A season of chaos

During the Trump administration, frequently I felt all that was left to say was "the cruelty is the point." (H/t Adam Server.) As I look at the current Trump/Bannon interval, I fear what needs to be said is "the chaos is the point."

A lot of people, mostly white men, feel massively aggrieved by a seemingly endless pandemic, an economic system in which they sit in a precarious place (if any place), and broad expansion of who matters in this pseudo-democracy (something more like all of us, not just them). So we get both 1/6 and the truckers fouling up Ottawa.

Timothy Snyder is perceptive in The Winter Sieges of North American Capitols.

... the deepest similarity was that the cause of the protestors made no sense.  The Americans who stormed the Capitol last January purported to believe that Trump had won an election that he lost.  There was no evidence of this; what is more, there was no logic: if the Democrats really stole elections, surely they would have arranged comfortable majorities for themselves in the House of Representatives and the Senate.   

The Canadian trucker protest plumbs similar depths of unreason. The ostensible pretext for the "Freedom Caravan," the use of trucks from around the country to disable Ottawa, was the need for Canadian truckers to be vaccinated before they enter the United States.  But this is not something over which anyone in Ottawa actually has control.  ... But this senselessness, it seems, is part of the point.  Making demands that cannot be met makes it hard to bring the chaos to an end.

Snyder blames the internet -- but media which enable communication of feelings more than thought are just a tool. 

Neither of these events attract majority approval. Though most Republicans believe Trump's Big Lie about the 2020 election, 62 percent of us still believe the insurrection was an effort to overturn a valid vote, not the Republican National Committee's "legitimate political discourse." Most Canadians are NOT on team trucker according to The Grid: 

The protests are not organized by Canadian trucking unions, the largest of which has come out against the protests. They also do not appear to reflect the values of most Canadians or most Canadian truckers: More than 80 percent of the Canadian public is vaccinated, including almost 90 percent of truckers, according to Canada’s minister of transport.

A hack of the GoSendMe "Christian" fund raising site which is supporting the Canadian trucker protest revealed that the largest part of the cash support is coming across the blockaded border -- from MAGAs in the United States.

I blame political leaders who see personal advantage in fomenting chaos. Trump himself of course -- what other power has he got? But the hangers-on are leaping into the fray.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis -- the aspiring GOPer presidential hopeful who wants election police to preside over voting -- is all in with the Ottawa protesters. He thinks he's got a winning pitch with this sticker:

Rand Paul has charged out front on weaponizing the pain, as has been his family's business for a couple of generations.

"I’m all for it," said [Senator Rand] Paul, a vocal critic of masking and vaccine mandates. "Civil disobedience is a time-honored tradition in our country, from slavery to civil rights to you name it. Peaceful protest, clog things up, make people think about the mandates. ... I hope the truckers do come to America, and I hope they clog up cities."

I'm feeling for the residents of Ottawa -- a quiet, almost staid, small city. Here's one reaction from some native Ottawans:

The Unitarian writer John Pavlovitz catches what those of us struggling for some minimal sanity are up against:

The fatigue of decent humans is the plan of bad people: inundate us with a million tiny crises, assail us with countless daily culture war battles, and batter us with endless legislative assaults—until we are gradually crushed beneath the weight of it all.

Yes, there are bad people manipulating painful feelings. And if we want to live in a more sane polity, we can but keep on keeping on.