A look back at 2017’s “People to Watch”
This year’s first post on Political Orphans described seven prominent, but under-appreciated figures who seemed poised for a breakout year. Here’s a look at what each of them accomplished in 2017.
Category: Future
A postmodern challenge to democracy
If you need sophisticated experts to sort out a base notion of reality, what happens to democracy?
Thinking about the political impact of transience
What if your ability to vote in a presidential election was conditional on showing that you voted in the last city or county election?
Our last professional President?
For the first time in living memory we will now have a celebrity President who fails any credible standard of competence or qualification. The solution emerging on the left, attempting to replace Trump with a better celebrity, fails to address the core problem. For the country to survive in a dawning age celebrity politics, the power of the Presidency and the reach of the federal government may have to be constrained. If competent political professionals are going to be consistently defeated by tabloid figures, then it may be time to rethink the power of the office itself.
Collapse of the Third Republic
Robbed of credible leadership and frustrated by an absence of vision, our options for resolving economic and social contradictions through conventional politics have, at least for the moment, collapsed. Our most powerful levers of government are in the hands of con artists and cranks.
The Third Republic is over and there is no roadmap to the fourth. Few channels remain through which the demands of a new era can be peacefully and democratically expressed. We will either build a new political framework, very quickly, out of a new set of alliances and policies, or experience the usual consequences of political collapse.
A chilling reinterpretation of Idiocracy
For Brawndo and Starbucks and Carl’s Jr. and Costco to continue to function and thrive in this Idiocracy, an entire class of humans must have escaped the reach of democratic politics. They exist in a realm beyond the conception, much less the authority, of President Camacho and his cabinet of simpletons. Idiocracy may not be about the descent of humans into stupidity, but rather the collapse of politics as a means of achieving common human interests.