It’s taken me a very long time to learn that in the face of deeply triggered emotions, best to sleep on my response.
Some thoughts on “that” election.
11 November 2024 (Athens, Greece) — Very often you can open an envelope and take out something which bites or stings, though it isn’t a living creature. Worse is an email or a news alert on your timeline which has the same effect. Such was the news of Trump’s election. My brain was full of spots of light and darkness, circling in confusion. And I thought “Logically, disasters should define us. Sheep learn from electric fences. Yet we humans, collectively, cannot make the same course correction”.
I had some initial reactions which I wrote about the day after the election. I stand by all of it.
But herein a few more thoughts after a few days of nice sleep – ok, and some wine.
Yes, I looked at a lot of numbers. The whole country simply jolted to the right:
He moved every demographic rightward – except rich white women.
But the overriding number for me was the granular analysis on young and middle age white men voters. They came out to vote in record numbers, far exceeding 2016 and 2020. And Trump got 55% of their vote.
And that’s why I said too many people are just overthinking the election loss – “Biden lost the election” and “Harris should have done this” and “the Democrats didn’t understand inflation concerns, pricing concerns, [fill in the blank] concerns”- when it comes down to a simple truth: the U.S. country is not ready for a woman President. And it will never be ready.
It was not ready in 2016 or 2024 – and it won’t be in 2028. Or well into the future. Racism, sexism, misogyny is embedded in American culture. It is in its DNA.
A woman lost to the WORST candidate in history in both 2016 and 2024. They were far superior candidates in every possible measurement in both parties.
But it did not matter: millions upon millions of people couldn’t see past their gender. It didn’t matter what they said, where the economy was, or how crazy Trump talked or what he threatened to do. It clearly doesn’t matter how many women he has sexually assaulted or what he had going on with Jeffrey Epstein. He won 40% of the overall women’s vote!!!
It . just . didn’t . matter.
The Democrats as a political force are dead unless they follow the Republican lead and admit this. They need an ex-marine type candidate who can talk to the knuckle-draggers … but also demonstrate compassion to women and make clear that he understands their plight. Yes, despicable to many – but the reality. America is run on passion and distrust. The Democrats just do not get it.
A friend told me “Oh, we’ll get a woman someday”. Oh, you might, but she’ll need to be a brutal authoritarian like the Kate Winslet character in “The Regime”.
As I have said time and time again, we have forgotten our history – assuming anybody actually reads anymore. The arc of the moral universe does NOT bend toward moral progress and justice. Freedom, democracy, liberalism are mere blips on the screen of humanity. Autocracy, totalitarianism and dictatorships have long ruled the world. America is merely skewing back to the norm. No surprise. In the short history of political man, no democracy, no republic has ever survived as such.
So it is not hard to see that the world has come to a critical juncture, a point of possibly catastrophic collapse. Multiple simultaneous crises – many of epic proportions – demonstrates liberal *democracies* do not have the power to govern their way through them. They haven’t the mettle. They haven’t the will. Europe will continue to disintegrate but that’s fodder for another post.
Trump learned a long time ago from his mentor Roy Cohn that truth has no place in finance. Or politics. Or the law. Tell people what they want to hear, tell them repeatedly, and eventually enough will believe you. The 17th Century philosopher Renee Descartes is famous for I think therefore I am”. But he also said “There is no truth – there is only belief”. He might have added “I believe therefore I am – a fool”.
There is no place for truth in Trumpworld. He is a huckster. There will always be another sucker coming around the corner. And Trump knows there is no such thing as bad publicity, provided he has no shame. The more outrageous he is, the more people talk about him and the more TV companies show his outrages. For every minute that Harris had on moderate, corporate TV, Trump had ten. The mistake CNN and MSNBC made was in talking too much about Trump and not enough about Harris. They thought the people would see what they saw. The public saw what they wanted to see and heard what they wanted to hear. “He’s a fool like me”.
Note to readers: right-wing media sets the news agenda in the U.S. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post. Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. This has been building for years. The media needs a reinvention, not just a “wake-up call” after Trump’s win The media can’t just pivot into the next cycle of looking around the room and asking “what just happened?” as if it had nothing to do with it. I’ll rip my professions to shreds, but in another post.
The other important thing is that Trump showed the world the U.S. legal *justice system* simply does not exist. It is a fantasy. The system pretends to desire “the truth” to “serve justice” – but it is simply a trillion-dollar money machine that requires lawyers to argue their point. The best argument wins. The truth is irrelevant. Trump has proved a rich man in the U.S. can purchase the law. In corporate law, the company can beat down the smaller opponent by making a case too expensive. Trump has dallied, delayed, and paid lawyers (with other people’s money) since he attempted to overthrow the 2020 election – and he has succeeded. Where he has been found guilty, he has avoided sentencing. Where he has been ordered to pay compensation, he has not paid.
Now he will claim that he cannot be convicted because he is President-Elect, proving beyond doubt that rich people like him, are above the law. He has shown that with enough cash for lawyers, the rule of law, the truth, and the very fabric of civilization is a house of cards.
Under Biden, the United States became the first country to face an attempted coup and not only fail to punish the coup plotters but allow them to hold office and make laws. There is no parallel in world history. For God’s sake, even Hitler had a prison interlude between his putsch and his presidency. The only thing approaching an equivalent lies in the American past: the refusal to punish confederates and instead let them regroup under new names, leading to the decimation of Reconstruction and the birth of Jim Crow.
Trump learned the way to win is to cut every corner, trample on every ethical guideline, while his opponents primly weighed up the legal niceties and nuances. They were thumbing through the rulebook of the monastery – while in front of them a mafia don has set the monastery on fire.
The most egregious offender is the U.S. Department of Justice. Under Merrick Garland, the best friend of Jared Kushner’s ethics lawyer Jamie Gorelick, the DOJ refused to prosecute Trump administration crimes even after the criminals confessed. He let the statute of limitations run out on the Mueller probe, ignored the repercussions of Trump’s network of mafiosos gaining classified intelligence, disregarded blatant criminality on the Supreme Court, and deliberately slow-walked a response to the theft of stolen documents containing nuclear secrets.
This is not a serious country, but a country in serious crisis. This is not a sovereign country, but a country under the tyranny of the minority regardless of who is in charge. We have elections – but we do not have choice.
And now, an even more brutal era dawns. America’s “tech bros” will now strut their stuff in the corridors of power. As Carole Cadwalladr noted this morning in the Guardian, 2016 was the beginning and 2024 is the end. The first cycle of information disruption is complete. We’re through the looking glass. We’re all now wading through the information sewers.
But this is something I have long written about but I want to borrow from Carole:
Trump is a bacillus but the problem is the pipes.
We cannot fix this. It began as a tear in the information space, a dawning realization that the world as we knew it – stable, fixed by facts, balustraded by evidence – was now a rip in the fabric of reality. And the turbulence that Trump is about to unleash – alongside pain and cruelty and hardship – is possible because that’s where we already live: information chaos.
I will leave you with this, a quote I have used before. Hunter S. Thompson, writing in September 1972, a little over one month ahead of Nixon’s landslide reelection:
The polls also indicate that Nixon will get a comfortable majority of the Youth Vote. And that he might carry all fifty states.
Well … maybe so. This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves: finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes and all his imprecise talk about “new politics” and “honesty in government”, is one of the few men who’ve run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.
McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.
Jesus! Where will it end?
Nixon won 49 states.
And if every damn word of what Thompson wrote doesn’t ring true to you today, you’re deaf.