The pitiful pendulum: America's strange contentment with political extremes.

Reason does not always lead to the best decisions, but it is our best hope for avoiding the worst.

-- Al Gore

By J. Basil Dannebohm

At the beginning of each new month, I receive an email from the manufacturer of my thermostat providing me with a usage report. The report gives me a usage breakdown, lets me know if there are any problems with the HVAC system, provides reminders when it’s time to change the filters, and offers tips on how to improve energy efficiency. Our government used to be a lot like my thermostat. I knew it was working effectively because things felt comfortable. Occasionally, elected officials would provide detailed updates on how things were going. If something didn’t seem right, I could look to the news for a fairly reliable, mostly unbiased explanation. If things were especially dysfunctional within the government, we would vote out the problematic officials during the next election cycle and hope for a return to normalcy.

In recent years, however, it seems as though something has been constantly malfunctioning with the “thermostat” that is our government. Our nation’s collective temperature goes from hot to cold with no indication of arriving at a “comfort zone” anytime soon. The national thermostat is sparking, smoking, and making obnoxious noises. Technician after technician has been elected and sent to repair the problem, but they only seem to make it worse.

In fact, the issue with our “national thermostat” is largely rooted in the fact that the elected “technicians” we’ve sent to remedy the problem enjoy the attention they receive when chosen for the job. Rather than fixing the underlying issues, they deliberately make the situation worse knowing that instead of using our warranty card (our vote) at election time, we will take the lazy approach of rehiring them for the job again – and the cycle of discomfort will keep repeating.

In reality, if the government were indeed a household HVAC issue, we would have long since terminated the employment of the elected “technicians” and moved on to somebody more reliable. Yet, for some reason, voters have an almost masochistic relationship with their government and who they elect to keep things operational. Therefore, the blame for the dysfunction likewise falls in part on us for our strange contentment with the constant back-and-forth between hot and cold.

Over the course of the last four years, our nation’s temperature went to a certain extreme. Believing that migrants seeking a better way of life were the only people crossing our borders is grossly naïve. There were, in fact, terrorists and gang members who took advantage of the situation. Though these individuals are certainly not entirely responsible for the uptick in crime experienced by certain regions, they nonetheless contributed to the issue.

Likewise, our nation’s collective view on identity and sexuality reached new levels of absurdity. The very notion that individuals of good sense would be forced to refer to somebody by pronouns such as “they” (something that contradicts proper English grammar) or face potential retribution from a Human Resource office, or worse a civil court, is frankly ludicrous. Though I have no problem with an individual identifying as the opposite gender – or even undergoing gender-affirming procedures, I do take issue with being forced to use a pronoun (they) which defies reason. Moreover, the idea that individuals were identifying as animals or opting to be wed to their four-legged friend was frankly a bridge too far for me and most Americans, both conservative and liberal alike.

Similarly, there was the issue of electric vehicles and the push to force Americans into purchasing these so-called energy efficient automobiles. Numerous studies have shown that the batteries used in “green” vehicles have devastating effects on the environment both in the production and disposal of the battery. To force Americans to purchase something based on inconclusive albeit much-hyped research is an absurd overreach and keen example of government recklessness.

Hence, we find ourselves at yet another “national temperature” extreme. We’ve gone from a free-wheeling border policy to sending brown-skinned people to third world concentration camps. We’ve regressed from the LGTBQ+ community having a seat at the table to being forced back into the closet. We’ve transitioned from energy conservation to, “drill, baby, drill.”

Though we are less than 100 days into this new administration, many of us are already exhausted with this new extreme – yet we only have ourselves to blame. Perhaps by the midterms the political pendulum will swing in the opposite direction, but don’t expect it to rest someplace in the middle where the national “temperature” is both comfortable and reasonable. We’re too democratically masochistic for government comfort.