Nobody Governs With the Jesus

Two parties walk into a bowling alley. One's a personality cult. One can't agree on the lane. The rug that tied the room together has been pissed on. Nobody governs with the Jesus

There’s this guy at our lanes. Jesus Quintana. Purple jumpsuit. Licks the ball. Three scenes in the whole movie of my life, basically zero relevance to the actual plot, and somehow the most memorable dude in the room.

The Republican Party is the Jesus right now. Terrifying to face across the lane. Absolutely no governing relevance whatsoever.

Let me explain what’s keeping me up at night, man, and I say this as a guy who has achieved a level of non-attachment to outcomes that most people would describe as heroic or possibly chemically assisted.

There used to be a rug. I know, I know — you’ve heard me on the rug. But stick with me. The rug was a functioning two-party system where both parties, even when they were being complete jagoffs about it, were capable of governing. You could lose an election and trust that the winners would operate within recognizable rules. You didn’t have to like it. You just had to be able to function.

That rug has been pissed on, man. By several different people, on several different occasions, and nobody’s entirely clean here.

The Republican Party didn’t just get Trump. The Republican Party chose Trump, repeatedly, in full information, and then chose to become something structurally different from a political party — more like a loyalty enforcement mechanism with occasional gestures toward policy. The policy part, the actual governing part, has been hollowed out. What’s left is vibes, grievance, and the willingness to do whatever the big guy wants. That’s not a governing coalition. That’s a personality cult with a primary system.

Okay, so the Democrats. Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.

The Democratic Party is — and I say this as a man who is solidly left of center, who believes in the thing, who signed the Port Huron Statement or at least was in the room — a genuinely difficult coalition to govern from. The professional class, the progressive activists, the working-class voters who’ve been drifting away, the Black church voters, the Silicon Valley money, the labor movement — these people want different things, man. Really different things. And the party has been able to hold that together for one reason and one reason only: the shared enemy.

But “not fascism” is not a governing platform.

The Biden years proved this with painful clarity. You had unified government. You had nominal majorities. And the coalition’s internal contradictions were so severe that it couldn’t deliver on its central commitments. The Manchin problem wasn’t Joe Manchin. The Manchin problem was that Joe Manchin was, politically speaking, real. He represented a genuine fracture in the coalition that was always going to blow up the math.

And now the Never Trump people are in the mix, and they’re allies, and I appreciate the assist, I genuinely do — but they have their own agenda for what the Democratic Party should become, and it looks a lot like a party that makes them comfortable, which is not the same as a party that does anything about the material conditions that made people so angry in the first place.

So here’s the darkest version, man.

We cycle between an authoritarian coalition that can’t govern and a dysfunctional coalition that can’t govern. Nobody gets anything done. Institutions strain under continuous stress. The republic has more structural resilience than people give it credit for — but it was built for an era when at least one team was capable of running the ball.

Maude told me once — and this is one of those things where I hate that she’s right, because she says it in that extremely Maude way — she said, the word itself makes some men uncomfortable. The word was, in context, accountability.

What would it take? A Democratic Party that treats its coalition’s contradictions as a problem to solve, not a diversity to celebrate. A Never Trump wing that’s honest about where its priors actually sit. A left-populist insurgency that’s got enough discipline to govern and not just primary. Something rising from the ash heap of the GOP that’s recognizably serious.

None of that is on the near-term menu, man.

But the Dude abides. You find a way to abide, because the alternative is to pull a Walter — to be so furious about the violation of the rules that you escalate every situation past the point of usefulness. That’s not calmer than you are. That’s not getting anybody home from the lanes.

The Stranger told me once that it’s good knowin’ he’s out there, the Dude, takin’ her easy for all us sinners.

I’m trying, man. I’m trying.