I awoke this morning to learn that “New Hampshire has
spoken.” Fortunately, unlike most of the candidates themselves, New
Hampshire spoke sotto voce, not
nearly loud enough to disturb my slumbers.
Indeed to say that New Hampshire spoke is to indulge in the classical
rhetorical figure of synecdoche—the one
generally known as “the part for the whole”.
My rough-and-ready
extrapolation from the newspaper charts is that approximately thirty-seven
percent of New Hampshire spoke (sort of)—that is, thirty-seven in one hundred
of a population about that of San Antonio.
Still,
given the anemia of our national political participation, that is a not
unimpressive number. The victories of
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were not merely decisive but crushing. And to be clear, as scornful as I may sound,
this essay is more of a confession than an indictment. For I have followed all the primary events
slavishly in the newspaper and on the PBS “News Hour”. I have attended to most of the so-called
debates on the Tube, and digested column yards of posterior analysis and
exegesis. My attention has been
bi-partisan, though this year the Republican “debates” have been more
interesting than the Democratic “debates” rather in the way that Paradise Lost is more interesting than Paradise Regained--simply because of the
raw materials of the two poems. Milton’s
politics were intense but from our point of view perhaps somewhat
incoherent. Although he was a spokesman
for a revolutionary regime, and even an apologist for regicide, the actual
operations of his imagined divine government are autocratic in the
extreme. On the other hand democracy of
a sort does characterize the political operations of the demonic world. Milton invented the word Pandemonium—a place
bringing together all the demons—as the name of the diabolical congress or
parliament in which the fallen angels meet to cook up their plot. It is the raucous character of their debate
that accounts for the meaning of the word pandemonium
in ordinary discourse.
In the
shouting match of the last Republican forum the governor of my state, Chris
Christie, seems perhaps to have pulled off a successful kamikaze attack on the
S. S. Marco Rubio. Rubio is not exactly
dead in the water, but he is listing noticeably, at the bottom of the
mediocres, and (humiliatingly) just below Jeb Bush, who is in the middle of the
mediocres. Does anyone still read
Matthew Arnold these days? I am thinking
of Sohrab
and Rustum, the oriental tale that
reverses the archetype of Oedipus Rex. In this one it is the father who unknowingly
kills the son. Mr. Christie himself is
way out ahead of his fellow single-digit also-rans, but the world is rarely
impressed by a sixth-place finish. It
worked for Dante Alighieri*, of course.
But I knew Dante Alighieri. He
was a friend of mine. And, Mr.
Christie, you are no Dante Alighieri.
Please return immediately to New Jersey, where we languish for want of
executive direction.
Tremendous
amounts of money have already been spent on these preliminaries. It is hardly worth saying that the money
could have been put to better purposes, because that is true of so many of our
expenditures, public and private alike.
But the figures are staggering.
In the Iowa contest Jeb Bush received 5200 votes, less than three
percent of the total votes cast and about one tenth the number secured by the
“winner”, Ted Cruz. It is hard to assess
precisely how much money the Bush people spent in achieving this result because
“the Bush people” include both the candidate’s official campaign workers and
the administrators of an opulent Political Action Committee technically
independent of that campaign. The
published figures I have seen range from a low of $2800 per vote to a high of
$5200. It is probably closer to the latter than the former, though either end
of that spectrum would seem to me to deserve the exclamation point that is so
ludicrous in its collocation with “Jeb”.
Whatever became of the frugal good old days of the ward bosses, when you
could secure a vote for a bottle of whiskey or, at most, a Christmas turkey?
There is
little faith left in what is usually called the “conventional wisdom”. How could there be? Wisdom itself has become so
unconventional. But I am at last vaguely
apprehending what people smarter than I have noticed for some time, and that is
a fundamental congruence between what superficially seem like such starkly
divergent candidacies as those of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. You cannot make an omelet without breaking
eggs. Unfortunately the hard part is not
the egg-breaking but the omelet-making.
*See Inferno 4.102
