Let Me Talk You Down

A little pep

Sometimes it seems the only alternatives are doomerism and cockeyed optimism. There has been much discussion of the extra strain politics puts on people’s nerves these days as opposed to ten or twenty years ago, enough that I’m not going to cite examples. (Oh, well, have this anyway, from the journal Politics and the life sciences: “Election-Related Post-Traumatic Stress: Evidence from the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.” You may question the methodology — especially considering it relies on a sample from YouGov — but you will probably be unsurprised at the findings: “We estimate that 12.5% of American adults (95% CI: 9.2% to 15.9%) experienced election-related PTSD, far higher than the annual PTSD prevalence of 3.5%. Additionally, negativity toward opposing partisans correlated with PTSD symptoms.”)

That’s worth several discussions itself, but briefly: The bright side of it, in my view, is that we’re now confronting conflicts in our democracy that have been papered over for many, many years — since the Founding, at least in a sense, but within my lifetime I’d peg it to Reaganism and its disruption of the post-WWII consensus on just about everything from civil rights to capitalism to labor to, well, the very idea of America and whether it is (as the old bastard used to say, no doubt laughing up his sleeve) a shining city on a hill or a gilded bunker from which we send forays to loot the world and within which we celebrate cruelty and white male supremacy.

Seen this way, the reason things seem so fraught and crucial is that a lot of people and ideas that previously went unheard or got laughed off have in recent years received broader and more respectful attention (see, the internet is not all bad) – for instance, the idea that racism and misogyny have not been conquered, as we had been constantly assured by our betters, but are in fact built into our systems and are the bone-deep philosophy of our elites and should be rooted out and discarded. MAGA is that elite’s violent and stressful reaction, in populist disguise, to the rise of these contrary voices.

So in the long run it may be fruitful, but at the moment it’s a major drag — mid-traumatic stress syndrome.

Since I churn through political outrages for a living, and have a natural surfeit of choler, it’s very hard on me. I take comfort from guarded optimism and a limited form of fatalism — that is, if things go really wrong it’s because we done fucked up, that’s all, and maybe after the ensuing conflagration and collapse some other group of humans (if humans still exist) will pick up the fallen standard and do better job of it. Hell, most of Western Europe was full fascist in the early 1940s. They bounced back pretty good.

Also we have a pretty good chance now, too, though we have to plow through oceans of disinfo and voter suppression and, assuming we succeed, fight off the inevitable attempted coup to keep at least within hailing distance of the shining city. (And then we have to fight some of the people we’re voting for now to get all the way there, which may turn out to be the tougher battle!)

But even if, as I believe, most Americans are not crazy enough to vote for Trump again, it remains a worry that so many are that crazy. That still means millions of voters are very aware of his racism and misogyny, which they share, and his criminality, which they enjoy because decades of educational failure have left them convinced that criminality is the highest manifestation of independent thought and while the Joker may be worse than Batman, his is the model they’re more likely to be able to live up to.

Still. Call me a cockeyed optimist, but however many people actually think that way, and even adopt the attendant political psychoses like Jewish space laser weather manipulation theories, I can’t believe this way of thinking can support a winning coalition.

It’s not that I think the average voters’ respect for (or even understanding of) democracy is so strong. It’s that I think, even with his natural Electoral College advantage, the mass lunacy required to carry Trump to victory just isn’t there.

In 2016 there were a lot of chuckleheads who didn’t have any idea Trump was worse than the usual Republicans (yeah yeah, I know, but let’s table that discussion until after the election, OK), and voted for him because they always vote Republican. The Republicans-for-Harris thing may eat into that constituency. Besides the nuts, that leaves voters who saw just as well as we do how far short of its promise America has fallen but had a rather badly thought-out idea of how to rectify that. I expect many of them have been disabused since then.

In other words, what had been a coalition of the enraged, the uninformed, and the Who Gives a Shit in 2016 is now just a crackpot cluster — too volatile and fragile to hold. As I have noted before, Trump now lacks the charm of novelty — boy, does he lack it. And 2020 certainly knocked off his aura of invincibilty  — which I think he knows, and which was why he insisted, long after it could have helped him in any other way, that he’d won that election. It’s also why he flipped out at the debate when Harris talked about people walking out of his rallies. People talk about Trump’s narcissism and no doubt he’s got it, but he also knows how differently his fans look at a winner than at a loser.

I could be wrong. It could be Trump only gets 2% less than Harris (I’m sure he won’t do better than that) and, as in 2016, ekes out an EC win. Or his minions might blow up some polling stations and get corrupt judges to give him the win notwithstanding. But these are mere mechanical defects of the system, nothing like Reagan taking 49 states in his second election; and in such cases, assuming Trump can’t gather enough brownshirts to seize complete control of the apparatus (as his followers are mostly cowards, I don’t think he can), there’ll be opportunities to turn back the tide.

OK, back to doom and gloom (but funny!) later. (Maybe I’ll do a Harris-is-fucked post in a week or two, for balance.) Have a nice day!