In a truly enlightened society, someone would throw Jane Mayer a parade. The New Yorker's Washington correspondent is as good as it gets at combining deep reporting and solid, readable prose. Her recent profile of Mitch McConnell demonstrates all of this once again and, in addition, it contains one of the most amazing quotes about a political figure—hell, about a human being not currently incarcerated in a SuperMax facility—I’ve ever read. Mayer speaks to someone who’s known McConnell for years, and apparently tells this person that, in all her research, Mayer hadn’t been able to find any animating principle behind McConnell’s political career. And this person tells her:

Give up. You can look and look for something more in him, but it isn’t there. I wish I could tell you that there is some secret thing that he really believes in, but he doesn’t.



That’s one of those quotes for which you make sure you save your notebook. Mitch McConnell, it tells us, has managed to enable a criminally negligent, criminally incompetent, and (likely) criminally criminal president* because Mitch McConnell is a vacant, soulless, unprincipled goon whose only allegiance is to his own power and to those forces in politics that allow him to maintain it.

Once again, it’s worth thinking deeply about the kind of politics that inevitably produces a Mitch McConnell, and that inevitably allows him to reach a position of considerable power. What kind of party nurtures a Mitch McConnell? What is the philosophy of government that rewards a lack of civic virtues and principles? Perhaps one that casually dismisses “government” as an instrument of good. Perhaps one that denigrates the value of the institutions of a self-governing political commonwealth—like, say, the United States Post Office. Perhaps one that sees public service as an opportunity for private gain, and nothing more than that. The president* is the walking embodiment of a political system in danger of collapse. Mitch McConnell is the walking embodiment of the dry rot that made it all possible.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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