New Year's Devolutions
We Are All DEVO
“Devolution” has two meanings. Britannica.com’s page begins:
“devolution, the transfer of power from a central government to subnational (e.g., state, regional, or local) authorities.”
It goes on to discuss the recent history in the U.K. of support for devolved power over Scotland and Wales, and the rise of nationalist political parties, something you can read all about in my favourite newspaper, the Guardian.
But 50 years ago, in the wake of the shootings at Kent State University in Ohio
a student who knew two of the dead, Gerald Casale, came up with a theory to explain the horror they had witnessed: De-Evolution, the idea that the human race was no longer advancing.
Mark Mothersbaugh, who founded DEVO along with Gerald Casale, told the New York Times,
“We learned from Kent State that rebellion is obsolete. If the government doesn’t agree with you, and you become too big of a pain in the butt for them, they just push you back down and shoot.
“And I was thinking, well, who does change things in this world? Look at TV. It’s Madison Avenue. It’s commercials. It’s subversion. You get people to eat sugar that’s not good for them. You get them to buy cars that are stupid and not well-designed. And they’re happy when they do it. And we thought, what if you use those techniques for something else? What if you use those techniques to talk about de-evolution?”
Now, we’ve seen that de-evolution can also lead to people voting for presidents who are just as stupid, not well-designed and not good for them, and be happy when they do it.
What’s a democracy to do?
While I’m still not watching MSNBC,
I do often share what I heard Nicolle Wallace say during the 2016 campaign. Quoting how her parents felt about Trump, she said that some people think politics is so broken, so cancerous, that Trump was needed as chemotherapy for the system. More and more voters want to burn it all down and then build up something new.
But now we know what happens when we let Donald Trump do the building—which is more like a wrecking ball.
David Corn writes that for the past few weeks, he’s been acting like a grief counselor to people worried about the future of the nation. His latest newsletter revisits a trip to Hiroshima where he writes about people who “put aside bitterness and victimhood for caring and hope.”
I’ll add to that by reprinting what I wrote here about
That post made a side trip to a day I spent with Pete Seeger at his house on the Hudson:
As we were leaving I asked Pete if after all these years of activism he ever got discouraged.
“No, I don’t,” he said.
“I know that all over, every day, people are doing things to make a difference.”
He looked out his big picture window overlooking the Hudson. “They’re cleaning up the river. They’re doing things all over the country. Things that matter and that other people see them doing. No, I don’t feel discouraged. I feel encouraged every day.”
I still believe that the way to unlock future elections is to reach those “values based voters” who want change but grew up seeing Donald Trump as the paradigm of successful politics, along with other generations who take politics and elections about as seriously as they regard WWE smackdowns.
When Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, Harvard’s John Della Volpe summed up the challenge for Democrats’ appeal to young voters:
Many still cared about investing in climate and curtailing gun violence and using government to protect the vulnerable. Those values haven’t changed. What had changed is that this younger cohort of mostly first-time voters had a different experience with Trump than the previous younger cohorts. They viewed him as a personality, as an antihero, and not the sitting president. He wasn’t the president anymore. And a lot of their views were based on the contrast of Trump versus Biden. There wasn’t a lot of love for Trump, but there wasn’t confidence in Biden’s ability to execute his vision.
I’ll write more about the numbers after the holiday, but it turned out that young voters didn’t turn out for Democrats, and those who did included a lot of first-time voters who didn’t take their ballot all that seriously. To them, it wasn’t about democracy over autocracy and oligarchy, a reckless foreign policy and lawless Justice Department, economic disaster and an environmental hellscape—it was “owning the libs”, as this Doonesbury classic reminds us.
Some people voted for Trump because they think he’s funny.
Talk about de-evolution.
