I largely avoid writing as much about politics as I did as a kid, when this website first started, when the 'blogosphere' was actually a potent force that anybody cared about. There's two excellent reasons for this. One is that this topic is no longer merely a sporting hobby where I had aesthetic associations with one side and could smugly cheer for it. Now politics is dark, deeply depressing, and upsetting. I cannot talk about the state of the world in real life anymore. If the topic comes up, even when I am well-versed and knowledgeable on it, my mouth locks up. It is a psychological wound now that inhibits function. The other reason is that I do have any illusions of greater knowledge. The more you learn the more you learn how little you know, just how ignorant you are on so many topics. Twenty-year-old me would look at the political landscape and say "clearly nobody knows anything" and decide in his arrogance, that he was "the special boy, the savior who could untangle all of this with my keyboard". Thirty-three-year-old me looks at this and thinks... well fuck.
I'm only writing this because ultimately I have no other option. This is a lunatic urge, a compulsion, an instinctual act. I could not sleep last night because the words kept repeating in my brain what I needed to say. Dr. Melfi might compare this form of painful, utterly useless writing to childbirth - Tony Soprano and I know it is more accurately taking a shit. I don't know if I'll have the stomach to read and revise this. I might not even publish this, I don't know.
One thing I do not need to do is wag my finger. The polling results will come in, a million narratives will form, somebody will eventually decide what the mistake was. According to the crooked unfair system of the Electoral Collage, this election is a brutal landslide. Worse still, it looks like our future cretin leader-of-the-now-free-to-be-cruel-world will win the popular vote. It was not laughing too hard. It was not bringing in Dick Cheney. It was not being too wishy-washy on stopping the reckless rampage of Israeli violence (but hey, it would be nice to think so). Somebody else will watch the tape, somebody else will tell us where Harris' fundamentals were wrong, where she did not plant her feet and how she lobbed an INT over the head of Texas when there was a wide open Michigan. Unless there is a miracle and we discover some spectacular act of voter fraud at a level not seen since 19th century political machine elections, the truth is pretty damn clear: Kamala Harris could never win this election. Worse, the entire Democratic Party as currently constructed, could never win this election.
Eggs are too expensive, McDonalds sets its prices like its deep fried slop is luxury food, gas prices are too high (even though I just filled up for what is a reasonable in my adulthood $2.67 a gallon the other night), affording a house has gone from "maybe when I get that better job" to "ludicrous daydream". That's all it is. That's all America ever was, I'm sorry to say. It is less easy to pretend otherwise this morning. This whole late-20th century slide towards Reaganonomics, neoliberalism, whatever you want to call this creature, was born because in the late Seventies one day Americans realized the good times of ruling the world's markets unchallenged forever after the World Wars was ending, and we needed to get crueler and more brutish to stay ahead. Therefore we had layoffs, severe inequality, billionaire oligarchs, and now the dream that AI can wipe out jobs so the empire can continue. The narrative of the 2024 election is pretty fucked in its simplicity: We survived a pandemic, the economy overheat itself inflation like it often does after a major war which Covid effectively was, and people are timid with their dollars and believe we're in a recession even if statistically that's not the case. It does not matter, nobody cares economics besides vibes anyway. They just know the system as constructed does not benefit them.
I'm not excusing any of this. When the mammalian creature called the American was asked to choose between saving a dollar on a carton of eggs or not having open cruelty towards the most vulnerable and desperate populations within us, the creature chose the loathsome bestial option. And also, there's no proof you're going to get that dollar saved for eggs. You never got anything tangible under Trump's first term, you're not getting anything this time, I'm sorry.
Kamala Harris' big slogan was "we are not going back". But her project, a continuation of the Joe Biden project before her, was exactly that: going back. Joe Biden was the promise that all this Trump stuff could be safely put away forever, that just one boring norm-y presidential-looking fellow from Central Casting could reset politics back to 2013, or 2007, or 1978, whatever year you're nostalgic for and believe politics worked correctly then. I think Biden did better than I expected in some places, but I knew he was going to be insufficient even in 2019. The problem is that no matter what year you reset back to, you're still fundamentally resetting to an American system that operates with deep inequality, where inevitably even the "imperial core" of white (or white-enough) middle class Americans cannot get their car, house, BBQ pit, big screen TV, and yearly vacations. That's what they want, that's all this ever was. The American Empire has had lots of great moments in its history, and a built up a lovely mythology of freedom and generosity and positive reform. Over a century ago, the American people were on the forefront of liberal drives to save Jews trapped in poverty and pogroms of the backwards Tsarist Russian Empire. In the twenties we saved the floundering Soviet Union from famine after its civil war. There's dozens of examples you can name that your high school textbook won't remember. It would be nice to think that's the real America. But all those liberal drives were only possible because the middle class 1900s Americans were wildly rich thanks to the happy accident of being granted a whole continent to rule practically unopposed, they were wildly comfortable and would soon become more comfortable. The increasingly doddering tanned criminal says we can all get back to being fat and happy again, where we can rule our little car dealerships off a stroad next to a Chick-fil-a and a crooked mattress store as mini-dictators, going home to a wife we're cheating on when we molest our female employees whose wages we steal but luckily the wife never has to know. Then on the weekend we watch football, we watch superhero movies that now-properly only star men/boys like us, and we get angry about the right kind of sexually-sinful minority on our phones.
