“Speaker Kevin McCarthy returns to Washington this week,” CNN reports, “confronting a twin set of challenges: avoiding a costly government shutdown and addressing growing calls on the right to impeach President Joe Biden, despite resistance from the party’s moderates.”

Fans of DC theater may get a fall double feature!

“Shutdown” situations have become so popular and perennial that you might think they’ve been on the marquee pretty much continuously since the days of Washington and Jefferson.

In reality, all ten of the US government’s actual “shutdowns” (federal “funding gaps” that resulted in furloughs of government employees) have occurred since 1980. Even the 14 “funding gaps” that HAVEN’T closed the Smithsonian’s gift shops for a few days didn’t start happening until 1976. But the whole thing has certainly become the standard — the last time Congress passed a budget on time was 1996.

Congress got a much earlier start on impeachment theatrics when it attempted to bring down Andrew Johnson in 1868, but they’ve only done it three times since — all three in the last 25 years and two of them in the last four. If those are enough data points from which to discern a trend,  we may see at least one impeachment in every presidential term from here on out. And every one will be about as serious as … well, as the budget process.

When it comes to theater, modern Washington rarely does tragedy (1963 and 2001 are notable exceptions). Our politicians try to stick to comedy, and specialize in farce.

The important thing to remember about political theater is that it’s exactly that: Theater.

With control of government always split between the two “major parties” — arguably just factions of a single state party, in complete agreement on the only things that matter, which are preserving their monopoly and getting their rake-off from your paycheck — real issues of importance are almost never even addressed, let alone resolved by principled debate on cogent arguments.

American government these days is more like professional wrestling, with multiple teams — all beholden to the same league — switching off soap opera style between “face” and “heel” roles, then pretending to put each other into painful holds and through devastating body slams until the countdown to a predetermined (and hopefully surprising) outcome finishes. Which is what makes professional wrestling theater rather than sport.

I, for one, approve of the move toward this double feature paradigm. It’s the least we deserve given the insane ticket price.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Most Americans likely harbor little sympathy for Nathan Hughes.  He was arrested in Arkansas on August 30 on felony and misdemeanor charges relating to the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol.

Whether Hughes is guilty or not I can’t say, but it’s clear that he made a big mistake when it came to securing his firearms. That mistake was trusting the company which built his gun safe — Liberty Safe — to keep his access codes private. Liberty Safe turned over a code allowing law enforcement to unlock the safe and take the weapons.

There’s some disagreement over whether the code was specific to Hughes or whether there’s a “master code” that unlocks all Liberty Safe products. If we’re to believe Liberty Safe, it’s the former, and they’re acting to let customers “expunge” their codes from the company’s servers.

There are also, of course, calls to boycott Liberty Safe for complying with the FBI’s warrant instead of fighting it, but let’s be honest: It’s hard to fight the feds and hard to blame a company for complying rather than going to war.

The solution to this problem isn’t boycotting Liberty Safe specifically. It’s to avoid putting yourself in any situation where someone else has a “back door” into your stuff.

There’s a saying in the cryptocurrency community: “Not your keys, not your crypto.” It refers to the difference between “custodial” wallets run by centralized exchanges and “non-custodial” wallets to which the wallet owner, and ONLY the wallet owner, has the private keys. Cryptocurrency kept in those “custodial” wallets can be seized any time the government goes to the exchange with a court order. But unless the owner gives up his private key, crypto in a “non-custodial” wallet is secure.

With the advent of the “Internet of Things,” there’s a temptation to let second or third parties control access to one’s things. If you forget a password or whatever, they can help you get back in. The problem with that is they can also help someone else get in, unintentionally (a hacker, for example) or intentionally (usually a government).

Governments hate your privacy. They want to be able to know what you’re doing, or take your stuff, at will and without inconvenient safeguards.

That’s why we see so many government efforts to mandate “back doors” in encryption or even outlaw some forms (non-custodial crypto wallets, end-to-end encrypted email and text messaging, etc.) altogether. And don’t even get me started on “Know Your Customer” laws and the requirement that banks report “suspicious” transactions rather than awaiting a demand accompanied by a warrant before they hand over their customers’ data and cash.

It’s not criminal to value one’s privacy and want to keep one’s belongings secure from theft by criminals or governments (but I repeat myself).

Take a look around your house, with special attention to your computer and phone. Is your crypto secure? How about your email? Find ways to stop trusting your money and information to other parties’ honesty, competence, courage, and good will.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

A couple of numbers from FiveThirtyEight‘s polling roundups:

56% of Americans polled disapprove of US president Joe Biden.

56.1% of Americans polled disapprove of former (and hoping to be future) US president Donald Trump.

Those two are their respective parties’ 2024 presidential nomination front-runners, and it’s not even close.

US vice-president Kamala Harris, who’s best positioned to replace Biden on the Democratic ticket if he drops out or dies in office, is just a wee bit less unpopular than those two with a disapproval rating of “only” 51.3%

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s running against Biden for the Democratic Party’s nomination, is less unpopular yet — but more so with Republicans (23% unfavorable) than with Democrats (41% unfavorable).

On the Republican side, second-placer (so far) Ron DeSantis bests Trump with an unfavorable percentage of “only” 48.6%. Former US vice-president Mike Pence is even less popular than Trump or Biden at 58.5%.

I’m not old enough to remember people actually wearing “I Like Ike” buttons, and I’m just old enough to have trouble remembering who it was — it may have been Dick Morris — who said in the early 2000s that if your unfavorable rating is above 35%, you shouldn’t bother running for president.

This year, the only “serious” “major party” candidates who seem to be getting under that wire are on the Republican side: Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley (34.2%) and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott (24.7%). And one suspects that if either gets any traction, those unfavorable ratings will spike upward.

Looking at Gallup statistics, I see that the average disapproval rating for elected presidents upon taking office from Eisenhower to Obama was 11.3%, and that average was dragged way upward by Bill Clinton (20%) and George W. Bush (25%).

Even the likely retrospectively most unpopular president overall of the Eisenhower-to-Obama era, Richard Nixon, entered office with a stunning disapproval rating of only 5%!

Something has changed in recent years, and that change manifests in two important ways.

First, politicians in general are obviously becoming a LOT less liked and trusted. I don’t think that’s because politicians are worse now than they were in, say, 1952. I think it’s because people are paying closer attention.

Second, these days, it’s hard to make a case that voters are voting for the politicians they like best for the nation’s higher office. Instead, they’re mostly voting against the politicians they hate the most, and for politicians they hate just a little bit less.

The predictable result is that these days, instead of running on their own policy proposals, presidential candidates run on claims about their opponents. Trump is an “insurrectionist.” Biden runs a “crime family.” Ignore my IDEAS, folks! Focus on how naive, stupid, or dastardly my OPPONENT is.

Which explains why, policy-wise, it’s hard to tell one president from the next without a scorecard.

I can’t help but think of this phenomenon as a huge neon sign reading “TERMINAL DECLINE” flashing brightly over any polity it shows up in.

That sign means it’s time to stop worrying about WHO’S next, and start thinking about WHAT COMES next.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY