The Modern Manchurian Candidate

I guess what really, really gets me is this.

Every time I (using the royal I here) have asked ‘why can’t my country, which I love, do (X) for its citizens?’ X being anything from ‘educate its children in world-class schools’ to ‘provide chemotherapy to kids with cancer without their parents declaring bankruptcy,’ the answer I always get comes back to the military.

We have to fund the military, or else. We have to have the largest, most byzantine military contracting sector in world history because the survival of democracy depends on it. All priorities in the American project must come second to the military, and anyone who who questions why will be dismissed as an idealist. Any amount of money, no matter how small, no matter how vital, is in danger of being categorized as a luxury we can’t afford if it threatens a penny of military spending.

This is more or less the refrain of every bumper sticker about bombers and bake sales, and I am aware I am a little late to the party in terms of being outraged by it. But here’s what really gets me. None of it fucking matters.

I once had a conversation with an FBI hiring manager who told me they subject all cyber defense candidates to a lie detector test and ask them if they have done drugs in the past 10 years. He told me their starting salaries are in the 40s. He told me they can’t have long hair, noserings, or tattoos. He expected me to be impressed with this. That the FBI took its anti-nosering policy so seriously they’d turn away a wunderkind who wanted to protect democracy from real threats.

We will steal billions out of the mouths of poor and hungry children in order to build a tank that is going to sit in a warehouse in case we ever decide we need to storm the beaches of Normandy again, but we won’t spend 100k on a kid who wants to smoke weed and keep Russia from hacking our elections.

And now it’s happened. Now we actually are living in an asymmetric war zone. We thought the Manchurian candidate was a fantasy, and if it wasn’t we assumed it would be some clean-cut, handsome war hero who would win us all over with platitudes about democratic values and helping the less fortunate. Turns out it’s a 70 year old game show host who spraypaints himself orange. And there’s nothing, nothing that will be done about it.

There won’t be any investigations. There won’t be any commissions. There won’t be even a token attempt to prove that America, the world’s premier democracy, can hold an election without Russian interference. We lost a war that we didn’t even know we were fighting.

I don’t know what happens next. I want to say ‘we just have to survive 4–8 years,’ but do we? How certain are we that the one democratic norm Trump will respect is the peaceful transition of power? Even if he does, how certain are we that we’ll survive a kleptocracy run by Russian-backed oil barons and people who want to engineer financial catastrophes so that they can live out their white power fantasies?

And the saddest part? Half the time when I think these thoughts, I can’t help but remember the millennarian panic of the right when Obama was elected. How they spent eight years certain that he was a foreign plant bent on creating an imperial Presidency, despite all evidence to the contrary. And now here I am, staring at what I really fear will be the death of the Republic, and wondering if I’m the crazy one.

I still know what I always know; people are mostly good, I can’t stand alone against history, and my duty and the duty of all moral people is to try to keep each other safe. But it feels so, so inadequate sometimes. What will it matter if I fight for this ordinance or that bylaw if these are the last decades of democracy?