By Micah Meadowcroft, The American Conservative
American politics, like American life, is more than D.C. and the federal government.
This was going to be a different column.
The federal government, made up of three branches as it is, provides a convenient typography for political actors and reformers. There are people whose theories of politics—that is to say, theories of power and justice—focus on the executive, with its quadrennial presentation of a diadem to a new small Caesar; others emphasize the balanced scales of priestlike judges, Anubis weighing the heart of the law and the feather of progress; meanwhile, many still look to the circus of the legislature, that ringed fantastic show where the backwoods meet boardrooms and Mammon cracks his whip.
That sort of taxonomy piece is common enough to the weekly columnist, who has to get in his reps and sets even in a slow news week. Maybe I’ll write it someday, but I probably won’t; after all, you can write it yourself now. Just sort the factions of whomever (the “new right,” commentators, Twitter personalities, etc.) into their primary branch of government: one, two, three.
I was diverted from this plan by a conversation with someone who works in state policy, though, and the realization that the hypothetical column, like so many other parts of our public discourse, takes D.C. as the default. But American politics, like American life, is more than the federal government.
The consolidation of mass media in the age of digital technology has increased the rate at which our culture has nationalized and homogenized, and partisan politics is at least no exception if not the pointy bit at the front. Conservatives, who ought to know better—being in theory and disposition skeptical of grand-scale social engineering projects and content to preserve things as they have been received and long endured—continue to fail to build where they are when the roof starts falling in, and look to D.C. and an election or lifetime appointment to save them.
