Washington has once again demonstrated how detached its political class has become from the concerns of ordinary Americans. After a bruising election season, Democrats are signaling that their answer to economic anxiety is not a serious plan to address the country’s problems, but another round of political retaliation, legal warfare, and Beltway score-settling.
In the months before the election, Washington’s biggest controversies revolved around Donald Trump’s authority to put his name on the Kennedy Center, a bitter dispute over the liner of a reflecting pool, and an extraordinarily overlawyered fight over removing trees from a federally owned golf course. The capital managed to turn matters of almost no consequence to most Americans into major political battles.
Meanwhile, the federal government’s debt surpassed $40 trillion. Republicans controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress, while the Supreme Court was dominated by Republican-appointed justices. Yet the promised course correction never materialized. The people supposedly in charge appeared increasingly disconnected from the economic pressures and everyday realities facing the country.
Now, with Democrats making major gains in political power, the message coming from Washington is hardly reassuring. The emerging priority appears to be punishment and retribution: another round of partisan combat, this time directed at political enemies inside the same insulated establishment.
The central question is whether Washington’s political class still has any meaningful connection to the nation beyond its own privileged circle — or whether the country outside the Beltway has become little more than an afterthought.
Back in September, I described the election as a contest about nothing. Republicans had failed to present a compelling record or a clear governing agenda, choosing instead to frame the race as a contrast election built around one message: Don’t vote for crazy Democrats.
Democrats responded with essentially the same strategy.
Their message was simple: Trump, Trump, Trump.
The Republican pitch was don’t vote for weird Democrats. The Democratic pitch was don’t vote for Trump Republicans. It was a double-negative election, with both parties asking voters to reject the other side rather than offering a persuasive vision of what they intended to accomplish.
That is the depressing state of American politics: a contest defined less by what candidates stand for than by what they despise. A politics of negation and repudiation leaves little room for ambition, serious ideas, or a hopeful vision of the country’s future.
And it is making public life increasingly unpleasant. The spectacle is exhausting to watch, exhausting to discuss, and even more discouraging to participate in. When politics becomes a parade of personal attacks and partisan resentment, it is hardly surprising that many capable, sensible, and decent people have little desire to run for office.
The election’s most striking feature may have been just how unpleasant its winners were to listen to. Troy Jackson and Peggy Flanagan were, in the author's assessment, deeply unimpressive candidates. Amy Klobuchar’s speaking voice was compared to fingernails scraping across a blackboard. Arizona reelected what the author derisively described as a “dead-eyed toddler” as governor, while Mary Peltola’s voice was also singled out as an irritant.
The point is not simply that voters chose candidates the author dislikes. It is that the political environment has become so abrasive and joyless that even the prospect of electoral victory offers little reason for optimism. Winning increasingly seems to mean gaining another opportunity to attack the other side rather than taking responsibility for governing.
There is little reason to expect an especially healthy period in national politics. Washington’s appetite for partisan combat is unlikely to disappear just because the election is over. But Americans should resist allowing the political class to consume their lives or dictate their sense of the country's future.
As Camille Paglia once wrote about another historical moment, “Society is in its late or decadent phase. The ruling hierarchy consists of the senile and the adolescent.”
It is a bleak assessment, but one that captures the dysfunction on display. America deserves leaders focused on its people, its economy, and its future — not an establishment endlessly preoccupied with its own rivalries. Until that changes, the country will have to keep its perspective, refuse to surrender to the spectacle, and remain ready for a better alternative.
