I think I have discovered a new emotion, since it happened. Well, not “new,” exactly, but a mixture of the familiar primary colors into a new shade. There’s rage, of course, although not the bright, boiling one I know best–this one is muted, designed to keep itself burning instead of burning itself out. Grief–the kind that wraps itself in a protective layer of numbness, and observes itself from a distance, going about the tasks of daily life. There’s a touch of fear, but really it’s only a presentiment of the terror to come. And then, lending a sheen of chaos to all the rest, is a madwoman’s urge to laugh.
Surprisingly, when you blend all these hues together, you get something that looks very much like calm. I think–I believe I may be–calm.
I will own up to being surprised, when it happened. I thought she’d win. I had good reasons for believing this: the small-dollar donations, the social media enthusiasm, and most of all the simple fact that the evil bastard lost last time, and he has not spent the subsequent years making a lot of new friends.
But the thing is, even if Kamala Harris had won the election, she could not and would not have saved the values and institutions she represents. What she (and Joe Biden and Hilary Clinton and even Barack Obama) represent is an American order doomed to collapse. All she would have bought us is a four-year reprieve, a stay of execution.
To be clear, I would have welcomed four years of our crumbling democracy with open arms. I would have treasured them, because they are the precious years of my precious life, which I would like to spend in peace.
I am far from the most radical leftist in my circle of friends. When they wax poetic about The Revolution, and Burning It All Down, I always angrily interject that a revolution is the last fucking thing I want, and the last thing they want either, if they thought about it for more than forty-five seconds. The line I always end up using is: you should cling to democracy for as long as you possibly can, because once it is gone, you are left with only terrifying unknowns and impossible moral choices. Even our wheezing, corrupt institutions are preferable to a nation that has given up on the idea of negotiation. They roll their eyes at me when I say this.
And now here we are. The day has come, the reckoning will no longer be postponed.
How to find the moment when this collapse of the basic consensus of liberal democracy became inevitable? It’s not one moment, of course, but a series of wrong turns. Citizens United was one. The rise of Fox News was another. Reagan-era deregulation planted poisonous seeds still bearing poisonous fruit. You can go back further, of course, to the cruelty embedded in our national spirit, the proud cruelty of slavery, Jim Crow, and genocide. Or even further, to the greed and wanton violence that distinguish us as a species. As Bruce Springsteen said, “there’s a meanness in this world.”
But I do believe there were opportunities to set this country on a better path. This was not always inevitable. For me, the moment it started to feel…off-kilter…was 2015. It was clear, at the end of the Obama era, that I had been mistaken about something. I thought the words “hope” and “change” would mean an economic transformation on the scale of the New Deal, a return to the generous America of the Marshall Plan, a shared commitment to saving our planet as invigorating as the Space Race. It turns out hope and change were just marketing–words vague enough that people could see what they wanted in them. Like a Coke bottle or a Marvel movie.
But even in 2015, it seemed like that might have been a fixable mistake. After all, Obama did not think he would spend all his political capital on healthcare, and was blindsided by (and then refused to adapt to) a Republican Party behaving in naked bad faith. So I threw my support behind Bernie Sanders. Sanders was not without his blind spots, but promised to go further than Obama had and to restore the American Dream by wrestling it away from the rich, who had quietly been amassing unheard-of wealth while life for the rest of the country became more precarious.
But instead, the Democratic Party–with a giant push from Democratic leadership–picked Hilary Clinton, who promised to continue the Obama legacy without even the candy coating of good marketing. (To be clear, I believe many of the reasons voters despised Hilary Clinton were rooted in misogyny, but nevertheless, she was despised, and this made her an obviously bad candidate.)
And then along came a carnival barker, a perennial punchline never in on his own joke, a human abscess. And he won. The morning after the election in 2016, I walked around my town and it felt like an invisible bomb had gone off. I was stunned.
I’m not stunned this time. This country had four years to inoculate itself to Trump, by taking seriously the threat he posed and taking away his ability to do it again. We went with denial instead.
We’re going to be debating for a long time about why Kamala Harris lost this election. I think that’s healthy–there are a lot of theories and I see truth in most of them. The media landscape is poisoned. We were naive to think Americans would elect a Black woman. There is a global backlash against incumbents. But the story that makes the most sense to me is that Donald Trump offered people a very simple story about who to blame for the precarity of American life.
