Signs of the Times

I live in one of those neighborhoods where every third house has a political sign of some kind in the yard: Lots of “Beto for Texas” signs advertising the sacrificial victim feckless Democrats are going to offer up to the maw of the Texas GOP machine this time around, scads and oodles of those prim, imbecilic “In This House” signs, that kind of thing. One of my neighbors kept up a big banner reading “Stop Killing Black People” for more than a year, but has now taken it down, so I guess that killing black people doesn’t matter three blocks over anymore, or maybe they got bored and wanted a change of scenery. They have added some nice planters.

I hate them all, of course — all the signs, I mean, not the neighbors.

Partly I hate them because they are such effective advertisements for the ignorance of the general electorate. One neighbor has a very large sign in her yard that demands we “say ‘no’ to demagogues” and blames our political troubles on “donors and special-interest lobbyists” — i.e., the sign criticizes demagoguery and then engages in the classic, textbook technique of American demagoguery, insisting that covert moneyed interests rather than genuine good-faith disagreements about values and priorities are behind our differences. You see that with demagogues targeting the National Rifle Association all the time: claims that So-and-So voted in favor of the Second Amendment because he got money from the NRA. The NRA is, in fact, a trivial player in the world of political money (946th in donations, 268th in lobbying outlays, 275th in outside spending), and the power it has it has because it represents a position that millions of Americans strongly endorse — not the tiny-but-loudmouthed share of Americans on Twitter, but Americans who vote. I am sure my neighbor’s heart is in the right place, but she is the kind of mark who makes demagoguery so effective and profitable.

There were some stereotypical Trump voters down the street until recently — textbook dysfunctional white people of the screaming-confrontations-between-bored-police-and-aging-hookers type — but they are gone, having been priced out of the neighborhood. (The tragedy of gentrification is that it doesn’t happen all at once.) Their Trump banner went with them. The rising tide of gormless lifestyle progressivism has inundated the cities of Texas just as it has the cities of the other states: The Audi People (who used to be the Subaru People before going upscale) and their simpering conformism have come to stay.

The less real diversity there is in the neighborhood, the more the local progressives feel compelled to advertise their bona fides to one another. They are simultaneously lobbying for some street closures that would just happen to have the effect of discouraging the poor brown people on the other side of the socioeconomic Berlin Wall a few blocks south of us from walking the same pristine urban streets as their purported benefactors. The people with the “No Human Is Illegal” signs live in a gated community, even if the gates are invisible and the borders are enforced by mortgage bankers rather than by actual patrolmen.

If you have ever spent any time around anybody who has made a credible run for the U.S. presidency, you will have noticed that there is something wrong with them — even the good ones, even the ones we like. You have to be a little bit cracked to want that job and to put up with the irritation and degradation that seeking high office in the United States entails. Presidential candidates are a rare breed, but there is a similar sickness at work in the lives of the yard-sign people. There is something missing.

As even the most casual observer will understand, in the lives of many Americans who are not particularly happy or well-adjusted, politics has taken the place of religion — and I do not mean God, who can see to His own interests, but religion in the sense of a community with shared values and a shared story about where we have come from, where we are going, and why things are the way they are at this point in the journey. Politics isn’t a very good substitute for religion — setting aside such big questions as truth, there is the fact that politics is an increasingly insular and atomized pursuit that plays out on social media and in narrow, homogeneous social circles composed of people who watch the same television shows and read the same news sources. Religion, in the American practice, at least, remains as a matter of form outwardly directed: We go to church, out into the world, where we are obliged to have real-world, unmediated social encounters with people who may be different from us in some important ways. The church congregations have sorted themselves out to a great extent by now, too: I would be surprised if there were more than ten registered Democrats in the church I attend, and I don’t know of one. But even with that sorting, there is a great deal of real diversity — of experience, of education, of economic condition, of interests, of profession, of origins, etc. — that exists in a church. Churches also understand themselves as communities, and unlike the people you “meet” on social media, the members of your church are people you expect to have continuing, regular, face-to-face interactions with for a long time — and that changes how you interact with them.

But even the churches are in on the yard-sign game at this point: There is a very large church down the road from me, belonging to one of the famous old mainline Protestant denominations, that is festooned in gay-pride rainbows, that goes a little bit overboard with Pride Month decorations, and that makes various splendid proclamations about who is welcome there. Not a word about that Jesus character, of course — the signs are not about transcendent or eternal considerations but parochial social and tribal ones in the profane here and now. “All Are Welcome Here” the sign says, but I’d bet you 30 pieces of the finest silver that they’d crucify Ralph Reed in the churchyard if he showed up on Sunday and gave a sincere account of his religious and political views.

Because the truth about those signs advertising diversity and toleration and open-mindedness is that all of them really say the same thing:

“No Trespassing.”