Every Day We Order Waffles. And Every Day, We Get Larger and Larger Bowls of Flaming Trash Thrust In Our Faces

There's no normal to go back to. Welcome to the New Disorder.

The story goes that a Portuguese monk met Pope Julius III and his caravan on the road to a holy place. The monk had heard the popular jokes and whispers about the pope, mocking and biting, and felt they were a shabby way to treat a man upon whose shoulders lay so much obligation. Moved by sympathy, he told the pontiff how sorry he was that the burdens of Julius’s office should be so heavy, and how certain he was that the pope must be a man of great wisdom and ability in order to carry them. Whereupon Julius III looked at him kindly and said “do you not know, my son, with how little understanding the world is ruled?”

Julius might just have been projecting. The record of his pontificate is unspectacular, the legacy of a man of limited understanding indeed who spent his time alternating enthusiastically between self-indulgence and gout. Or the story might also never have happened at all. The line about how little understanding rules the world is often attributed to a Swedish nobleman encouraging his son, a young and intimidated diplomat, to have confidence around the Great And The Good who had gathered to negotiate what would become the Treaty of Westphalia. You also see it attributed to Cardinal Richelieu, which seems plausible enough from the kind of man who’d get so pissy about his dining companions’ table manners that he casually invented the now-ubiquitous table-knife.

Do you know, my son, with how little understanding the world is ruled? Now hold my beer and watch this.

I like the Julius III version. There’s something timeless and essentially human about the idea of a sympathetic fellow telling the most powerful figure in his world how grateful for and confident he is in the powerful man’s wisdom, only to be told “son, I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing, and neither does anyone else.” It needs only a “now hold my beer and watch this” to complete the picture. As a species, we have ever expected the trusted and wise to make sense of our world, a tendency that commends our generosity more than our judgment. 

Which brings us, as all things must, to the debt-ceiling. This is not a piece about whether we should raise it again (so obvious it barely deserves comment), or the politics of the upcoming legislative battle and various work-arounds (discussed at length and in detail elsewhere). But the uncertainty over whether we will, in fact, raise the debt-ceiling or let the American economy completely crash, and the way that people who are paid to talk about that debate have chosen to do so, clearly and starkly illuminates the absurdity and sheer terror (two great tastes that taste great together) of This Moment. And it’s a great introduction to what this substack is about.

I asked a generative AI to produce Death of Socrates in A Waffle House, which is very much the vibe of This Moment and what we’re talking about on this substack.

Every iteration of the Republican Party in the modern era prior to this one was oriented around the principle of protecting profit before anything else including human life, and was also generally aware of the need to cover the sheer brutality of that creed with a patina of notionally-compassionate or at least intellectually-coherent bullshit. It would not have occurred to Republicans of a previous generation to destabilize the market via the threat of not raising the debt-ceiling, much less to actually toss years of corporate profit to the flames.

Things do change! This iteration of the GOP has a wide streak of outright nihilism and an unsettling number of elected representatives who think we should make the train go faster and not slower around Dead Man’s Curve because they want to see what happens or believe themselves impervious to harm or don’t believe the tracks or cliff or even the train are real at all, a set of impulses that collectively boil down to a macroeconomic policy of fuck it, and fuck you.

I cannot begin to describe how few people actually want things to work this way. Nevertheless!

And so we are treated to the spectacle of a political party that every few years gleefully tells the country that they’re perfectly willing - excited, even! - to usher in the Second Great Depression, while the opposition party is incapable of mustering a majority durable enough to put an end to this grotesquery once and for all. 

I cannot begin to describe - and it will not greatly tax your imagination to conceive - how few people actually want things to work this way. Nevertheless! 

A common device in therapy discourse is Going to a Hardware Store to Buy Oranges. It’s used to refer to a person looking for an emotional response - support; validation; unambiguous affection - from a second person who has repeatedly and clearly demonstrated that they cannot provide that thing. Going to the Hardware Store to Buy Oranges once is misguided; going a second time (and third and fourth and so on) is deluded and self-destructive. 

That is not what is happening with Americans and our democracy. We are not going to our elected government and expecting it to give us the gift of laughter, or eternal life, or sexual satisfaction, or anything else it cannot and was never intended to provide. What is happening is that Americans are looking to their government to make their lives better or easier in some way through the ability to make and execute policy. 

We are going to the same diner every day and ordering waffles and are presented with larger and larger bowls of flaming trash.

Instead we are treated to…whatever the fuck the latest debt-ceiling thing is. We are Going to a Hardware Store to Buy Nails, and being given a bag of oranges. We are going to the same diner every day and ordering the waffles because the diner is where you get waffles, and are presented every day with larger and larger bowls of flaming trash.

And it is not just government, not by a long chalk. To return to the debt-ceiling (must we? - ed.), let’s check in on the media coverage of it. Here is the daily podcast explainer of the country’s organ of record informing us that “both sides” use the debt ceiling as a political tool. 

In a sense, this is true, because one side says it will bring about the Second Great Depression unless its unpopular political demands are met, and the other says that it does not want a Second Great Depression and that people who share that view should vote for them, so, really, who is to say where the difference lies?

Of course, in another, more accurate and less infuriatingly infantile, sense, the comparison of hostage-taker to hostage-negotiator is simply demeaning, and the answer to “who is to say?” is “any goddamn fool at all.” 

This is just a small illustration of a long-gestating tendency in legacy media, one which fully burst upon the scene after the election of Donald Trump, to believe that a kind of performed and performative lack of basic judgment is not just compatible with the job of journalism but in fact represents its best practice. There might be no clearer example of mistaking a flaming bowl of trash for a plate of waffles.

This sort of thing abounds in This Moment; it is daily life in the New Disorder. 

But the way we talk about it - and because you should always ask “who exactly is ‘we’?” when someone invokes the royal first-person plural, I mean: the left-of-center political and media professional class, both practitioners and analysts; candidates and electeds; activists; concerned citizens; the sort of people who read and write and talk about politics with personal urgency - doesn’t reflect the scale of this Disorder, or its exigency, or its irrevocability. Put differently: there are still a lot of people waiting for and talking about and trying to get things to go back to normal.

There is no normal to go back to. The New Disorder is the New Normal.

This substack proposes to do three things about it:

1. Name the Devil. Looking at each individual bowl of flaming trash as a unique failure is ineffective and deranging. The problem is not that the waitstaff misheard you, or that that’s some unique recipe for waffles you’ve never heard of, or that you misspoke your order. The kitchen is just pumping out flaming trash - let’s not pretend otherwise. The New Disorder is a series of institutions and individuals fundamentally, serially, and baroquely failing to meet the expectations of the majority of the people whom they notionally serve. It is a systemic phenomenon and should be discussed as such. 

2. Say Why. There are a number of theories for how we got to This Moment. Some are probably at least partially right! And we should explore them.

3. Do Something About It. Ah, yes, the hardest part of all. Polemic is easier (and much more fun!) than prescription, but we’ll try to hold ourselves to a marginally higher standard. 

It’ll be fun!