Download Insider NJ’s 2022 Advance publication or view it below:

The United States rose out of the Enlightenment – that curious exploration of an elusive condition called human happiness – but our public square at some point became a closer approximation of medieval times, which is to say – and with a certain generosity – decidedly pre-Enlightenment, plague and all.

Those delicate social compacts comprising the provocations and procedures of an evolving civilization coarsened into a two-party system consisting of a battering ram on one side and a trebuchet on the other, crude and outmoded tools bearing little relationship to those keener processes and deeper demarcations in the dialogues of humanity.

We adjusted, it seems, to the abbreviated dynamics, in a way that on occasion made coded spoon-fed slogans easier to identify with than the depth of lifelong friends, as the noose of COVID obscenely tugged.

Too, the forms only rehearsed primitive dramas masking a darker aspect of our republic: namely, a failure of the system to consistently deliver results to actual people, or to even pretend familiarity with the country’s core Enlightenment ideals. Our politics came to convey poorly imagined substitutions for ideas by those intent merely on sustaining urgent commercial interests while maintaining false collisions to keep so-called pygmy minds preoccupied.

China and Russia continued to witness this, of course, and delighted in reasserting their respective tyrannies as more efficient options on the world stage, perhaps in tandem, as the latter mobilized on the border of Ukraine, and China bristled at President Joe Biden’s efforts to coalesce western democracies.

Already routed from one another by our machines, we received the latest viral strain as the next downward strike of an ax to drive us farther apart. Everyone alienated in the same electronic envelope of ego lacked that most fundamental and reliable ability to physically grasp.

What then, in the context of all this, did the coming 2022 elections mean for New Jersey, supposedly that Northeast blue state bastion, shakier on the other side of the 2021 election cycle?

Download Insider NJ’s 2022 Advance publication or view it below: