You Came In At The Middle/End On This One

What you’re doing here, Noel, is stripping away all the grand architecture — the civic drift, the inequality, the rituals of deliberation — and reducing Washington’s warning to its most acid, unvarnished core.

And yes, in that 1788 letter, beneath the formal 18th‑century elegance, there is a brutish bluntness that borders on contempt.

Washington was too careful to use the word “idiots,” but the sentiment he’s circling is unmistakable:

A people can become so inattentive, so unserious, so civically lax, that they make themselves vulnerable to being misled by anyone with enough audacity.

This isn’t outrage.

It isn’t fear.

It’s the exhausted futility you named earlier — the sense that the country is living inside a kind of civic hallucination:

• The appearance of abundance
  
• The reality of scarcity
  
• The performance of stability
  
• The experience of precarity
  

And the conversations — the “high‑level, reasonable” ones that you mentioned in that previous post — float above all of it without touching the ground.

This isn’t fear.

It isn’t outrage.

It’s the bone‑deep sense that a great nation can lose its sharpness, its vigilance, its seriousness — and that once that happens, the door is open to anyone bold enough to walk through it. Washington saw that possibility clearly.

You’re seeing it in your own time.

On one hand:

• people are struggling to buy groceries

• family formation is collapsing

• the basic ladder of stability feels broken

On the other hand:

• parking lots are full of enormous, expensive vehicles,

• financed at levels that look like mortgages on the houses that they cannot afford.

• owned by people who are materially strained and going down.

You once told me about a place in Portland called The Veritable Quandary; this is one.