Dalton Delan: Picking our political battles in a perilous time

We don’t know what it was.

Orange sky. The Texas school shootings. Ukraine invasion. Purple rain. A Musk tweet. Biden abandoning “strategic ambiguity.” CBT in Girl Scout cookies. Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart. An invisible sun. Dylan turning 81. The Shanghai lockdown. Perdue crying chicken in Georgia. The final season of “Better Call Saul.” White rabbit. A bit of an underdone potato. A little bit of everything.

Whatever it was, we woke to a changed world.

It started in Austin when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law a landmark bill mandating not only background checks but witnessed affidavits that gun purchasers are either recognized hunters experienced in skinning and butchering meat for their own consumption, or engaged in security work or other high-risk employment. The peddling of the cash crop of marijuana, with tax receipts, is sufficient for gun possession. With the originalist Supreme Court once again abandoning stare decisis to admit that the Second Amendment was about “a well regulated Militia” rather than a well lubricated weekend soldier, Justice Clarence Thomas was given his due as a man who could at least borrow his wife’s slacks.

Nearby in Foggy Bottom, the Democratic Caucus, over lattes at Starbucks, had a “deus ex machina” revelation, possibly due to extreme over-caffeination, or else one demand too many from AOC, and realized — belatedly only by several decades — that ethically sound but politically suicidal positions are not a successful strategy against cornered Republicans for whom winning at all costs is a sufficient motivator to abandon pesky details such as the U.S. Constitution. In this newly enlightened state, they pledged to personally visit, resplendent in their Tesla and Prius affectation, whatever flyover states also have a nice al fresco wine selection for lunch. After all, they had pretended to read J. D. Vance’s book before he went all MAGA.

The Republicans advanced even further, sharpening the inflection point, given the realization that Trumpism could survive without Trump if only they moved on together. This meant a new House minority leader, as mendacious Kevin McCarthy had become so tangled in contradiction that he was last seen chasing his tail like a lost dog. In their born-again state, they proposed a platform for 2024 in which middle- and working-class Americans would receive tax breaks equivalent to those awarded to big business and real- estate tycoons going back a century or so — but who’s counting? — and rescinding all those “trickle-down” breaks that functioned as well as an enlarged prostate. They also abandoned “America first” isolationism in favor of joining President Joe Biden on defending Taiwan and, even more, shipping F-16s to Ukraine.

Waking from my momentary reverie, I wonder: If judicious dealing from strength seems reasonable to many of us, and we still oppose autocracy, why is it that so many hesitate to confront Russia and China?

I get it. Growing up in the 1960s, witnessing the folly of Vietnam and latterly Iraq, it is easy to adopt a posture of timidity, as Vladimir Putin noted. Recent events have demonstrated that neighborhood bullies swell in silence and eventually push past swagger. Of course nobody wants to risk nuclear war. But we can’t let the fear of it cow us.

Sad to say, our great republic was not built on a base of popular democracy. We don’t have direct one person, one vote. Rather, industrious little Delaware, official home to corporate America, or Montana of “Yellowstone” series shine, get the same number of Senate votes as New York and California — the world’s fifth largest economy — while the seat of the nation in D.C. gets none. And there went the third leg of government, the Supreme Court, with three anti-abortion Trojan horses. If we no longer legislate, and politics pervades the judiciary, we’re at the mercy of the next plutocrat borne by legally unfettered state electors.

The question is: What can we actually do save fantasizing alternative universes? We’re saddled with bad math, in that extremes, left or right, tend statistically to pull the middle with them. Candidates are rewarded for staking out edge positions. AR-15 owners are passionate about voting. If we want to return to the art of compromise on which our system was based, the Dems need to pick their battles better. Gun control can’t win. Abortion law, reframed from misnomers such as “pro-life,” can. Most of all, it’s the economy, stupid. Jettison the “woke” and the “stop the steal” joke. The incumbent POTUS is a middle-man, but likely one-term. The Dems will surrender the midterms, too, championing unsaleable causes.

A perfect world is the enemy of a good one. For America to long endure, we can try more unum than pluribus. Yes we can.