Tilting at Non-Existent Windmills
Terry H, Schwadron
April 16, 2024
It’s not as if there are no problems around to solve — war and peace, humane treatment of others, election stealing and coup plots, a court system at odds with our perception of law.
Why, then, is our news filled with pretend outrages over symbols and shadows. Why do our leaders prance about in campaigns that tilt at non-existent windmills — though Donald Trump regularly tilts at real windmills, too?
What is it about us that makes our politicians believe that we want faux calls to the battlements to fight for imaginary evils rather than to address the real concerns of the day? Are we so ingrained in promotion and advertising messages that some promotional image of “toughness” is all that matters?
It’s clear that little of the politics we suffer daily still meant to reach a solution over anything substantial. It’s too easy to point to election year tactics; this has been going on for years now.
The Picture at Mar-a-Lago
Let’s take Friday’s joint appearance — no, actually, the dutiful and required bow of the head — by House Speaker Mike Johnson with party leader and embattled former president Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago for an unneeded appearance ostensibly to push legislation to keep noncitizens from voting in federal elections.
Okay, we understood it to be a show of mutual support between the two top Republicans on an issue they each back towards healing the growing rift among congressional Republicans. But voting in federal elections by noncitizens already is barred by law, and any reported instances in which there are violations are rare indeed.
USA Today looked at the Heritage Foundation’s database of voter fraud for noncitizen voting registration and naturalization fraud and found fewer than 50 results among 1,499 proven instances.
Foreign nationals are explicitly banned from voting in any federal election under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, though a few jurisdictions allow noncitizens to vote in local elections such as municipal and school board elections.
According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, there is no evidence that noncitizen voting or
other instances of voter fraud have had an impact on election outcomes.
The Set-Up
The idea of Trump and Johnson appearing on behalf of “election integrity” after seeking to overturn 2020 election results seems absurd on its face. For Trump, the twin pokes at election-stealing possibilities and excessive illegal immigration are just too ripe a campaign promotional opportunity to pass up.
For Johnson, the embarrassing jockeying within his own party over a bill to renew policies to allow surveillance of foreigners (after Trump erred in indicating which surveillance bill had drawn his personal displeasure over contacts between Russian operatives and his election campaigns) and the pending disintegration of his job over allowing a vote on military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine and Israel made it essential that he appear with Trump as if getting his blessing to continue in office over a threat to unseat him from MAGA confederates like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.
Thus, your awake time and mine is supposed to go towards another bleat about too much unresolved immigration trouble at the border, the fault, of course, of opponent President Joe Biden. There is no responsibility, apparently, or talk of responsibility for Republicans’ failure to support a bill that pushed almost all of what they had sought in negotiations to address immigration issues.
Maybe it is because no one running for president really can reset inflation — too much depends on a market-driven economy. Maybe it is because Trump and Biden see the loss of perceived rights for abortion or college admission policies or living quietly as a trans person or adherence to ethical standards all as fungible material for campaign ads and not enough about addressing inherent values.
If everything is just a means to get a point or two advantage in fundraising or in almost meaningless national polls, none of the debates has any meaning at all. In that sense, it is easier for Trump to be outraged about the effects of climate policy on the water flow of his shower, and for Biden to cite macroeconomic growth statistics to explain away the prices at the supermarket.
What we’re hearing in endless, mostly meandering television interviews of individual voters is that people want practical responses to real problems that touch their own lives. For Biden, talking shrinkflation doesn’t change the weekly grocery tab, and for Trump, bleats about legal persecution at the hands of the FBI and Justice don’t answer anything but a cover for bad behavior. For Biden, providing for student loan debt reduction does exactly touch young voters, as does Trump’s constant appeal to gun ownership as well as promises for permanent tax cuts for the wealthy on whose support he depends.
There are reasons that third parties are gaining strength. The candidate that cures the tilting at non-existent windmills on a sustained basis is going to draw the best response.
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