The 'Sh*t ain't good enough' theory of politics

It’s been six months of Trump II, and someone close to me, with whom I often discuss politics, recently said he was still puzzling over the same question as he was in November: How could we elect this guy again? What are we doing here, man?

It’s one of the great questions of our time, and I suggested an answer that I call the ‘Shit Ain’t Good Enough’ theory of politics.

The theory’s pieces began falling into place after the fatal shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson a lifetime ago last year. The vast majority of Americans polled felt the shooting was unacceptable, as of course we all should. But a big majority could also see that the health insurance industry’s practices and profits bore part of the blame. Horror stories of surgeries denied, wheelchairs withheld from children with disabilities, and medications out of reach for parents and grandparents flooded the news media. Many pointed out that Thompson’s company was one of the worst for denying care. Why the hell can they deny care that you need, anyway?

The response reached across the political spectrum, with some on the left calling the shooter a hero while even fans of rightwing commentators said they weren’t going to sympathize for a health care executive, either. In spite of our hyper-partisan times, there was a shared sense that the way things work is wrong, that this system sucks thanks to people like Thompson. Shit ain’t good enough, or S.A.G.E. for short.

My opinion of Donald Trump has been unchanged he came down his escalator, but seeing the shooting’s aftermath felt like a sudden insight into a segment of his voters — not the neo-Nazis and segregationists, of whom there are many, but the swing voters, the deciding voters, the people who don’t or can’t pay much attention to politics but still see that the usual ain’t working. For many of them, the past eight years have been one long scream: To hell with all these politicians who haven’t done what they promised. Let’s go with the guy who says the same thing. S.A.G.E.

Trump I was a disaster, of course, so we swapped in Joe Biden, whom I liked in a lot of ways but still failed in the essential tasks of protecting us from a wannabe dictator and getting us out of our national rut. He and other Democrats worked hard to defend institutions that the rest of us are sick of. The rich still got richer while we got inflation and housing that costs too much. The powerful are still taking our money and getting away with horrific crimes. It can feel like no one is man or woman enough to actually fix our biggest problems.

So 2024 came around, and it shouldn’t be shocking that many voters concluded our leaders still haven’t gotten the message. And the proof is in the pudding, i.e., the relentless failures of our universities, political leaders of all stripes, media and justices in the face of an authoritarian regime. I’m not one to say “both sides,” but the pathetic performance of our national opposition leaders in Congress this spring showed that while we’ve got lying assholes and frauds on one side, we’ve also got lying phonies and weaklings on the other. S.A.G.E.

“Trump promised to attack a broken system. I get it. Ripe target,” Jon Ossoff, the Democratic senator from Georgia, said at a rally earlier this month. America has “the most corrupt political system in the Western world,” he added, thanks to Citizens United and billionaire money. Faith in Trump to break the wheel, he added, was utterly misplaced: “He’s a crook and conman, and he wants to be a king. Yes, the system really is rigged. But Trump’s not unrigging it, he’s re-rigging it for himself.”

Which brings us to now: an even worse disaster than last time, a catastrophic collapse of rules and decency and shared reality. And things are bleak at the local level as well. Arkansas is one of the worst places in the country to be a child, a new mom or a queer or trans person, one of the most unhealthy, one of the least safe. Instead of doing more about it, Arkansas Republicans are abandoning the vulnerable and betraying the freedoms they claim to love while also trying to take away our power to fix things ourselves. S.A.G.E in Arkansas, either.

But amid all this crap, the S.A.G.E. theory can also be harnessed for good. There are still common threads that bind many of us, still shared hopes and needs and troubles that connect ordinary people despite the very best efforts of some of the wealthiest among us. Trump was a symptom of our problems, now he’s a cause, and most of all he’s an X-ray, revealing the hypocrisy and bullshit and failed half-measures on all sides. We are starved for real connection, real solutions and real people who care enough to make shit better. And that’s a force that can overcome billionaires.

I’ll end with a point from the great writer Jamelle Bouie, who earlier this year wrote that the old ways of doing things — the ways that got us here — will never suffice again. I’ll reframe it slightly: No matter what happens next, we’re not staying in this mess, not forever. We’re going somewhere new.