Everybody keeps saying the other guys need to be sent to the wilderness for a while. Nobody has checked whether we have one.
So I’m at the lanes on a Wednesday, which is not league night, which means I’m there for reasons that are entirely my own, and there’s a guy two lanes over talking about politics into his phone at a volume that suggests he’s forgotten other people exist. And he says the thing. You’ve heard the thing. He says what this country needs is for those guys to be out of power long enough that the fever breaks.
And I’m nodding along, because it sounds right, man. It’s got a rhythm to it. Fever breaks. Sure.
And then somewhere around the seventh frame it occurs to me that I have absolutely no idea where the wilderness is.
Like geographically. Institutionally. Whatever. Where do you put them? Because in my head this whole time there’s been some kind of holding area, some place off to the side where a political party goes and sits and thinks about what it’s done, and then comes back different. And I have been picturing this for years without once asking whether the room exists.
I brought this up. Obviously I brought this up.
Walter did not care for the question. “The wilderness, Dude, is a metaphor. It’s not a place. You send a party into the wilderness by defeating them at the ballot box, repeatedly, until the leadership is discredited and the moderates reassert control. This is how it has always worked. This is Goldwater. This is 1964. There is a process.”
And okay. Fine. That’s the one real example anybody’s got, and Walter’s got it, and he’s standing up about it, which he does not need to be doing.
But run it out, man. Goldwater got buried in ‘64. Forty-four states. It was not close, it was barely a contest. And the party did change afterward, Walter’s right about that part, that absolutely happened.
It changed into more of what just lost.
The moderates did not come back. The guys who lost got the keys, kept them for sixteen years, and returned as Reagan. That’s the case study. That’s the whole precedent everybody’s leaning on. A party got sent to the wilderness, went in, and came out as a more concentrated version of the thing that got it sent there in the first place.
So Walter’s not wrong that there’s a process. He’s just the only one in the building who’s actually looked at where the process goes.
Donny, who had been paying attention to none of this, said, “so where do they go though?”
“Donny. You’re out of your fucking element.”
And nobody said anything after that, because nobody ever does. But he’d asked the only real question in the building, which is somehow always how it goes with that guy.
Maude explained it to me, and I wish she hadn’t
It took Maude about ninety seconds and she did it in that tone she has, the one where she’s not being unkind, she’s just genuinely puzzled that this needs saying out loud.
There’s a floor, she said. Roughly forty-six percent. In a country with two doors and a rule that you have to walk through one of them, about that much of the vote is committed before anybody says a word, and it does not move regardless of what happens. Not for a scandal. Not for a catastrophe. Not for anything. Both parties have one. It’s structural.
Which means, she said, and here she paused in a way I did not enjoy, there is no scenario in which either party is away. The losing side is permanently one bad quarter away from a Senate majority. There is no exile. The room you are picturing does not exist and has never existed and cannot be built.
Then she asked if I was going to finish that drink, in a way that made it clear she was not asking about the drink.
So I’ve been sitting with this, and here’s where I’ve landed.
Everybody I read, everybody I listen to, half the guys at the lanes, they’ve all got a plan that runs through the wilderness. The other side goes away for a while, cools off, and comes back reasonable, and in the meantime we fix things. That’s the plan. That’s everybody’s plan. Left, right, the guys who used to be right and now write newsletters about how bad the right got, all of them.
And it’s a plan that requires a place that isn’t real.
It’s like making elaborate arrangements to have a conversation with somebody in a room in your house that you’ve never actually been in. You know where it is. You could point to it. You’ve been describing it to people. And then one day you go looking for the door and there’s just wall.
Walter says this is defeatist. Walter says the metaphor still works even if the place isn’t literal. And sure, Walter. Metaphors work great right up until you build a whole strategy on top of one and then go looking for the load-bearing part.
Because that’s the thing, man. Waiting isn’t a strategy. Waiting is a feeling with a calendar attached to it. And I say this as a man who has made waiting into something close to a lifestyle, so I know it when I see it. I’m an expert, actually. I have a real feel for the difference between resting and stalling, and I can tell you that from the inside they are indistinguishable, which is exactly why it’s such a comfortable place to set up shop.
I don’t have a better plan. I want to be upfront about that. I’m not the guy with the plan. I’m the guy who noticed the room isn’t there.
But I do think there’s a difference between a bad plan and a plan that’s waiting on a thing that cannot arrive, and I think most people currently have the second one and believe they have the first one. The first one you can fix. The second one just sits there being comfortable until enough time goes by that it’s not a plan anymore, it’s a thing you say.
It’s a little like the rug, honestly. I spent a lot of energy on the assumption that the rug situation would resolve, that somebody somewhere was going to make it right, that there was a process. And the process, as it turned out, was several men lying to me in sequence while a woman with her own agenda moved me around a board I couldn’t see. The rug did not come back. Nobody came and made it right. What actually happened is that I adjusted to a room that didn’t tie together anymore, which I want to be clear is not the same thing as a solution, it’s just what happened.
Anyway. Fever’s not breaking, man. The fever isn’t even the thing. The fever is just the part you can see.
The Dude abides. Somebody else is going to have to figure out where.
The Dude’s been on the road playing league games, and well, he’s a lazy man, so his posting has become more sporadic. The Dude will try to do better.
Wilderness—in America, you go out there and then you come back. Like Lewis & Clark. Or like Jesus (the original one, not the child-diddler). Or like Nixon. He lost in 60 and in 62, and he went out into the wilderness and came back in 68. Goldwaterites—as you point out, they went away in 64 and came back in 80.
So—wait—what’s your point? That the wilderness doesn’t exist? Or that you can come back from the wilderness not cleansed but even filthier?
I know it’s not about the toe….