Distracted by Repulsive Objects

I highly recommend Fintan O'Toole's new piece in NYRB, which they have kindly made available to non-subscribers. Do read the whole thing, depressing as it is, because it may knock some scales from your eyes. Here's a key paragraph:

There is, surely, a reason why books that give us Trump in all his outlandish tawdriness—like Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury and Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House—cannot, however appalling their accounts may be, do him any harm. They are exercises in “looking straight at him to learn the truth about him,” an act that seems entirely right by any traditional political and journalistic standard but that misses the specificity of Trump’s performance. If you look straight at such a glaring object, you are blinded.

While the media fill their pages with his grotesque antics, vile slanders, bigotry, ignorance, schoolyard insults, the relentless torrent of lies, narcissism and psychopathy, something substantive is going on that the world is ignoring. The administration is destroying the federal government -- the infrastructure of social welfare, environmental protection, financial regulation, community investment, science and technology that has been steadily built since World War II. In this endeavor, the Resident's ignorance, incompetence and laziness are assets, not liabilities.

In reviewing Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk, O'Toole notes that the federal government seems extraordinarily incompetent at letting the public know about all the good things it does for them. And this is why Ronald Reagan was able to joke that “You know, it’s said that the ten most frightening words in the English language are: ‘Hello, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

In claiming that government was not the solution, but the problem, Reagan captured the loyalty of people who in fact depend on government but don't seem to know it. Remember "Keep your government hands off my Medicare?" Small business owners  tend to be conservative and libertarian even as they depend on federal loan subsidies, the basic transportation infrastructure that delivers customers to their doors and enables them to ship their products, the federal investment in technology, data they depend on for market research and long term planning, the weather forecasts that let them plan their staffing levels, and a whole lot more.

The destruction of the federal government is massive, is already causing enormous damage, and will take a decade or more to reverse. And it's happening unnoticed. Do read.