Hat tip to Nathan Koenig for a clean, unpleasant little phrase in his Louisiana piece yesterday that explains a lot of what all politics feels like when we stop cheering and start cogitating: the illusion of choice.

Nathan, I hope I will do your piece justice here.

I speak less to the core story in Koenig’s piece, the fact that a “conservative” like Steve Scalise was standing giddily beside Troy Carter at Helena Moreno’s inauguration, or the “Get Gordon” guy playing friendly middleman between Moreno and the state’s top Republicans. I speak more to the trick, in staying consistent with my ecosystem–and that is the exhortation not to be duped at all, to consider that it’s not that your side loses, but that the machinery–the hidden hand–keeps moving no matter what color hat you wear and no matter what state you live in.

Where Koenig’s thesis intersects with what this space has been circling for a long time—among motifs like narrative warfare, controlled opposition, and all the Catholic work on Modernism—is that the public mind is the battlefield, and that electronic screen is the one giving the sermons.

Elections, it seems to me, work as one cog inside a substitute national religion, where voters get a sense of belonging and moral certainty without actually gaining control over what happens next. We aren’t even sure that the tallies are real. And since that’s true, how can we say our vote even matters at all? In Louisiana, the red vs blue fight gives people energy and identity, but it also gives the system cover. It is able to hide behind layer after layer of plausible deniability, offering one reason or another why our guy or gal didn’t win this time around.

Look, I get it, the left can be loony, and I’m certainly not suggesting we switch tribes; but the observable data out there so many respected colleagues keep reluctantly circling is clear–every now and again, one of these anomalies-that-really-aren’t pop up, shifting a well-meaning and sharp thinker like Koenig into the next stage of his developing thought space.

The illusion of choice is as real in Louisiana as it is on a national level, as it is in the media. Controlled opposition reigns everywhere. So if we’re busy hating only the other team, we’re not tracking the real physics of it all–who writes the policy language, who funds the campaigns, who controls the committees, who has access behind the scenes, who benefits when “bipartisan cooperation” suddenly produces the same outcomes no matter who won the last race.

Essentially, we fail to track who is penning the narrative keeping us inside the snow globe–and that, to our peril.

None of this means there are no real differences between parties. Koenig even says that, and he’s right.

It means that this admittedly real binary is often the bait to chomp on the madness of a false war, ignoring Genesis 3:15, ignoring the lessons from the Saul Alinskys of our history.

What is the answer then, if the citizenry of a state and nation have so little say in what actually matters in politics?

We keep our wits, as William Wallace might say. We follow the news, sure–some of us have to. But we refuse the trance inside that news. We stop letting the illusion of choice replace moral judgment under God, prayer, and sincere study of what actually happened to our religion. And we rebuild the only kind of freedom that can’t be gerrymandered or bought: an interior life rooted in Christ, strengthened by confession and repentance, a disciplined daily regimen, fasting, and the sacraments.

Once you learn how the theater works, you realize that to truly be awake, you have to admit that the only real change now must come through a chastisement, the cross, a Good Friday, the week-long grind in the heat before power lines brighten the Saturday night sky.

Not red over blue.

Not even Trump over Biden.

But God first… or God last.