No Faith In Constitution

I did a bit of streaming service surfing last weekend, searching for a new television show to watch. I typically gravitate to original content by the streamers and some of the more “quality” cable channels, having found that the broadcast networks’ modern content is too formulaic, tropey, and pandering for my personal tastes. Nevertheless, I tried a network show, “La Brea,” on for size. Formulaic, tropey, and pandering – I got half an episode in before quitting.

My perambulations then brought me to the new FX series “Y: The Last Man.” The premise, done many times, is that a plague wipes out a chunk of the human race. In this case, a disease kills every mammal on the planet with a Y chromosome. Suddenly and all at once, with airplanes falling out of the sky, cars crashing or coasting to a halt. With two exceptions: a street magician slacker dude and his pet monkey. Who happens to be the semi-estranged son of a congresswoman who, thanks to the mass die-off and the various concomitant accidents, rises to Speaker of the House and then the Presidency. There’s much to roll your eyes at here, but I opted to let it go, to see what they did with the premise and setup. That it was on FX, which has a solid track record, and starred Diane Lane and some other names, warranted giving it a chance.

The requisite SPOILER ALERT…

Our introduction to the sitting President, prior to the “event,” offers a leftist’s caricature of neanderthal Republican: vaguely midwestern down-home accent, condescending to women, gun toting… you get the idea. His daughter leads a cadre of women who oppose cancel culture, who complain about how boys are being raised “afraid to become men,” and so forth. Again, a caricature, a leftist’s Handmaid’s Tale cookie-cutter of regressive, oppressed red-state Trump lovers, though the President physically resembles Pence more than Trump.

Eye-roll number 2.

Next, we have the tough, sensible, no-nonsense Congresswoman/President Jennifer Brown played by Diane Lane, who has all the correct (read: Democratic/left-leaning) views and positions. See: Josiah Bartlett, Andrew Shepherd, and Dave Kovic’s version of Bill Mitchell.

Eye-roll number 3.

By episode 3, we find out that a Cabinet member, presumed dead from one of the countless accidents that happened when half the planet died, has survived, and outranks Brown in terms of presidential succession. That woman is, we are told, some sort of right-wing “fringe lunatic” who asserted that “Jesus wasn’t vaccinated” and was chosen as a pander to “the racists.” Immediately, half President Brown’s team starts arguing that “the line of succession couldn’t possibly matter less, and that “it’s not much of a leap from ‘suffered brain trauma’ to ‘unfit for office.'” The conclusion? “She hasn’t been here… it would take weeks to get her up to speed. We don’t have weeks.” “If we’re a united front, she’ll fall in line. She’ll have no choice. But she can’t be President.”

Those arguing about the Constitution fell in line in a sixty second conversation. Of course, since three can keep a secret if two are dead, his daughter heard of the cabinet member’s survival right as that conversation was happening, and immediately gathered up her posse to confront the President’s gaggle. When she slurred one of the latter by calling her a RINO, I turned it off.

Yesterday morning, I received a fundraising email from National Review (I’m a subscriber), written by columnist Charles C.W. Cooke, titled “Joe Biden Is a Threat to the Constitution.”

In the immortal words of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, “Well. No shit.”

The attacks on and dismissals of our Constitution by this administration, in a mere nine months, are innumerable. They echo the attitudes of Brown’s loyalists, attitudes born of the present day Left’s disregard and disdain for our very system of government when it prevents them from doing what they want. Talk of packing the Court, imposing federal rules on states’ election laws and processes, killing the filibuster, arresting parents who object to CRT being taught in schools, imposing vaccination mandates on the private sector, literally ignoring the Court’s instructions regarding the eviction moratorium, and on and on, are not met with even the slightest disagreement from his party’s leadership or from the Left-o-sphere.

In fact, since he’s doing what they want, many couldn’t care less that he’s ignoring the Constitution. Many who screamed countless dire warnings about Trump behaving in that fashion.

When we see such attitudes creep into pop culture, we have reason to worry. That writers would present the “rational and reasonable” people in the room as willing to ignore the core rules of the nation because they don’t like one particular outcome (and in Y: The Last Man, we are offered no first-hand exposure to the cabinet member’s purported fringe-ness to judge for ourselves) is an indictment of a new strain of lawlessness that has infected our society. It manifested in the days after Trump won, in a combination of “how can we undo this result” and “how can we unseat this man” harping from the Left. It pendulum-swung the other way after Trump lost, with a barrage of unsubstantiated “they cheated!” assertions that were offered in the public sphere but somehow vanished when court oaths were required. Now, it has bled out from the elections themselves to actual governance.

Gordon Sumner offered us his thoughts:

There is no political solution
To our troubled evolution
Have no faith in constitution
There is no bloody revolution

Our so called leaders speak
With words they try to jail ya
They subjugate the meek
But it’s the rhetoric of failure

I recently lamented the loss of faith in the integrity of our elections, a loss created by partisans who overlay a paper-thin moral veneer on rank political gamesmanship (if the Dems worry about people without ID being disenfranchised, why don’t they propose we spend some of the trillions they are magicking out of thin air on getting those people voter ID cards, instead of simply rejecting the idea of voter ID itself?). Such lost faith makes it easier for those who’d scream “Cheat!” without real evidence to peddle their message, and the corrosiveness of this lost faith in elections eats away at faith in our Constitutional system itself.

Especially when politicians do nothing to affirm that faith and much to further erode it.

Our nation cannot survive, let alone prosper, if our politicians can do whatever they want merely by winning a 50%+1 majority. Government will seesaw between two increasingly polarized extremes, and chaos will ensue.

It is we who must reverse this trend. We must reject the message of “it’s OK to break the rules if it benefits our side or gets us what we want.”

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AFTERWORD:
I did indeed turn the show off when I heard the President’s daughter spit out “RINO!” As I was researching for this article, I learned that “Y: The Last Man” won’t be back for a second season. I won’t speculate if it got axed because its messaging turned off the audience, or simply because it wasn’t good (I watched 2.5 episodes of the 10 episode season – 7 of which have been released). But, it is worth noting that it is (was?) based on a DC comic, and that DC comics and their movie/television derivatives have been rather deeply infected by ‘woke.’ I cannot but smirk a bit at the “get woke, go broke” quip (by writer John Ringo) that popped unbidden into my head.