By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire

One of my uncles was serving in the Navy at the end of the Second World War. He wrote his family a letter in 1945, describing how a Japanese ship had come alongside his ship so its captain could tender his formal surrender. He wrote that the Japanese officers came aboard in their dress uniforms; that he and most of his ship’s other crew members were wearing just tee shirts; that he had felt ashamed of looking so sloppy, because it had not suited the gravity of the moment. They had all been busy at their jobs, though. They hadn’t had time to dress up.

The historian David Halberstam wrote that the profusion of casual and leisure wear in the nineteen-fifties and thereafter stemmed from those tee shirts; that men got used to being comfortable from their time in the military, so they stopped wearing shirts and ties (just look at all those old pictures of well-dressed people attending baseball games back then!) and began to dress down whenever possible.  Casual wear, like the internet and Spam itself: brought to you by the military.

But seventy-five years after our country put eighteen million of its citizens through a crash course in both self-sacrifice and self-realization, that cultural memory has faded to nothing. Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto-king turned federal defendant, made a fetish of wearing stretched-out tee shirts and soggy-looking cargo shorts. People gave him billions of dollars to invest. They are sorry for having indulged him now, and he has taken to wearing suit jackets to his various court appearances.

When grown men today dress like little children, in other words, the drift is no longer practicality. It’s avoidance of maturity, and running from responsibility, with a dose of magical thinking attached. And if that sounds familiar, it should: it describes our current Congress to a tee. People like Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert are not interested in governing. They want attention; they want instant results; they want whatever they want, and they want you to give it to them. They are Instagram creations. It can hurt your eyes to watch them.

I could not help but note that in charting the political origin of these febrile brats, former Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland saw fit to lay their heritage on Richard Nixon and his skill at cultivating the anger of the so-called “silent majority.” Hoyer gets credit for such a deep dive, because getting past the malignant aura of Newt Gingrich is tough. But Hoyer didn’t go back far enough, and like all Democrats, he gives Nixon too much credit for everything venal in this world. Because Nixon didn’t invent that silent majority. His electoral strength was built on the Wallace vote, and Hoyer might not like to admit it, but Wallace was a Democrat. 

Streams in politics do not run pure. We can rightly despise the Republican fringe for its sideshow fashions and its blatant immaturity, but it isn’t much different from the self-styled “Squad” on the Democratic side. And the central problem is this: the impulse towards individualism and self-actualization, as being more personally satisfying and potentially even more consequential than following the rules, or doing what’s expected of you, because it can lead to innovation, and excellence, and even transcendence, is at the core of classic liberalism. That’s what liberalism is: a belief that the individual matters. But taken to its logical extreme, that noble thesis can lead to self-indulgence, self-centeredness, and spiritual emptiness too.

As anyone who has ever eaten as much as they wanted to, of any cream-filled Hostess food product, can somberly attest.

Balance is all, and there is no conceivable moral calculus by which Kevin McCarthy can believe that he came out ahead in his nominally successful attempt to become the Speaker of the House. He has paid dearly for a jewel cheapened to dross by the grubby nature of its purchase, and our land will suffer for his pains. We’ll get nothing but grief from him and his rule. The House will become a circus, reflecting the peculiar talents of its shallow and smarmy leader.

Perhaps the worst of it, though, was how Donald Trump came back from the dead to make it happen. I had hoped that our former president’s trading card debacle would be the end of him. It made him look so weak, and Republicans are weirdly enamored of strength. But now that McCarthy owes him his job, Trump might remain relevant yet.

Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project,  The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka . They are available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Davidow’s Chanukah Land can be found here.