That's the greatest level of ambition America seemingly can aspire to. Thousands of people need to suffer to make that dream happen, but that was true on Monday, it is still true today. On Monday the police brutalized people for landlords, our subsidized proxy bombings murdered people in the Middle East, authorizations for necessary medical procedures were auto-denied by insurance companies cooking their books, and people were fired from jobs they were good at to make their company's stock price look sexier. The only thing that changes today is the tempo of cruelty. And that it is less easy to pretend otherwise.
I would love to say I see an arc of history trending towards justice. The Democratic Party gave its most truly Democratic Party punch this election. It was insufficient on practically any level. I can't say that the Biden-y Big Tent brand of politics is dead forever, but the bench for their kind of politics is pretty vacant. Who the fuck do you run in 2028? (Not a woman, I'm sure, they'll be blamed somehow for this.) The old bastions of liberal thought are gutted and dying, hollowed out by billionaires: Bezos owns the Post and Musk owns Twitter. The Norm-y wall of "Resistance" types exhausted themselves, and turns out, were not enough. I would love to say that the death of the center finally opens up the possibility of leftist, socialist politics, but I know where this is going. This is not going to be a fast controlled burn to open the momentum to a new America built on justice and wisdom and economic equality. No, we're going to march downwards into the dust and cinders with the fire. In the Nineties, after getting thrashed for a generation by Reagan and his cronies, Clinton figured out the winning move for the Democrats was to "just be Republicans", and they're still basically there, and even that Overton Window has slammed shut. So in 2028, we'll have the first 'moderate' anti-woke Democrat. Does John Fetterman want the job?
At least there will be an election, since the most reactionary conservative movement in American history since Reconstruction came to power bloodlessly on the ballot. Saved them the need for violence. That Southern reaction of the 1870s took a century to overcome, history does not move linearly, I'm sorry to say. This will take a long time to fix, it is ever fixed. I do not think these guys are very good at much of anything except capturing anger and grievance. When it comes to actually ruling, I do not have many silver linings for you. There's not a lot I agree with these people on, and not a lot of legitimate forms of opposition left with much strength to stop them, except perversely, states rights if you're lucky to live in New York, New Jersey, or California. This fight will continue, there will be losses and victories, but you do not fix a fundamentally broken America by doing more America.
I should end with some kind of silver lining. A nice statement that ultimately national politics only goes so deep and so far. That in the end, our lives and their meaning are not defined by what skin color the samurai is in the new Assassin's Creed that you probably aren't going to play anyway. But I do not know how much I believe that, the poison seeps deep, and there's few methods of communication left that are not blackened by the creeping shadow. You open your computer to work and the home screen is just another vector of infection towards hatefulness and conspiracies and a general desire to tear down everything collective and community-based in modern civilization from schooling to milk. I'm writing this on a website owned by Google, who are pushing a slush of AI trash that is the new "exciting" future, whose venting of pollution is aiding to the overall malformations in our climate that have caused an unseasonably warm and dry November. It has not rained in six weeks, this could be my apocalyptic log. Harris did not even try to fight on the environmental front, we had already ceded that ground, and not going to fix it, again, it is less easy to pretend otherwise.
All I have are what little spaces I have left in my real life and in my online presence. I have trans and queer friends, I have friends with unclear immigration status, I have friends who simply want to create and write truth in a time overwhelmed by bullshit. I do not know what else I can do for them except maintain what communities I'm in or have built. I'm going to be fine: so far they're still saying I'm a white dude, so I can pass. I don't know writing this will help them or help me. Just, last night I finally fell asleep after dozing on and off for four hours. Today I'm still safe, you're still safe, we'll still be able to grieve with the people we love. We can go to sleep maybe a bit easier tonight because it does get easier day by day.
And I'll delete whatever gloating fucking comments somebody posts underneath this. Because this place, this blog, you're not welcome here.