The Democratic party could have offered an equally simple counterstory, and told people to instead blame the rich. (We’re out of practice blaming the rich for things, but I think we would have gotten into the spirit of it quickly.)
But today’s Democratic Party, and Kamala Harris in particular, were never going to deliver this message, because they don’t believe it. The corrosive influence of corporate and billionaire power has twisted them into defending something indefensible.
Congress is nonfunctional. Corporate consolidation has turned “free market competition” into a joke, and left us with no defense against greed and rising prices. Government at every level has proven powerless against rich homeowners who stop anyone from creating desperately-needed housing. The United States is funding the genocide of Palestians, against the wishes of the vast majority of the world. Roe vs Wade was overturned and Nancy Pelosi read a poem.
We have been driving the nation’s car down the highway for miles, turning the radio up to drown out the weird noise from the engine, ignoring the smoke from the radiator. But the wheels are finally slowing down.
To me, the above narrative goes a long way toward explaining why electoral support for Kamala Harris failed to materialize. It does not do anything to explain why support for Trump did. To explain that, the story that makes the most sense to me is that we live among fascists. They are not the majority, but they don’t have to be in order to rule. They saw exactly who Donald Trump is and they salivated for more. The transgressive thrill of bullying is what they voted for, and it’s what they’ll get.
It’s going to be so bad, you guys.
I don’t think anyone can deserve fascism, not even the people who vote for it, because in voting they are giving away something without realizing that they will not be able to get it back. I don’t want anyone to go through what we’re about to go through, to feel what tariffs and mass deportations and wild deregulation does to our communities and our souls. But I’d be lying if I said that on some level I didn’t find it just the tiniest bit funny. It’s that madwoman in me.
The tone of human history is entirely a matter of scope. On a person-by-person basis, life is a melodrama if you’re lucky, a tragedy if you’re not. Pull the lens back a few meters and it becomes a comedy–the earnest French Revolutionaries marching each other off to the guillotine until there is no one left but reactionaries is grimly hilarious. Pull the lens away a bit farther and it’s all just data, the rise and fall of empires just layers of sediment to be excavated.
I grew up being told, straight-faced, that I had been born at The End of History. “How disappointing!” I thought. “How ever shall we make meaning of our lives when all the great questions have already been settled?” How many empires in history have convinced themselves of the same thing?
In the last few years I have fallen back in love with history. I read and listen to podcasts about it obsessively. And while I don’t think history gives us “lessons” in the sense that you can map one historical moment precisely on another, it does give us an awe-inspiring and melancholy sense of perspective. So many people have been exactly where we are now, watching the decline of an empire that had seemed as eternal as the mountains. The Egyptian pyramids had stood for over 2000 years by the time Cleopatra, their last independent monarch, watched the sun set on them for the last time. What must she have felt? I think I know, a little.
But history doesn’t merely offer us the comfort of knowing we are not alone in grief; it reminds us that people have always carried on and made joy and meaning amidst that sorrow. We have continued past our empires, and we will again. I mean really, I wasn’t crazy about this empire in the first place.
So I feel calm, somehow.
But I misled you a little, before. I left out one of the composite emotions lending its color to my current state of mind. The most surprising one of all–I’ve spent the past couple of days staring at it in disbelief.
Joy.
I know! What is joy doing here? It honestly feels a little tasteless, like bringing champagne to a funeral. In my defense, I didn’t invite it. It just showed up, and I can’t bring myself to send it away.
Every morning I wake up next to the person I love most in the world, the person who is my world. I go to the kitchen and make us coffee and then the cats come into the bedroom and walk all over our bodies in their desperate eagerness to be loved. I walk out amongst the painted leaves and revel in the autumn sunshine, even as the days grow shorter. I laugh at myself, all the time, because I am always doing things I find amusing. I take joy in my silly little job, I take pleasure in cooking for my partner and our friends. I really like my house. All of this, added together, means nothing. And it means everything. As with every human life.
Soon it will be winter, and my seasonal depression will come, as it always does. Soon it will be winter, and a fascist will come into power, and more will be required of me than ever before. I am getting ready. I am making plans. I have never been more dangerous. They have made me dangerous, and I find that funny too.
But for now, I won’t let the fascists or the media or the knowledge that I am only a dust mote in the eye of history take my autumn joy from me.
It’s borrowed time, but I’ll take every second of it.
Well put! And I’m glad to see you posting here again.