Much is being written about the surplus of ineptitude in Washington these days. It’s an easy essay given the incorrigible behaviors we see among some of the politicians that “we the people” have sent to the hallowed grounds of our nation’s capital.

One gets the sense that the name of the game among many in Congress is how extreme, how controversial can one be to make the day’s news cycle. What will it take for me to achieve celebrity status? Public policy you ask? What’s that?

A small cohort of the right-wing caucus that nearly shut down our government seemed more intent on getting an interview on one of the main news channels than in achieving a coherent budget plan for the nation. One gets the feeling that their actual plan is more focused on how to get rid of their own Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy. Sadly, it’s a fact of life now that when you hold high office, in the eyes of the media, everything becomes political.

Marianna Sotomayor wrote in the Washington Post last week that, “If the far right faction actually forces a vote against McCarthy, it will be equal parts historic and chaotic.”

There’s a false premise among hardliners and wannabe autocrats that disorder leads to strength. An extension of that premise is that change can be made and power can be achieved by means of chaos and anarchy. It’s as though this premise has been politically actuated among a frighteningly large number of those in our Congress who seek power, influence and celebrity rather than the stewardship of our nation.

Some of the political antics we now witness on our news feeds and TV screens remind me of the unbelievable headlines I used to see as a youngster waiting in line at the grocery stores. We called them grocery store tabloids, the extremes of yellow journalism.

Utterances in support of fascism, violence, white nationalism, the attack on the Capitol, antisemitism, hostility towards women and LGBTQ are the kinds of things that used to lay dormant in some souls, behaviors that were assumed to be if not known to be unacceptable. But we have entered an era in which some of our “leaders,” in their quest for notoriety, have in essence given permission by example to let these behaviors come out from under the proverbial rock, a sad new-normal side to our civil society. It seems as though we’ve moved to a national malaise of moral confusion.

I have this terrible feeling that there is a growing sentiment among too many in America that the despotic virus that seems to be proliferating in our nation is OK, not a threat to our nation, just free speech on steroids, no worries. Well, I’m worried.

An event last week struck me as the latest example of what concerns me. When a respected statesmen like Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley (recently retired) gives a full-throated warning about the health and well being of our democracy, it gets my attention. In defense of democracy he said, “We don’t take an oath to a king or a queen or to a tyrant or a dictator. And we don’t take an oath to wannabe dictators.” Why then would a well-known media celebrity call him “a cowardly woke pig,” and a former president accuse him of treason, saying that he should be executed? Really.

Which brings me to chaos theory, the idea that systems, no matter how complex (our democratic system of governance), rely on underlying order, and that very simple or small systems and events can cause very complex behaviors or events or, more to the point, the point at which stability moves to instability or order moves to disorder. It can happen in America. Democracy is a fragile system.

If we want to save our democracy it’s time to give up the silly tribalism that has infected our politics. It’s time for us to say we need serious statesmen and women in our halls of Congress, not “musketeers of mayhem” as conservative columnist Hugh Hewitt put it recently. It’s time that we, as voting citizens, put an end to the fatuous antics that have taken over our Capitol by electing serious representatives who pledge to solve the many problems the future presents us with.

Authoritarian antics, hyper-partisanship, identity politics, culture wars and calculated and deliberate chaos will, I’m afraid, lead us to the historical dustbin, not the exceptional hallmark of the virtues of freedom and the virtues of constitutional democracy that the United States has proudly demonstrated to the world for over two centuries.

Bill Sims is a Hillsboro resident, retired president of the Denver Council on Foreign Relations, an author and runs a small farm in Berrysville with his wife. He is a former educator, executive and foundation president.