America in Denial?
Former Governor Mitt Romney speaking with supporters of U.S. Congresswoman Martha McSally at a campaign rally at The Falls Event Center in Gilbert, Arizona. Photo: Gage Skidmore, October 12, 2018.
Over the July 4th holiday, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney published a short piece in The Atlantic where he made one simple point: America is in denial. Instead of joining together to find solutions to our shared problems, Americans are wrapped up in a never-ending blame game with dire consequences. Romney mentions issues like reservoirs and lakes going dry in the west, rising inflation, and the attack on our democracy on January 6, 2021.
According to Sen. Romney, America's most significant issue is the wishful thinking that allows us to live in denial. And there is no shortage of "sophists, grifters, and truth-deniers" who are willing to help us dig deeper into the wells of delusion that Romney worries about. Romney argues that we need leaders like Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr, or Volodymyr Zelensky to guide us forward as a united nation ready to tackle the problems before us. The senator from Utah believes we are on a brink from which we may be unable to return.
A Trump return to the White House in 2024 will likely make our denial a full-blown delusion. President Biden, Romney says, is a good man, but he has not been able to be the uniter we need. However, with all due respect to Sen. Romney, there does seem to be one slight difference with the issues he highlights.
While environmental problems are severe, and we cannot ignore the harm inflation is causing, neither of those can be overcome if we do not have a functioning democracy. If America is to continue being America, it is necessary to perform a kind of political triage where we rightfully identify our most pressing problems and work to fix them.
Biden may be a good man, but he has not been able to unite Americans. So what is our next solution? As of right now, it does not appear that Trump in 2024 will be the choice. Betting markets favor Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, but would that be a better choice than Trump? DeSantis does not strike me as a great uniter, given his love for using the state as a cudgel to browbeat his opponents to acting as he sees fit and only saying what he approves.
America is indeed in denial. We are in denial that we have two functioning parties capable of keeping our nation together. This is not to say that we cannot have two functional parties. Still, so long as Republicans are unwilling to take a hard look in the mirror and root out the Trumpist cancer in its midst, we will continue to be unable to focus on more straightforward matters like inflation, the environment, or the national debt.
3 Other Things
1) In his Sunday newsletter, the French Press, David French discusses our flawed thinking around Red America and Blue America. In short, America is not divided into two but into three pieces: Red, Blue, and Exhausted. French writes about how the Exhausted Majority, who are not rabidly partisan and do not spend the bulk of their time thinking about beating their political opponents, have been rising on the Left and the Right to fight against rampant partisanship. French spoke about the article in a CNN interview and you can watch a clip of it on Twitter here.
2) Matt Lewis of the Daily Beast has an interesting observation about Trump's tanking future political career: the call is coming from inside the house. Lewis points out that most of those making a case against Trump returning to power for the January 6 Committee are former Trump staffers. Perhaps we should take heed of those who know Trump the President best and not allow him to hold that position again.
3) PRRI has a terrifying poll showing that QAnon beliefs have increased since 2021. Usually, this poll might rate as just a regular annoyance. Given that Q is posting again and we have another presidential election coming, this development is concerning and potentially alarming.