1. The "blue wall." Neither blue nor a wall. Make all the Holy Roman Empire jokes you want.
2. Allan Lichtman's "Keys to the Presidency" formula, which has all the scientific rigor and predictive power of haruspication.
3. Guardrails. They're gone.
4. The notion that abortion is ever going to be a central, election-deciding factor. For women of whatever color or anyone else.
5. October surprises. The age of scandal is over.
Kamala Harris and the Democrats lost decisively and lost big. Executive branch, Senate, and most likely the House will now join the Supreme Court in Fatass's back pocket. And, as usual, within ten minutes of the Democrats realizing that that was the ball game, the knives were out for... well, no one in particular, but some of the culprits were:
1. Kamala ("Didn't explain herself," "Said something dumb about trans inmates in 2019," "Didn't throw Biden off the back of the sleigh on The View" and my personal favorite, "Didn't go on Joe Rogan.")
2. Joe Biden ("Didn't get out soon enough," "Should never have run again," "Called Fatass supporters garbage people," "Didn't solve inflation quick enough.")
3. Nancy Pelosi ("Forced Biden out of the race," as if the former Speaker can force the President of the United States to do fuck all)
4. The Russians, yet again.
5. The Dems' rampant wokity.
6. Merrick Garland, who slow-walked the case against Fatass until the J6 Committee lit a fire under him.
7. And like a bad penny, once again, here comes good ol' Bernie fuckin' Sanders, blaming "the Democratic Party" as a whole for "abandoning working people."
Fuck off, Bernie. The Dems capped insulin and inhalers at $35/month, passed the biggest spending/jobs bill in American history, eliminated junk fees at banks, forced the airlines to refund ticket money, and Joe himself went and marched on the picket lines with UAW workers and helped force a garnantuan victory for unions and collective bargaining.
I'm sure it feels good to blame anyone but yourself, but I'm calling baloney. Every single one of these is horseshit.
Okay, maybe they're not completely horseshit. One recalls the image of the six blind men all trying to describe what the elephant looks like as one looks at all these competing coroners' reports. Are any of them right? Sure. Maybe they all are, in one way or another, in varying degrees.
But I'd like to posit something else. Suppose it's not actually an elephant at all. Suppose it's a rhino. Or a kangaroo. Suppose we're all asking the wrong question and trying to identify the wrong animal. Because to me, the salient question isn't "Why did she lose?" but rather, "How the fuck did this guy win? Again? And this time, resoundingly?"
I think there are two reasons.
The First Reason.
I posit that we're living through one of those watershed moments in history during which we're watching the death-spasms of one era and the birth pangs of a new. And that in this new landscape, this new context, there is no way Kamala, or any Democrat, could have won or ever will again.
Like all watershed moments, this one was a long time in the making. So many of these "watershed" historical moments are either part of, or the culmination of, very long historical processes and are, inasmuch as they can be identified at all, that moment when very long processes coincided with outside factors and circumstance to create that perfect storm moment. But here's what I think happened.
Let's begin by identifying the era in which we live: the Screen Era, that period when Americans, and maybe the world, quit reading and began watching. It began, roughly, in the early part of the last century, when film was invented and became, via the nickelodeon and movie theatres, the dominant form of entertainment and then, gradually, information dissemination of any kind, be it entertainment, news, education, etc. But we'll start with entertainment.
So back in the Depression, for example, about, say, fifteen or so years into the Screen Era, there was a very clear line of delineation between fantasy and reality. You stepped off the gray, grimy, gritty streets and into the rococo fantasia that were movie theatres in those days (the old Fox Theater on Grand Avenue in St. Louis, where I live, was decorated in a style called "Siamese Byzantine" which looks like a million Liberaces threw up simultaneously).
You took your seat in a vast, dark, hushed chamber, and then a fairy-tale enfolded before your very eyes: magical fables of cowboys or pirates or beautiful, rich people doing beautiful, rich people things. People who clearly are not you doing things that you clearly cannot do. And you lost yourself in the fantasy for an hour and a half or so.
Then the flick ended, the credits rolled, and you found yourself back on those same gritty streets wearing your older brother's hand-me-down shoes and there's a guy selling apples on the corner.
But then along came television. And suddenly, the fantasy world was beamed into our living rooms.
And then along came cheap televisions, which, if you were anything like my father's family in Indiana, allowed you to put a television in every single room and have it going all hours of the day, whether anyone was watching or not.
And then along came smartphones, which allowed us to carry the fantasy with us. In our pockets. Literally everywhere we go. And to escape into that fantasy world whenever we felt like it. Or, more darkly, made it impossible to escape from the fantasy world. And then to believe that the fantasy world was preferable to the real one. And then we, as a society and culture, lost the ability to distinguish between the two.
The symptoms appeared early. When the line between fantasy and reality became blurred, we began giving serious credence to what would have previously been considered, rightly, fucking ridiculous. We can run through a few:
-Vaccines cause autism.
-The earth is flat.
-Aliens built the pyramids.
-9/11 was an inside job.
-There were ancient, advanced civilizations before this one.
-The government is poisoning us/controlling our minds with fluoride.
-Elvis is still alive.
You can probably think of a whole lot more. But the point is that all of these ideas, and many more, which were once relegated to the deepest recesses of Art Bell-esque crankdom, metastatized and now they, and many more like them, have lots of adherents.
There's an argument to be made that the spread of the acceptance of looney-tunes ideas like these were the result of the public erosion of trust in public institutions like medicine, universities, the press, the government. That probably played a role. But the broader point stands: we lost the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality.
