By Chris Satullo
Ever feel a sneaking suspicion that it might not be a great idea to entrust government to people who don’t believe in government?
Who’ve built their careers on the claim that government is always and everywhere incompetent?
Who seem to view elected or appointed office mostly as a platform for performing gestures of contempt toward the people who actually want government to work well?
As food for pondering, consider this recent confluence of events:
- The death of Rush Limbaugh.
- The Texas power grid fiasco.
- The congressional debuts of Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Upon Limbaugh’s demise, some pundits felt the need to sprinkle their summing up of his career with a few compliments.
I suffer from no such compunction. Limbaugh was an awful person – snide, cruel, reckless, racist, bombastic, meretricious, a titan of hypocrisy. He easily ranks in the top 10 of Most Damaging Americans of My Lifetime (a span that, if you want to count my time in diapers, dates back to Joe McCarthy).
His worst sin: He was really good at what he did. He perfected the art of confecting grievance and fomenting hyped outrage over it. He relentlessly infected the conservative base with his zest for that game. He was the Patient Zero of toxic partisanship. Like many viruses, it soon raged out of control.
Even before many of them even knew the Web was a thing, Limbaugh taught his Dittoheads to troll. He made “owning the libs” the whole point of the political game – and to him it all was a game, designed for his personal fun and profit.
Profit he did, killer capitalist to the core. He didn’t really care about policy, principles, even the candidates he would build up, flatter fulsomely, then scorn. It was all performance, singularly aimed at boosting his ratings – a point he would even admit from time to time.
Worst of all, he ended up playing a perverse John the Baptist to the Orange Messiah, preparing the way for the one who was to follow, creating a desert of spirit while telling his followers it was an oasis. With Trump in the Oval Office, the game got deadly serious, but Limbaugh joked on. “[It’s} just the common cold, folks,” he said of COVID-19.
So, don’t wonder who turned Republican politics into an endless performance of Grievance Theater. Limbaugh wrote the script, did the lighting and painted the sets. For succeeding generations of Republican pols, Grievance Theater is all they know. For them, the play’s the thing.
Ronald Reagan was of course a real actor, a master of the prepared quip, the wry smile, the puckish tilt of the head. But his skill at narrative and stagecraft were all in service of a vision, an agenda, a set of ideals, in which he genuinely believed. I might consider the vision ahistorical and much of the agenda wrong-headed, but I know Reagan’s shtick wasn’t a fake, a scam. It was sincere. Limbaugh, even while pushing Reagan for sainthood, took a sledgehammer to sincere.
In the hands of Limbaugh’s political spawn, Reagan’s credo of “less government” has devolved into “let’s not even try.” Instead, let’s use Grievance Theater to gain power, so that we can…well, not do much of anything but hold onto the power and reward the rich friends who pay for our nice costumes and lovely perks. Let’s make gridlock, blame and posturing our “governing” style.
Which brings us to Texas, which is a master class in how real people who need government to have their backs get hurt when their state government devolves into one long run of Grievance Theater.
The risks posed by Texas regulators’ failure to winterize the state’s power grid had been demonstrated vividly by a cold snap in 2011, then analyzed in a painstaking federal report.
With that to-do list in hand, the state’s legislature – which meets only every other year, BTW – did..nothing. Well, it did find time to fret about transgender bathrooms, pass voter ID laws to prevent nonexistent fraud, enact a “sermon safeguard” law and expand Texans’ already copious gun rights. But did it do anything about the multiple risks flowing from the state’s utterly laissez-faire attitude to its power grid? Nah.
The result for ordinary folks across this vast state? Death, distress, illness, lost income, and bank accounts emptied overnight to pay utility bills. It was a cold betrayal of voters who elect people to state office under the reasonable assumption that those people might actually give a shit about doing their jobs.
So what did Texas Gov. Greg Abbott do when the scale of damage done by incompetence on his watch became clear? It took Abbott – who is as good at Grievance Theater as Tom Hanks is at mounting World War II sagas – a nanosecond to pivot to blaming AOC (has she ever set foot in Texas?) and the Green New Deal (not enacted) for Texas’ power woes. Nonsense, but he had reason to hope audiences addicted to Grievance Theatre might be fooled into applause.
You’ll note I have refrained so far from mentioning Ted Cruz. Just one point about this rich loam into which late-night hosts have planted so many fine jokes: When you have no clue and no interest in how to wield government power to help the non-rich, when your sole focus is “owning the libs” to make the base applaud, why not go to Cancun? I mean: Zooming into Fox News works just as well from Mexico as from Houston.
This mention of a terminally obnoxious member of Congress helps me segue to new House members Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga) and Madison Cawthorn (R.,NC). Each represents the logical outcome of 30 years of Republican valuing of “performance” over performing the basic tasks of governing.
After the House Democratic majority stripped Greene of her committee assignments in response to her touting of bigoted conspiracy theories, she told the Washington Examiner: “They don’t even realize they’re helping me. I’m pretty amazed at how dumb they are. Oh no, it doesn’t hurt me at all. I think it’s going to give me more time on my hands, I think, which is fantastic because then I can gain more support.”
In other words, I’m delighted that my pesky constitutional duties won’t take time away from what I really treasure: Tweeting, going on NewsMax and speaking at Q-Anon potlucks.
Similarly, Cawthorn, Capitol Hill’s youngest (25) elected MAGA acolyte, wrote this in an email to fellow members of the GOP caucus: “I have built my staff around comms rather than legislation.”
In other words, in hiring people with taxpayers’ money, Cawthorn is going to focus on recruiting flacks who can churn out social posts, talking points and money quotes for Fox News appearances, rather than analyze policy and legislation. This isn’t new; back in 2009, reeling from the Obama landslide in ’08, a GOP caucus leader advised backbenchers to make a similar shift of resources from governing to posturing. His name: a former radio talk host named Mike Pence.
Now, this failing is not the exclusive province of Republicans. The Democrats have their show ponies, their Twitter addicts, their heavyweights who pull theatrics for media to distract from their failures to govern (talkin’ ‘bout you, Gov. Cuomo).
But Greene and Cawthorn represent a real turn of the screw, a fateful difference of degree. They do not even pretend to try to govern. They explicitly say that’s a fool’s errand – particularly when their party’s clear agenda is to guarantee inept federal government.
Cawthorn and Greene rejoice that their only task is to strut the boards and chew the scenery of Grievance Theater. It works for them. It draws cheers from the bubbled base. It’s what Donald would do.
Just don’t try to explain it to the Texas parents who had to burn some of their children’s toys for heat.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia