08 November 2021 | We, the Sleepwalkers

Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner of Virginia are doubling down on their idea that the failure to pass both infrastructure bills probably helped the loss of Terry McAuliffe in his gubernatorial contest.

“Folks didn’t wake up to it,” Kaine said. “They’re waking up to it now.”

I’m not an analyst, but I’m going to chalk it up more to the usual midterm curse of Democrats not coming out in enough numbers that did it above everything else. McAuliffe should have beat his Republican rival on that basis alone.

So how can people still be asleep? Hey, this is not that difficult. The answer: a bored, lazy and decadent society addicted to luxury that can’t be bothered. The pundits will talk endlessly about white suburban moms and all that shit, but there’s no secret about the moral morass that is the Republican Party, so who wouldn’t vote against them on that basis alone? Who couldn’t be incentivized by that? Well, lazy voters who think that the worst is behind us and nothing else needs to be done, that’s who. The voter version of one and done.

This is ultimately what collapse looks like: it’s not a sudden, single action as we’ve been conditioned to think it is but a rot from within that spreads outwards, driven by the apathy of a populace that wants to be entertained and lacks values outside of pithy statements otherwise. We’re all the Emperor Honorius watching the Visigoths (in the form of QAnon, debased Republicans and other syphilitic right-wingers) coming over the seventh hill, not truly realizing that our empire is about to fall.