We have a new icon for our troubled times.
Emily Kohrs, the 30-year old foreperson of a special grand jury in Fulton County, Ga., whom CNN describes as “between customer-service jobs” — a euphemism that has a certain panache if you’re an actor, but doesn’t work quite so well for the nation’s struggling community of customer-service agents — is the public citizen our age demands.
The woman into whose hands some lawyer (and her peers) placed the potential liberty of a former president, and perhaps the stability of the republic itself, spent last week giddily skipping from television studio to newspaper office sharing the sober deliberations of a secret judicial process like a fluttery teenager dishing the dirt on the saucy goings-on at last night’s junior prom.
We don’t yet know if Ms Kohrs’s injudicious incontinence will derail any possible prosecution of Donald Trump or his associates over his alleged attempts interfere with Georgia’s vote-counting process. But we can say that her giggly gallivanting is a perfect avatar for the alarming unseriousness of our current public mood.
It would be grotesquely condign if somehow Ms Kohrs’ verbal laxity led to Mr Trump’s avoiding any indictment for his behaviour over the 2020 election. Because Mr Trump — who we might now say, channelling Ms Kohrs, is “between presidencies” — is the ne plus ultra of garrulous unseriousness.
We were once enjoined to take him seriously, but not literally, but I still can’t help but think his shtick has all along rested on an intuitive understanding of how shallow the nation’s political debate is. This isn’t to demean his many skills. His sense of comic timing was so perfect that he chose 2016 to run against the worst presidential candidate in modern history — and he was undone four years later only when his mastery of the unseriousness of modern politics proved no match for a serious public-health crisis. His unsuccessful effort to overturn the 2020 result on the basis of ludicrous allegations marked one last attempt to reassert the primacy of a transparent fairy tale over reality.
But don’t blame him for all of this. His unseriousness was more than matched by an opposition and media that embraced the temper of the age for years with mountainous nonsense about a Russian takeover of America.
This besetting focus on fictions and trivialities consumes much of our political culture. The current budget debate is a case in point. Everyone knows we face a fiscal crisis that looms larger each year. But any attempt to have serious, bipartisan discussion is scotched. Democrats can demagogue every proposal to do something about entitlements because they know there is no penalty for not taking things seriously.
Take any of the supposedly pressing issues that are lumped into the category of “culture wars.” The proponents of these radical new ideologies aren’t serious, and I suspect most of them know it.
Critical race theory is a profoundly unserious proposition that rests on a willing suspension of disbelief about history, economics and society. No honest person with an ounce of historical learning believes the U.S. was founded to preserve the institution of slavery. Yet for years we have found ourselves locked in a pseudoacademic debate with grifting extremists who’ve made this flapdoodle part of the curriculum in some places.
Or the idea that biological sex isn’t real. Surely some future generation will look back and giggle, Emily Kohrs-like, when they discover that we have a government that solemnly talks about “chest-feeding” and “pregnant people,” or that a recently installed Supreme Court justice declined to define the word “woman” because she lacked biological expertise.
This is not serious.
Then there is the alarmist environmental claptrap we get thrown at us daily. Climate change is real and needs honest debate about measures to restrain and remediate it. But that would be serious. So instead we are told the planet is going to burn up and our only option is to reverse millennia of human progress. And our leaders spent the last few years trying to win the approval of an angry Swedish teenager.
What about Ukraine? On the face of it, we seem to be displaying a rare and admirable seriousness. But even here, there’s an unwillingness by our leaders to match the gravity of the moment with serious reasoning. On the populist right we hear bleating about American “fatigue” and how money spent on Ukraine prevents us from dealing with domestic challenges, as though a great country is, like a dog chasing a squirrel, able to focus on only one objective at a time.
For everyone else there’s a continuing refusal to face up seriously to the consequences of supposedly limitless U.S. support for a war without end.
It is as though our leaders have figured out what Ms Kohrs understood — that a few minutes of airtime is far more rewarding than doing something substantive.
Maybe it’s hyperbolic — even a little unserious — of me, but all this has the hallmarks of late-stage civilisational collapse, the stuff of gladiatorial contests in the Colosseum while the barbarians amass beyond the mountains: a great and serious nation badly in need of leadership.
The Wall St Journal
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