A grand theory tailored to the moment

I just had one of those political epiphanies that revealed a terrible truth, previously hidden by the noise and chaos of the historical moment.

It is this:

First, the Supreme Court is going to rule that Donald Trump cannot be disqualified from presidential ballots via state courts or state attorneys general determining that he’s ineligible for the office because of the provisions of Section 3 of the 14th amendment. I think there’s very little doubt about this. The formal legal arguments for the proposition that these courts and AGs can do so are far from rock solid, and, given the level of genuine formal indeterminacy here (cls ftw), political and pragmatic arguments are going to determine the outcome. And, given the current composition of the SCOTUS, we all know how those arguments are going to play out. So no magic judicial arrow is going to find the soft spot in the Trumpian dragon’s scales.

So far, so bad.

But something much worse flows from all that. The Ariana Grande theory of politics is that, for a huge percentage of the voting public, politics is something to which those voters pay the only most casual and intermittent attention. This percentage includes essentially 100% of the voters who actually decide elections in our miserable age: the “low information swing voters,” aka the common clay of the west, who think that Donald Trump is better for the economy because he’s a great businessman, as well as holding other beliefs that warp the space time continuum in their sheer inanity, but whose votes count as much — actually far far more — than the votes of people who actually know true things about the world.

And here is my point at last: For these people — for the voters who will decide the 2024 presidential election — the Supreme Court will have determined that Donald Trump didn’t do anything wrong, or seriously wrong, in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, and that Joe Biden’s claims that Trump is an imminent threat to the survival of liberal democracy are just a typical politician saying typical politician things because that’s politics, which is a bunch of lies anyway.

That the Supreme Court — even this Supreme Court — will have said no such thing is as a practical matter completely immaterial, because Ariana Grande rules our world.

Ooh, look what you made me do
Look what you made me do
Look what you just made me do
Look what you just made me…
Ooh, look what you made me do
Look what you made me do
Look what you just made me do
Look what you just made me do

Per curiam