I Don’t Care About the Status Quo

A rejoinder to “I don’t care about the issues”

I don’t think I’ve really written an article about TDS yet because what was there to even say about it? We’ve all seen the deranged libs afflicted by it and had our fair share of laughs at their expense. Toddler tantrums are amusing, perhaps, but not a subject for serious analysis. I have now encountered a TDS post that is more than just a crazy person having a meltdown, though. That post is titled “I Don’t Care About the Issues.” This is basically an attempt at rationalizing TDS; the ultimate conclusion that Only Trump Matters is the same, the author simply tries to get there using actual logic instead of childish histrionics.

I will at least give the author credit for having TDS and yet not acting like a four year old about it, which is faint praise but still better than I observe from most people with this perspective. The fact that I’m sitting here writing this means that I find a lot of fault in his narrative though. His story is fairly simple and goes as follows:

1.      The status quo is pretty good.
2.      Donald Trump tried to disrupt the status quo by overturning the 2020 election.
3.      Therefore, stopping Donald Trump to defend the status quo is more important than anything else.

If all the people who have gone completely insane with TDS could actually put their emotions aside for two seconds and express their sentiments rationally, I think they’d probably arrive at a story that lines up with this. Now the kneejerk reaction from conservatives here is probably to dispute step two in this narrative. But the 2020 election actually was stolen! But Trump isn’t actually a threat to democracy! But Democrats try to steal elections too! Blah blah blah.

I won’t fully discount any of that stuff—my opinion is that I haven’t seen proof 2020 was stolen, but I also don’t trust that it wasn’t. I’m not ultimately very interested in litigating that here. I want to focus on steps one and three. By hyper-focusing on the single tree of Bad Orange Man, our “I Don’t Care About the Issues” guy is missing the forest in which that tree has grown. Let’s just say for the sake of argument that step two is basically correct, Troompft really did try to heckin’ overthrow democracy and all the rest of it.

That means that not only did he do that, but much more importantly, large swathes of his “side” basically sympathized with his actions. Conservatives didn’t just sympathize with him in 2020, they were even willing to nominate him again in 2024 by a pretty overwhelming margin. They’re sticking with the guy! They don’t seem to care very much about “Our Democracy,” do they? That should give you more cause to worry than Donald Trump himself. If the conservative half of society really agreed with your assessment, they surely would’ve thrown Trump to the wayside after 2020.

Furthermore, Donald Trump won’t last forever, but the people that voted for him will, in the sense that the conservative half of US society will still be there after he’s gone. TDS people seem to operate on this implicit assumption that Blumpft has magically hypnotized Republicans into becoming evil and, like a villain in a comic book, if they can just defeat him then everyone will be released from his mind-control spell.

This is, of course, the inverse of reality. Fundamental shifts in the perspective of conservatives at the mass level had to take place before Donald Trump was even possible. Those shifts aren’t going to just somehow instantly revert if he were to drop dead tomorrow. When Trump is gone, there’s every reason to believe that the hundreds of millions who supported him will rally behind another figure who picks up his torch.

So if we accept that step two is accurate—that Orange Man threatened Our Democracy, and that this is a truly unforgivable offense—then the enemy isn’t primarily the Orange Man, it’s the masses that elevated him and then stood behind him. This perspective necessarily implies that Hillary Clinton really was correct with her “basket of deplorables” comment. The conservative half of the country is evil, can’t be reasoned with, and needs to be disempowered sooner rather than later. As you can probably guess, this is a recipe for escalation, not for actually safeguarding our precious heckin’ democracy.

Let’s add the necessary step that is missing from the picture here:

1.      The status quo is pretty good (for you).
2.      The other guy decided that the status quo actually sucks.
3.      Donald Trump tried to disrupt the status quo by overturning the 2020 election.
4.      Therefore, stopping Donald Trump to defend the status quo is more important than anything else.

Now we can see how this story is actually fragmented and fails to address root causes. You see, Donald Trump isn’t the root-level threat to the status quo. The real threat to the status quo is the fact that so many people find it unacceptable! If you never address that, then it doesn’t matter how much hand-wringing you engage in over threats to the status quo, does it? The people you’re trying to convince might see that as a feature, not a bug.

Brief intermission here to remind everyone that I don’t like Donald Trump and won’t vote for him. I actually think his behavior surrounding the 2020 election was bad as well, but for sort of an opposite reason. It was a stupid, ineffective means of trying to change the status quo, which failed badly and did a lot of damage to my interests. That doesn’t mean I would be happy with Trump if his little “coup” had actually succeeded, either! I would really prefer that we find a way to resolve this without doing anything like that, but that requires that we all recognize what the problem actually is, which is where these TDS people consistently get it wrong.

The TDS people act like the problem is the current situation, the Trump situation. The real problem is the trends which led to the current situation. Here I repeat my favorite saying—the future trajectory is more important than the current situation. Your precious status quo is not protected by rigid adherence to time-honored rituals about confirming vote counts and elector slates and such, not really.

It is preserved by a balance of power and interests in which all players calculate that continuing to play the current game is ultimately their best option. Even if they lose sometimes, the costs of doing something else aren’t worth it. But how often can you lose before that math changes? If the stakes are low, maybe you can accept being a perma-loser, but this isn’t a low-stakes game. Indeed, it’s very much the opposite!

