The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [1]
A key point I took home from my examination of Congress was that both parties, Democratic and Republican, were equally guilty in what really was a conspiracy to run the government without outside interference. The only way the public could protest all the handouts and earmarks and fast-tracked tax breaks and other monstrosities was to vote for the other party—and the other party, it turned out, was inevitably whoring for the same monied masters.
Excepting a few rogue, quixotic members who eschewed the usual campaign donors, Congress was mostly a highly advanced, finely tuned mechanism for turning favors into campaign donations and vice versa. It was a system of formalized political tribute not at all unlike that of the old Supreme Soviet, where the daylight hours were occupied with “political debates” about how the USSR could best aid socialist friends in Mozambique or confront American racism in the South, while behind closed doors fat bloated party functionaries conducted the real business of divvying up military contracts and highway concessions.
I was all set to spend a full year covering this business, in particular following the appropriations season, but my day job at Rolling Stone unfortunately forced me to travel away from Washington far too much to do that work effectively. I remember trying to fake my way through the project by following a C-SPAN Webcast of an appropriations hearing from a hotel in Islamabad, where I’d been sent to cover an earthquake. Even so I was managing to keep up, but then a few days later in Kashmir I ate some kind of fruit and nut salad my fixer had prepared for the Eid holiday and contracted a horrible bacterial illness. I was on the way home on an El Al flight, writing a section about Congressman Joe Barton, when I suddenly spiked a fever of about 105 and fell over face-first into my keyboard. Convalescing a few weeks later, a doctor’s note in hand, I broke the bad news to Chris that I might have to bail on this project as well. I started to hoard my money in an expectation of giving back my advance.
But then a funny thing happened: while on the road for my magazine in the subsequent months, traveling all across America, I began to notice what I quickly realized was a phenomenon directly related to the mess in Washington. There was a consequence, a flip side to the oligarchical rigged game of Washington politics: apparently recognizing that they’d been abandoned by their putative champions in Washington, the public was now, rightly it seemed, tuning out of the political mainstream.
But they weren’t tuning out in order to protest their powerlessness more effectively; they were tuning in to competing versions of purely escapist lunacy. On both the left and the right, huge chunks of the population were effecting nearly identical retreats into conspiratorial weirdness and Internet-fueled mysticism.
As the national affairs correspondent for Rolling Stone I had been given a general mandate to seek out and describe the nature of George Bush’s America in the post-9/11 era, and as the years went by I began to see the outlines of the grotesque black comedy that had taken root in this country since that singular day six years ago. It all came together for me one day when I tried to imagine the whole thing from the point of view of Osama bin Laden. Here he had gone through all the trouble of attacking New York City, and how did the victim nation respond?
Well, its government responded by counterattacking the wrong country and passing a whole host of insane laws that had nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism; its president responded by encouraging its citizens to buy Chevys and go on vacations. Then, when it came time to ask why the attack had happened, the president announced that it had happened because the terrorists, well, those folks hated our freedom. Examining this rationale, the mainstream press did not denounce Bush’s reasoning as the preposterous