Believe Your Eyes: This Is Exactly What It Looks Like

Notice the patterns, not the tepid headlines.

It is by now a trite observation that the Donald Trump administration strategy by way of Stephen Miller is to flood the zone: To inundate the public with so many orders and changes and appointments and firings that no one can keep up with all of it. The point is to overwhelm. Overwhelmed people don’t fight back.

This is particularly destabilizing to people for whom politics is a hobby / identity / job (hello, it’s me). If you’re a person who reads several different newspapers and has a few issues you care about most but also tries to stay up-to-date on what’s happening generally, the last two weeks have been impossible. This is the point.

Our task now is not to follow every twist and turn and to know every bit of minutiae. That doesn’t matter (or at least, it may be counter-productive to try to follow all of it). What matters is identifying the patterns and understanding the larger goals of this administration— and then interrupting the most dangerous efforts.

What most strikes me about this moment is the realizing that nearly everything we consider real is simply made up. As in: Society itself is a series of agreements, upon which many other things are built. Democracy is an idea; a dollar has value because we collectively agree it does. That is a radical oversimplification of how democratic nations functions and economies work, but in truth, most of what props up our day-to-day is laid on invisible ground. We collectively agree to walk on that invisible ground because it helps (among many other things) to keep us safe and prosperous and nominally functional. And we have various guardrails up: Courts that are supposed to follow written-down laws and the Constitution, for one.

But right now we’re watching a handful of people simply decide that they no longer want to walk on the ground we’ve all agreed is below our feet.