God help us, Trump again. WTF, and what comes next?
The forecast here is for chaos, destruction, and suffering in the short term, then a surprisingly quick rebound into much the same contests and controversies as always, with Democrats recoiling into our usual feckless, inchoate, but intermittently generous and inspiring attempt to fix everything at once. Trump’s victory is so deeply founded in nonreality that it simply cannot last long or accomplish much. Look for serious resistance when reporters start sneaking into his deportation camps and posting photos of sick children; when his joy-ride on the prosperity from Biden’s masterly stewardship of the economy hits the high curb of his nonsensical tariffs; and when his base starts to feel the ruinous expense of his race war, maybe in direct cuts to Social Security, more likely in the stealth tax of renewed inflation. Even before that, it’s possible that even some Republicans will jib at a foreign policy that lets Putin roll into Kyiv like Hitler arriving in Paris in 1940. Meanwhile the Trump Show gets stupider and more repulsive by the day (Hey, cool, he’s giving the microphone a blowjob!) and even his mouth-breathing legions will eventually get tired of watching it. If we Dems can just throttle back the purity testing and virtue signalling, the fringe causes that lend themselves so well to Republican parody and distortion, we’ll have a real shot in ’28. Maybe I’ll be voting for Harris then, if I’m still alive.
God, I will miss her, in any case. Dealt an impossible hand by Biden’s long flight from self-awareness, she fell to uncomplainingly and made herself into a credible candidate, taking us several steps back from the brink, in the direction of decency, civility, hope, honesty, inclusion, kindness, and healthy debate. She never found a way to run on Biden’s (excellent) record, and her proposal for price controls was one of the worst ideas ever seriously pushed in a presidential campaign. But she performed with dignity and grace, got better every day, and gave, as they say, hope to millions.
The jokers in the deck are Trump’s health and the climate. Will Trump’s own Secret Service and RFK Jr.’s medical bureaucracy protect him better than Biden’s did? It’s a question. And how many more hurricanes and heat spells will it take before young voters resume noticing that no provision has been made for leaving them on a habitable planet? -- Biden’s efforts in this direction (token efforts, in the reckoning of real environmentalists, for yearly emissions continue to increase despite all the windmills and EVs) now, according to all the talking heads, having been proved “unrealistic” and starry-eyed and politically unfeasible.
But don’t listen to me, I’ve been wrong about everything – everything! – continuously since 2015. The underlying problem here is what old-line Marxists used to call, with proud faux-scientific chutzpah, capitalist decadence. We Americans are trained from birth to demand the impossible and insist on being lied to. The training is called advertising; we are immersed in it around the clock, cradle to grave, and it’s the real educational process that takes place beneath and all around our official schooling. We Americans may not know much about what reality consists of or makes available – not knowing is one of our sacred rights – but we by-God DEMAND to be satisfied, and screw you if you don’t do it, instantly.
So in this last outing, fifteen million should-be Dem voters stayed home because, I don’t know, maybe there was a game on, while millions of the “persuadable” trooped to the polls to protest the Trumpian inflation Biden and Harris had supposedly caused by refusing to let people starve in the streets in the wake of Covid. A fact-free election, often hardly better than fact-adjacent even on the Harris side. Don’t bother me with context, history, explanation; just grok what I’m feeling and gimme what’s mine. Like the customer, the voter is always right, and must not be challenged, instructed, or talked down to.
Part of the problem, one of the classic signs of capitalist decadence, is the way we dems use the term “capitalism” itself as a slur, refusing to think dialectically about the system that, whatever its flaws and excesses, is chiefly responsible for nearly everything that lifts life above its base of miserable, Malthusian subsistence. Absent a nearly three-century fossil fuel high that continues to defy every attempt to get us on the wagon, we would all still be grubbing in the dirt and groveling before our “natural” masters, the Trumps and Elon Musks of their day. The fact of our dependence on capitalism for nearly everything we want and need is so uncomfortable for us progressives that we mostly ignore it, preferring just to pronounce a few impressive diagnostic terms –- selfishness, greed, competition, materialism, corruption, alienation, monopoly, co-optation, capitalism itself, etc. etc. –- express our disapproval, and move on, like people trying to banish demons by pronouncing the names. Then we profess surprise when the economy lags and the next “business-friendly” regime comes along to turn us out, with the usual environmental and spiritual ravages.
So I grit my teeth, and check my watch, and wait for the next turning of this old wheel, this cycle of unreasonable hope and bitter disappointment and occasional incremental policy change for the better or worse. But like I say, don’t listen to me, I’ve been wrong all along. The other possibility, here in the smoking rubble of Election 2024, is that Trump II really will be epochal, a departure from which we never return. Trump has looked his base right in the eye, as it were, and dared them to disbelieve his wildly fraudulent account of recent history or his mountain of comically hyperbolic promises for the future. The next move in his game, surely, will be gaslighting on an industrial scale. The glittering fantasy future will be declared to have come true, and any who demur will be savagely denounced and sometimes persecuted. Keep your Orwell by the bedside.
Maybe this really is Last Stop for the old Enlightenment dream of responsible democracy, for the Founders’ and Lincoln’s vision of informed voters making wise choices regarding their own governance, treating opponents respectfully not vengefully. Maybe everything from here on is hype, hustle, indoctrination, disinformation, conflict, and above all money. Maybe an electorate terminally infantilized by its industrial and political processes will no longer make any real choices, though it will keep on pretending to, often with real passion, while all the strings that matter are pulled by the Trumps and Musks.
I doubt it, though. Facts are stubborn things, as they say, and the facts of our current situation, terrifying as they often are, will be too stubborn for Trump and his gang of ignoramuses. In my own sour way, I expect to enjoy the next four years. I look forward to seeing this crew, and above all Trump with his grotesquely swollen self-regard, encountering the slings and arrows and banana peels of reality, again and again.
