In the interest of interstellar amity and fostering a greater understanding among all residents of the galaxy, The New York Times sponsored a panel discussion of the American political scene by representatives of people obviously from a planet not our own.
The most corrosive and dispiriting thing is how zero-sum our political conversation has gotten. I look at the Democratic Party and see a lot of energy I love—particularly the old Bernie Sanders spirit, before it was consumed by the apparatus. I look at the Republican Party and see people like Ted Cruz, who are very good at kicking up against some of the party's worst ideas. There's hope here and energy, just not if you keep on seeing this game as red versus blue.
Yes, as seen from the perspective of a planet circling Alpha Centauri, America would appear to be hungering for a Sanders-Cruz coalition. You can feel the entire population fairly seething with the desire for it. Gooey, dripping, steaming, as the late Mr. Zappa might have put it. So much so that the casual observer from that quadrant of the galaxy might overlook the fact that Ted Cruz only “kicks up” against “his party’s worst ideas” on behalf of his own, which always are even worse.
Remarkably, the rest of the panel seems to be fascinated by this possibility.
This is a good example of the gap between how political professionals see things and how individuals see things. There's no place for the Bernie-Cruz sympathizer in normal political typologies!
Viewed from the heights of the mountains on Europa, one might see things that way, when actually there’s no place for the Bernie-Cruz sympathizer in any normal physical reality not heavily altered by psychedelic drugs.
It's a debate among libertarians whether divided government is actually a good thing. Or is the one thing the two parties can agree on that they should spend ever more money? I don't have a ton of hope that a Republican-controlled House or Senate will do much good. On the other hand, the sheer economic insanity of the Biden years—amounting to approving more than $4 trillion of new borrowing, to say nothing of the unconstitutional eviction moratorium and student loan forgiveness—is mind-boggling to me, so almost anything that could put the brakes on some of this stuff seems worth trying.
Yes, out on Triskelion, the locals carefully husband their quatloos. Proof of the longstanding theory held by exobiologists that libertarianism came to Earth on an ancient meteor from that distant world—Wait? What’s that? This is a discussion among actual Earthlings?!
It’s obviously nappy-nap time.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
