There is a peculiar comedy in watching the political class lose its composure, not unlike watching two drunk squires brawling in the mud over who gets the privilege of paying the king’s gambling debts. In Michigan, the ruling coalition’s mask slipped entirely this week when former Representative Haley Stevens, nursing the bruises of a primary defeat, decided to bestow her blessing upon the Republican contender rather than her party’s victorious nominee, Abdul El-Sayed. The polite society of the Democratic machine is in full-blown hysterics, clutch-bagging their pearl necklaces as if an eleventh commandment had been shattered on the steps of the Lansing capitol.
To the earnest partisan, this is treason of the highest order. To anyone with a passing familiarity with basic human incentives and an allergy to political sermonizing, it is merely the latest dispatch from the DMV of the human soul. Our sprawling government behaves remarkably like an embarrassing, flatulent uncle who crashes every family holiday, demands to audit the pie distribution, and somehow leaves with the silverware. The fight over who sits at the head of the table is rarely about principles; it is almost entirely about who gets to hold the regulatory whip and hand out the carved turkey to their favored constituencies.
The split in Michigan illustrates the fundamental friction within the modern managerial class. On one side, you have the technocratic progressivism championed by candidates like El-Sayed, whose entire worldview rests on the naive conviction that human society is simply a complex spreadsheet awaiting a sufficiently educated planner. It brings to mind Friedrich Hayek’s biting observation in The Fatal Conceit: the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. The progressive mind sees Michigan’s manufacturing woes, its healthcare logistics, and its energy grids as playthings for well-credentialed committees. Stevens, representing the slightly more calculating, corporate-subsidized wing of the apparatus, looked upon this unvarnished zealotry and evidently decided that even the opposition party would be preferable to a true believer who actually reads the central planning manifestos.
Yet we ought to spare ourselves the temptation to applaud the beneficiary of this endorsement. The Republican Party has long specialized in marketing itself as the party of the unburdened individual, only to deliver slightly different varieties of corporate welfare and border-patrol theater once safely ensconced in power. When a moderate Democrat crosses the aisle, she is not defecting to the banner of laissez-faire; she is simply making a hedge. The difference between an interventionist who wants to micromanage your carbon footprint and an interventionist who wants to micromanage your supply chains is largely aesthetic. Both agree on the foundational heresy: that three hundred million individuals cannot be trusted to live without a federal minder looking over their shoulders.
What makes this intra-party spat so morbidly fascinating is how entirely divorced it is from the lives of ordinary citizens. Voters are treated as passive spectators to an aristocratic family dispute. Endorsements from career politicians carry all the weight of an edict from a bygone monarch, issued under the charming illusion that citizens vote based on the permission slips signed by their former representatives. It assumes the electorate views political parties not as temporary vehicles, but as sports franchises demanding generational, unquestioning fealty.
The real tragedy, of course, is that a single Senate race in Michigan is treated with the solemn gravity of an existential planetary event. It only holds this terrifying importance because the federal government has metastasized far beyond its constitutional boundaries. If Washington were confined to its proper, modest perimeter—delivering the mail with reasonable competence and defending the borders from actual foreign invasions—nobody outside of Ingham County would give a damn who wins this seat. The stakes are catastrophic only because the power being contested is absolute. We have built an omnipotent regulatory behemoth, and now we must endure the quadrennial trauma of watching rival factions claw each other’s eyes out for the steering wheel.
As the ballots are cast, Michigan voters will once again perform the sacred civic ritual of choosing their preferred manager for a state of affairs that should not exist in the first place. Haley Stevens has made her peace with apostasy, the party loyalists will continue their theatrical screeching, and the winner will head off to the Potomac to author a few thousand more pages of compliance mandates. No matter which brand of management emerges triumphant, the bureaucracy will expand, the debt will metastasize, and the state will continue to lean over our shoulders, asking if we have a permit for our audacity.