You can observe this dynamic playing out constantly when people remark that the Constitution is just dead letters on a page. Does anyone really believe the Constitution was meant to enshrine a fundamental right to abortion, or to “gay marriage?” Even libs don’t believe that. Rather, the fact is simply that when interests shift to a sufficient degree, the letters on the page no longer really matter. The formalized legal structures always give way to accommodate the new reality as dictated by underlying interests and beliefs.

In the same way, once the current game becomes unsustainable for one or more players, it is inevitable that the previous balance will be upset as those players seek to exit the arrangement. Complaining to these people that they aren’t sticking to the rules is like conservatives complaining to the left that the Constitution wasn’t originally meant to enshrine abortion as a fundamental human right. Such concerns can’t be assuaged by blind appeals to conformity.

This means that step one in the TDS narrative—“the status quo is pretty good”—comes across to those of us on the right as sheer gaslighting. In one sense, sure, I recognize that the status quo is good, in the sense that I’m grateful to have been born in the United States instead of, say, Sudan. This goes back to the current situation vs the future trajectory, though. We on the right are worried about the future trajectory. You’re telling us to just be happy with the current situation. That’s the mismatch.

From where I’m sitting, this game is massively rigged against me, and has been since long before I was even born. My side of the game has done nothing but lose, and lose badly, for a hundred years or more. At best we win the occasional battle, but this only ever serves as a mild speed bump in the overall march of “progress.” The thing that led to Trump is that a critical mass of people realized this. They saw that even the people who were supposed to represent their interests—the Mitt Romneys and John McCains—really didn’t give a shit about them, and that things always kept getting worse on the issues they cared about, no matter which way any particular election went.

Given that reality, how can you blame us for giving up on the status quo? The status quo hates us! The status quo tells us that our interests are completely illegitimate while telling us over and over again that we are: Racist, fascist, every other -ist and -phobe, dangerous and evil and a threat to the republic, all the rest of it. And you’re asking me to defend that status quo with you? No thanks. Of course I want to change it. If the shoe were on the other foot, you’d feel exactly the same and we all know it.

Asking me to stick with the status quo under these conditions because “well the status quo is pretty good/could be worse” is the same logic of an abusive husband towards his wife. “I know I hit you every now and then, and I’m probably going to keep hitting you more often until eventually you end up in the hospital, but look how good you have it! You have to overlook my treatment of you because it could always be worse!” Technically, what the husband is saying is true; it can always be worse, and maybe the wife really would be a lot worse off in some respects if she left him. Does any of that justify the abuse? This is how a liberal’s appeal to the status quo sounds to someone like me. When I imagine the future of the right under the status quo, I see a giant rainbow-colored boot stomping on us, forever.

Not much really gets to me anymore after nearly 10 years in Clown World (I date Clown World Year 0 as 2015, the year of Donald Trump’s first successful presidential campaign), but it is truly galling to see people who are so utterly single-minded in simply clinging to the status quo at all costs, willfully oblivious to these clear and obvious reasons why their beloved status quo has become so fragile to begin with. If they’re really so serious about preserving the all-important “system,” you would think they’d get serious about reforming it in a way that soothes these tensions without blowing the whole thing up. Ignoring the tensions completely in favor of pretending that this was all magically willed into existence by the Evil Orange Man is one of the worst approaches I could possibly imagine for trying to defuse this thing.

What is to be done, you might ask? Step one: Acknowledge that other interests exist. If you’re playing a game that the other guy loses one hundred percent of the time, and eventually he wants to quit, it is absolutely absurd for you to sit there and pretend not to understand why he wants out. You might not think that the interests of those on the other side are legitimate, but if you want to maintain the cooperation required to preserve the game, you have to grant some degree of mutual acknowledgment.

This gets at one of the root causes why things have gotten this bad, because the leftist worldview has gone so far off the deep end that left and right have no fundamental premises in common anymore. Obviously cooperation was easier to maintain when people could at least agree on some very basic core values, such as: The United States is a force for good in the world, devotion to God is important, sexual deviancy is bad even if it’s not illegal, etc. Now we disagree on things as fundamental as whether or not the country should even have a border. How do you square that circle?

I won’t pretend to have a definite answer, but if you want to keep this pot from boiling over, that has to get worked out somehow. There has to be some degree of compromise where the right no longer feels that they always lose on everything every single time and they’re being spit on for it. I can say with confidence that this is not being attempted right now, arguably not on either side, but most certainly not on the left (and the left matters more here because they have the power). This is the exact opposite of an attempt at acknowledging the grievances of the right and trying to make a compromise:

If we can’t come to a compromise, which to be fair might be a distinct possibility? Then let’s try to live apart. We don’t have to do a heckin’ Civil War or anything retarded like that, just admit that we aren’t good for each other and support a stronger degree of federalism—let red states be red and blue states be blue without the federal government trying to crush one or the other. This is my personal favored approach. I can make peace with liberals if they can leave me the hell alone and stop trying to hurt me. This still means they have to stop calling me -ist and -phobe though, so I’m not particularly optimistic. But it seems obvious to me that this is the only plausible resolution that doesn’t involve one “side” tyrannically stomping on the other.

I can tell you one thing that is definitely NOT going to help anything, and that’s more TDS. I’ve got bad news for people who think the world revolves around Trump: Things aren’t going to go back to normal after Donald Trump, no matter what happens next month. Normal is over. Remember the 2020 election? That was Biden’s pitch, vote for me and things will go back to normal. “The adults will be back in charge,” they said!

Well? Do things feel normal yet?