But I think there was something else going on, too. For a very long time, the institution of fatherhood and fathers had been presented negatively. By the time I was growing up, Bill Cosby (and let's not even think about what happened there), was the only positive father-figure I can recall. Ward Cleaver had been replaced by Homer Simpson, Randy Marsh, Peter Griffin and Stan Smith of "American Dad"--clueless, feckless dolts whose existence mocked the entire concept of paternity. Even their masculinity itself was undermined (each of those cartoon dads I listed above either participated in homosexual acts or thought about it).
I think it's not too much to say there was a crisis of American fatherhood going on. Not sure whether TV reflected, caused, or exacerbated it. Maybe all three.
And then along came "The Apprentice", which rebranded a failed real-estate mogul and washed up relic of the discredited go-go 80's as... well, as America's dad. And suddenly, a cheap and bullying grifter who happened to be born right, a guy whose only genuine success, up to that point, had been projecting the illusion of success--became something that he manifestly was not: the father that most children believe theirs to be and what most adults wish he were, all-wise, omnipotent, brilliant, and personally admirable, presiding over a squabbling bunch of siblings competing for Daddy's love and approval. Sibling rivalry reimagined as mass entertainment.
He was, of course, none of these. Everything about him is phony: his hair. His tan. His height. His business success. His waistline. But we're TV Nation, a country that opts for fantasy over reality, and in TV Nation, Trump is really the only logical president.
And a public which had lost the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality swallowed the whole thing.
But what alarms me the most is that we did it WILLINGLY. Which leads me to my second reason for doubting, in retrospect, that Kamala Harris, or any Democrat, had a chance in this election or any other that may (or may not) occur in these United States.
The Second Reason
I'd like to begin this part by considering two phrases.
The first expression was one which my late father of blessed memory, a man from a less enlightened age, frequently used: "Can't rape the willing."
Not exactly a phrase used in polite company, but it's pretty tough to miss the point. You can't really victimize someone who wants to be the victim. Ask any masochist worthy of the name.
We liberals often look slack-jawed at the gullibility of those on the other side of the fence. "How could they BELIEVE that??" we wonder, and it's a hell of a good question. And we try to explain it by citing thirty years of a conservative news ecosystem, a bitches' brew of the EIB network, Fox News, OAN, Infowars, Joe Rogan, and countless right-wing nutjob podcasts who all spout crackbrained conspiracy theories as facts. They don't teach critical thinking in schools anymore. They're fed up with 40 years of failed neoliberal policies. They're terrified by a world spinning out of control. They lost their jobs in the coal mines, their kids are all hooked on fentanyl, they don't see opportunities anywhere, they've been locked out of the American dream.
But the people who believe this stuff do so because they WANT to. It's an active decision on their part. Because they don't have to. They have access to the same media that I do. But given the choice between the mainstream or legacy or lamestream or however you want to describe the media, which, with all its faults, is still pretty good, and the loons and liars, they chose the latter. Can't rape the willing.
But why would they choose to?
So now let's consider the second expression.
Leading up to the election, there was a phrase being bandied about in hushed and somber tones of voice which belied how freely and glibly it was used: "This is not who we are."
We'd watch his rallies, or read his Truth Social posts, or watch interviews with his supporters, and there'd be a swelling chorus from liberal politicians: "THIS IS NOT WHO WE ARE. We're better than this. America is a great and good nation. It may take us a while, but we always do the right thing in the end. America is GOOD."
But suppose this is who we are? What if Donald Trump isn't the cause of the disease, or even a symptom of it? What if he's a mirror? Did he destroy us, or does he reflect us? What if America really is as cruel, greedy, venal, stupid, hateful, and contemptuous of democracy as the president we just re-elected by, if not a landslide, by a very comfortable number well outside the margin of error?
I've thought for a long time that the things about Donald Trump that make liberals gasp are the very things that make him aspirational to a plurality, maybe a majority, of the country. Maybe we all want to be rich, bang porn stars with impunity, shoot off our mouths without consequences, and raise our middle finger to rules, norms, manners, niceties, laws, and every other institution that keeps us from tearing each others' throats out.
The American electorate knew precisely who and what he is, a majority voted for it. They saw his vulgarity, his cruelty, the armed insurrection that he planned and caused, the documents he stole, the rapes he committed, the fraud and theft he committed, the adultery he performed, and a clear majority of American voters said, "Cool."
Which is why I don't buy the reasons given--the price of eggs, inflation, rejection of wokism and identity politics, Biden's unpopularity, Kamala's inability to define herself. They all sound like we're just making excuses for ourselves. We like the fact that he's a colossal prick be we, ourselves, are colossal pricks.
The Lights Are Going Out Across America, and We Shall Not See Them Relit in Our Lifetimes
I admit to the possibility that I'm completely wrong, and everything I've written above is baloney. It's possible.
Maybe there is hope. Maybe Trump and Trumpism are an aberration. Maybe it really WAS the price of eggs and biological males playing womens' sports that drove this election. And maybe if the Democrats can correct course on issues like that, there's a chance to turn the ship around.
But I don't think so. It feels to me like we've entered the post-policy era, during which one, the only driver of electoral success is the entertainment value of the candidate, and two, America's true, retrograde tendencies are finally unleashed. I'm not at all certain that toothpaste can be put back in the tube.
And if I'm not wrong, or even if I'm only partially right, this raises three questions.
1. Is it possible to save America? To restore our faith in the democratic process and our fidelity to ideals like separation of powers, a free press, etc.?
2. Is it worth trying?
3. And, considering the fact that we just handed, more or less, unlimited power to a fascist, will we even be allowed to try?
Maybe this is just the despair talking, but I can't help but think the answer to all three is no.
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