Those of us who were born recently enough to only have followed the last several national elections may be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that our democracy is in the throes of unraveling, and that the Great American Experiment is, at last, a failure.
2000 found us stating that we were faced with the worst candidates in history. In 2004, we took it all back and declared that no, in fact, these were the worst candidates we’d ever been forced to elect. In 2008 the ascendancy of our country’s first black president gave rise to latent white nationalism from coast to coast, and was the most polarizing election in memory. The most polarizing election in memory, of course, until 2012, when the TEA party hijacked the Republican party and talking heads spoke exclusively in superlatives for like eight months. That shit was wild.
But then we have 2016. Holy crap. The world, it seems, is on the cusp of demise.
This election cycle has seen the most inflammatory language we’ve ever heard on the presidential stage, and it has incubated the ugliest in all of us. The last debate nearly came to blows, the candidates finally resorted only to libel. The Republican party is actually imploding before our eyes, and zealots across the political spectrum are openly calling for revolution if they don’t get their way.
Isn’t it great?
See, our body politic is reeling right now, but there isn’t really any better way for it to unfold. What we’re seeing here is entropy at work. Entropy, remember, is that pesky tenet of thermodynamics that you heard about in college and forgot about as soon as f’ing possible. That tendency in a closed system to err toward disorder.
Physicists deal with it all the time in a candid way, but entropy is a constant in all of our lives. You ever notice how it’s a full time job to keep the kitchen clean? Or the bedroom picked up? How a clean house will apparently descend into chaos over the course of a week if it’s allowed? That’s entropy. And it’s at work right now in our body of representatives.
It takes an outside force to restore order. It takes effort. The Trump campaign is, like he promises (one of the few things he’s right about), well positioned to fix a broken system. He really is poised to Make America Great Again, the same way that months’ worth of moldy pizza boxes under the couch are poised to get you to clean the living room.
Partisan inflexibility has gridlocked Congress for more than a decade. It’s that ineffectiveness that’s given rise to a candidate like Trump. People are sick of that shit, and this is what we’ve come up with: a big, orange cudgel brandished at our representatives that they’d better get their damn affairs in order or we’ll give ’em more of this whack job.
I hope that the Trump candidacy is simply an indication that our national politics have reached a state of squalor unparalleled outside of Shel Silverstein poems (a garbage fire, in other terms). That it’s time, now, to clean our bedroom. To put away those dishes. To wash and fold those piles of dirty clothes. Unchecked, the state of things will always tend toward disorder and chaos. I hope that we can agree that it is time, now, for a reset. It’s physics, after all.
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