congress for the first time next month, only 18 have previous experience holding some kind of elected office.
The election brought the most flips for Democrats “in nearly 50 years.” A few have experience in state or city government. Three are returning to Congress after a “hiatus.”
Nevertheless, the vast majority of that incoming class — approximately 70 percent — will be assuming elected office for the first time. In fact, only six of those 41 new members even had prior experience running for office.
Days after the November election when Democrats’ projected gains in the House still numbered 30, Lisa Desjardins of PBS “NewsHour” observed the average age of newly elected members is under 40, including the first two women ever elected to Congress under 30.
“Overall, this new group of members of Congress, their average age is 10 years younger than the members of Congress sitting now,” Desjardins said. There were still another 10 Democrats to add to her count.
With veterans soon to step aside, a new, younger class of leaders brings with it at least the possibility of changing how the game is played. The torch will be passed to a new generation tempered by #Resistance, disciplined by a hard and bitter economic recovery.
And just like that, GOP discovers $5.7 billion for a wall.
$5.7 billion
What if we instead added $5.7B in teacher pay?
Or replacing water pipes?
Or college tuition/prescription refill subsidies?
Or green jobs?But notice how no one’s asking the GOP how they’re paying for it. https://t.co/jXdm1w9bpy— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) December 21, 2018
Opposing these new leaders, a political culture that grinds idealism into conformity and a swamp that only deepened when Donald the Huckster came to town.
At The Atlantic, contributing editor Eliot A. Cohen of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies offers a requiem for the tenure of James Mattis as Trump’s defense secretary. Mattis, who announced his resignation this week, is “animated by sentiments Donald Trump could not understand,” Cohen explains, a warrior known for saying, “Engage your brain before you engage your weapon.” From a generation that signed up first to serve and wound up leading, and finally struggled to affirm “values of fairness and legality” in an administration that respects neither.
Alone among Trump’s coterie of sycophants, Mattis “refused to curry favor, to pander at the painful televised Cabinet sessions, or to praise someone who deserved none of it.” In the end, Mattis could not serve both Trump and his country, Cohen sighs:
Henceforth, the senior ranks of government can be filled only by invertebrates and opportunists, schemers and careerists. If they had policy convictions, they will meekly accept their evisceration. If they know a choice is a disaster, they will swallow hard and go along. They may try to manipulate the president, or make some feeble efforts to subvert him, but in the end they will follow him. And although patriotism may motivate some of them, the truth is that it will be the title, the office, the car, and the chance to be in the policy game that will keep them there.
They may think wistfully of the unflinching Sir Thomas More of Robert Bolt’s magnificent play about integrity in politics, A Man for All Seasons. But they will be more like Richie Rich, More’s protégé who could have chosen a better path, but who succumbed to the lure of power. And the result will be policies that take this country, its allies, and international order to disasters small and large.
That is the swamp. May our 116th Congress write its epitaph.
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cheers — digby
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