Chaos Syndrome In Politics

Rauch has penned one of the most important political analyses that you will read this season. Long, but well worth the trip.
How American Politics Became So Ineffective - The Atlantic:

...Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. It begins with the weakening of the institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees—that have historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time. As these intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in campaigns and in the government itself...

...Trump, Sanders, and Ted Cruz have in common that they are political sociopaths—meaning not that they are crazy, but that they don’t care what other politicians think about their behavior and they don’t need to care. That three of the four final presidential contenders in 2016 were political sociopaths is a sign of how far chaos syndrome has gone. The old, mediated system selected such people out. The new, disintermediated system seems to be selecting them in...

If I remember my Marquis de Sade correctly, chaos inevitably leads to entropy, an idea that predates the mathematical models of the Universal that has it all dying in the cold void of empty dead space when all the particles in the Universe will be so far apart that no particle can interact with any other particle; thus, the Universe ends with a whimper, not a bang. I will definitely whimper when I see the Duck Dynasty phony beards in the White House.