The real national emergency is the triviality of our politics

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi learned that President Trump would declare a national emergency to shift around money to finance his border wall, her denunciation was predictable. But her way of expressing outrage was not. The issue she used to make her point was important on many levels.

Observing the “unease” even among many Republicans over Trump’s abuse of his power, she noted that “if the president can declare an emergency on something that he has created as an emergency — an illusion that he wants to convey — just think of what a president with different values can present to the American people.”

And then she recalled the slaughter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14, 2018, when 14 students and three staff members were gunned down. “You want to talk about a national emergency?” Pelosi asked. “Let’s talk about today, the one-year anniversary of another manifestation of the epidemic of gun violence in America. That’s a national emergency. Why don’t you declare that emergency, Mr. President? I wish you would.”

Our nation’s deadly permissiveness toward firearms was very much on Pelosi’s mind because the House Judiciary Committee had voted 21-to-14 the night before to send a bill requiring background checks for all gun sales and most gun transactions to the House floor.

It was the first serious vote on a gun-reform measure since 2013, when the Senate fell six votes short of the 60 needed to advance a background-checks bill proposed by Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa. It was also the most significant gun-sanity measure to move though the House Judiciary Committee since 1993.

Yet as important as this step was, it received scant media notice. The drowning out of news that mattered tells us a great deal about our political moment. It also underscores the challenge confronting those speaking for the vast majority of Americans who want action in the face of what Pelosi was right to call a national emergency on gun violence.

In counting the many costs of the Trump era, we focus too rarely on the president’s success in pushing divisive trivialities and self-interested contrivances to the center of national concern. He manufactures crises, and then uses his manufactured crises to create new ones.

There is no crisis at our nation’s border. To the extent that there are border problems, his wall would do little or nothing to set things right.

In the meantime, problems that should engage our energy are forced to the back of the queue of public attention. The normal constitutional approaches to governing are no longer respected.

And no matter how much journalists investigate and expose Trump’s misconduct, his I’m-The-Only-One-Who-Matters approach to politics fits well with the needs of modern media, both social and traditional. Clicks and page views and ratings encourage everyone to dwell on individuals more than on issues.

This aggravates a profound pre-existing cynicism about the possibilities of political action. And defeatism is especially damaging when it comes to guns.

For decades, as one massacre cascaded into another, the gun lobby beat back even the most modest efforts to control access to firearms. The sense of doom about any progress obscures overwhelming evidence that the politics of guns has changed.

This is why what happened in the House last week on guns deserved far more coverage than it got, and why Pelosi was right to use Trump’s phony emergency to highlight a real one. The only cure for political cynicism is to show that the steady and painstaking work of grassroots action can bear fruit. And the only alternative to a politics of spectacle is for elective officials and the media to lift up problems that actually need solving.