Negligible Liability
A Trump defeat is part of the long game. Long live the defeated!
“Negligible liability,” (def.): when the degree of shared or presumed risk is outweighed by the degree of uncertainty. See also, “willful ignorance.”
The Republican Party leadership has debased itself again, which begs the question, is there life after Trump?
During the House debate on immigration reform, another vessel of trust sank. (1) Consider the House and Senate debates as not another example of dysfunction, but rather a perverted show of strength: our polity doesn’t need your complicity in governing, we can wreak chaos without you.
In this world there is life after Trump, a contrived certainty, as former President-Trump-for-life, once assured, “things can’t get any worse, can they?”
Offer a false alternative and one finds a shortcut to a ‘patronal auto/democracy.’ (2) You feel it. Of course you do: he said it out loud.
On the political front, by attending to our posture of always wreaking chaos, you have validated that we can do this, which is to say, undo everything. By not confronting our bullying, we have grown another tentacle.
Mind us, that in order to do this, we need silent but loyal allies, who reject the government and accept us. Who accept our inflated and impressionable momentum. Who are blind to our feebleness and fragility.
Who parse our despair on our behalf in one vaunted exercise: to reclaim what we have been convinced has been taken from us.
This is who we are: where we are. If it’s Tuesday, it must be Hungary.
January 31
Notes
1- Karoun Demirjian, “McConnell Casts Doubt on Border Deal, Saying Trump Opposition May Sink It,” The New York Times, January 25
and Stef W. Kight, “Trump. House Republicans plot to kill border deal.” Axios, January 29
2- A ‘patronal auto/democracy’ is a democracy in name only which cedes power to a supreme authority, a strong man. It’s a term invented as a conflation of “patronal autocracy” (ex. Russia, Belarus) and “patronal democracy” (ex. Ukraine), formulated by Hungarian political scientists Balint Magyar and Balint Madlovics in their documentation of the regimes which persist after the breakup of the USSR. See Masha Gessen, “Democracy in Darkness,” The New Yorker, February 5.
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