I STILL Swear This Isn’t Like All The Other “What Is To Be Done” Essays, Part Two

And not the last in the series, he threatened

I hope you liked Part One of my Post-Election Way-Forward thing, because you’re getting an extra helping: While I said yesterday I would stop at Part One, I’ve decided to deliver a one-bullet Part Two today and wait till the day after that to wrap up with Part Three. (Or maybe I’ll keep going! Life’s full of surprises.) Don’t worry, this one is pretty short.

Don’t despair in advance.

Ha ha, see the joke I made?

(That Tim Snyder On Tyranny thing is pretty good, by the way — short version here — and well worth your attention. It doesn’t have the “Live, Laugh, Love for Anti-Fascists” feeling of a lot of the current versions flooding the internet, for one thing; he’s not afraid to get heavy, as he does with the “Watch out for the paramilitaries” bit where he says, “when the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the game is over.” Maybe Snyder didn’t actually foresee Tubby’s recent proposed executive order that would, if effected, allow him to purge the Joint Chiefs of anyone who would defy him by, for example, denying him the right to use the U.S. military in conjunction with the Proud Boys against its own citizens. But here I am, already spoiling the tone! Really, this essay is sort of optimistic. I mean, relative to what a sensible person might be feeling that this point, anyway.)

In this first week (wow, it’s been a whole week, he said, dully noting the hashmarks scrawled in blood on the shithouse wall) you probably have seen approximately 20,000 takes on what happened in the election. Some of these, naturally, blame the Democrats’ alleged solicitude of trans people, or of other minorities that the blamers advise the party to immediately cut lose if they ever want to get anywhere again with the real American voters who voted against them and who are definitely not bigots (and just for thinking they are you will now lose the next election, too).

Others claim Harris would have won if only she’d denounced Israel for its treatment of Gaza, or if only she’d denounced Gaza for its treatment of Israel, or if she’d only managed some carefully titrated mix of denunciation that would have won the day (more titrated, that is, than what she tried). Others blame Harris for hewing too far left, or too far right, or too centrist or too right- or left-centrist or too hemi-demi-semi-centrist, etc.

All of these analyses (if we can so dignify them) come from political consultants, either professional or merely self-proclaimed — and this latter category includes anyone, on social media or elsewhere, who has forgotten they are ordinary human beings and begun thinking and talking as if Chuck Schumer might one day overhear them while jogging in Prospect Park and think, “you know, he/she is right, that’s exactly where we’ve been going astray!”

Whatever their status, all such bigbrains proceed from the same proposition: That the voters are irredeemably stupid and depraved and can’t tell right from wrong. Because why would you argue or debate how to talk to such people, rather than, you know, just telling them what you stand for (assuming you stand for anything), if you didn’t think they had to be manipulated into voting the right way?

It’s not that I don’t think there are a lot of very stupid voters. Clearly there are, and I speak as one who has been convinced of it, not by the 2024 election, but by an entire lifetime of experience.

But there are all sorts of voters, many if not most of whom are not stupid but very few of whom are ideal. Some are just evil scumbags who saw red when Trump told them Democrats were nice to gross trans people and hoped he’d murder them when returned to office. There are also many voters who are merely feckless and uninvolved, and many who maybe just voted the way they thought someone like them ought to vote. And some were concerned with the price of eggs.

There are lots of exit polls on the 2024 national electorate, but as the tallies finish up — revealing, by the way, a closer race than the Republicans and their Prestige Press flunkies had been portraying — it’s important to recall that while we may know the big trends, such as lower overall turnout with Democrats losing more voters than Republicans, we don’t know exactly who voted. The 2024 electorate isn’t just the 2020 electorate minus 13 million — it might be a very different group of voters entirely, including people who either changed in the past four years or didn’t vote before, and who might have had very different reasons than the last batch for voting the way they did.

All this is to say that elections involve a great deal of accident and unintended consequence. It could be about the voters, the politicians, or extrinsic events. As examples, we could cite a lot of weird presidential elections — 1824, 1876, 1968, etc. But let’s make it easy and focus on 2020.

Tubby has been bellowing for years that the 2020 election was fixed and stolen, based (to the extent it’s based on anything but his diseased ego) on its various oddities — for example, the large early and non-in-person voting totals caused by the pandemic. But you know what else was caused by the pandemic? People voting against Tubby because they thought he’d fucked it up.

I’m not the first person to suggest Trump would have had an even chance in 2020, notwithstanding the cruelty and stupidity he’d already evinced (though non-liberals may not have noticed), if it weren’t for the bugs. In fact, in a way you might compare the argument we’ve been hearing that Harris-née-Biden did as well as could be done with economy but still lost because of the public perception of it, and the argument that Trump did as well as could be done with the pandemic (Operation Warp Speed! Remember that?) but still lost for the same reason.

Sure, with Trump “public perception” was at a whole ‘nother holy-shit level of revulsion, because people saw him claiming the pandemic was no big deal and even a hoax, and then people started dying in droves, and then he foolishly went on TV (remember that? Long, awkward sessions with him and Fauci and the scarf lady?) and babbled about disinfecting the insides of our bodies and using horse dewormer to kill COVID.

Biden and Harris were more professional in their handling of their issue, and that more professional approach — which is exactly what most people prefer in a crisis, or should anyway (but I’m a liberal, of course I’d think that) — is part of the reason why so many of us, confirmed in our priors, are stuck on how unfair it is that they suffered electorally for it. But in the end, the dice land where they roll.

So come the next election (if we have one, ha ha, yeah, I acknowledge that possibility, but just suppose), things might be totally different. Maybe there’ll be a space alien invasion and Trump will go on TV and say, “It’s OK, I told the aliens they can kill all your firstborn children if they’ll leave the rest of us alone and they agreed, so kiss Junior goodbye like I just did” and then it turns out the aliens were kidding because that’s the kind of sense of humor they have, and voters will get turned off.

Yeah, I know, but if you told me in 2018 the upcoming election would be won or lost based on a global plague I would have thought that was crazy, too.

My point is, however rigged it all looks for fascist catastrophe — and, brothers and sisters, it does — there’s always some damn thing that can throw it off-course. I suggested last time (and will emphasize it in the next installment) that wishful thinking is a sucker’s bet. But there’s a difference between wishful thinking and awareness of the now fairly dependable chaos of modern life. You can’t expect people to turn on Republicans because of climate change, just as you couldn’t count on people to turn on Republicans in the early 21^st Century because of Wall Street corruption — but the 2008 crash fucked the GOP, and a few molten icebergs flooding Florida in 2026 or 2028 could do the same.  

There is always a chance. The real issue is: When we get it, what do we make of it?