When processing that first Trump victory in 2016, I sought counsel from my grandfather, who at the time I considered to be the wisest person I knew. This was before Trump had even taken office, when the damage he might do was still considered hypothetical or hyperbole by lots of people. But my grandfather, an upper middle class white man born in Flint, Michigan in the 1930s, agreed that Trump was dangerous. He was not trying to tell me there was no danger when he said, “yes it is very upsetting, but we will be ok.”
This was materially true, by the way. We, he and I and our immediate family members, have been more than ok for the entire intervening time [other than the fact that some of them, including himself, have died because they were old, though even in doing so they managed to have good medical care and savings]. Yet, what he said didn’t sit well with me, even in the moment, and I recall saying, “but what about the people who are not ok?” And his response was, in large part, a shrug. Not that he didn’t care about hypothetical people who were not us suffering in the future because of a terrible leader, but that he cared much less about those people than he cared about this affinity group known as “us.”
What he could have said [but did not say] to me in that moment was, “ok kid, lots of people are not ok right now, before Trump even takes office and makes a mess of things, why are you not concerned with them now and only concerned with them after the election?” I wish he had said it, that he had thought of it that way, so that he could continue to mentor me through adulthood. But he didn’t, I had to arrive at it myself, because I am the adult now.
When I think about the many people affected by the news of Trump’s most recent win, this is what I want to tell them. People are suffering now. This means the work of lessening suffering has not much changed. What has changed is how you feel about it, how afraid you are that you or someone you know might suffer more. That the claw in the arcade machine of life might start moving over into those areas of the box where people in your affinity group could be plucked up and sacrificed.
This is not to say at all that I don’t think Trump poses a real danger. He most assuredly does. Like many of you, I too voted for Harris, but I didn’t think she was going to lessen the overall suffering of anyone. I knew she was only going to be able to keep the zone of suffering generally where it is now: poor people, non-white people unable to overcome their generationally and systemically constructed lower status, people unable to contribute wage-earning labor to society without affiliations to support them, and anyone we can cast as completely not us.
Voting for Harris was not a strategic choice that I appreciated. But I understand that voting for president is not a Valentine but a chess move [to paraphrase Rebecca Solnit]. However, at the end of the day, I have a fair amount of sympathy for that roughly one third of eligible voters who stayed home. I think, as someone who has voted in every election I could since 2002 [other than one school board election where I lost my ballot and forgot, I am so sorry], having common cause with non-voters is rather heretical. I do not truly think that most non-voters can’t tell the difference between an obvious aspiring autocrat like Trump and a watered down centrist like Harris. I think that increasingly non-voters have come to one of two conclusions:
- the game is rigged by moneyed interests who own us regardless so why bother and get yours
- the rules of the game have been narrowed to prevent anyone winning who can’t first begin from the premise that there is not enough prosperity to go around, so we all need to be fighting over ever diminishing pieces of pie [which should be understood as safety, prosperity, you know, the American Dream].
I suspect that most Harris voters are familiar with the sort of tuned out apathy of the first conclusion, but the second one bears closer attention and might feel surprising. I am fairly certain that most Trump voters intuitively understand both of these [despite the widespread understanding among educated Harris voters that Trump voters are stupid].
This is a VERY broad brush, I get that. If you are a Harris voter and you read this and your hackles come up and you’re starting to think that surely the internet has something to offer you that makes you feel appropriately righteous right now in your defeat, I assure you that it does, but lean into your curiosity here. The democratic establishment just spent 4 years telling the MAGA faithful that everything is fine, and getting better, despite their feeling that it was not. We don’t get to tell people that their feelings aren’t real even if maybe they are really quite racist and want to turn women into baby factories for White Jesus. Why exactly do we think they came to be bigots, what does it do for them? Indulge me.
Democrats like to think of themselves as Big Tent people. I would argue that when compared with the GOP post Reagan, and certainly with the MAGA movement, that democrats are certainly Bigger Tent people, but I fall short of saying that they want everyone in the tent. They want the things that they do to award them the same good humanist points as doing the things that would let everyone be in the tent.
As metamodern humans we have a series of scripts that tell us that being a humanist and thinking that all [hu]men are created equal is all well and good as an ideal, but the reality is that, just as Orwell once [allegorically] said, “all [people] are equal, but some [people] are more equal than others.” I think that deep down we all believe that when push comes to shove, the appropriate thing is to cut our losses with equality for everyone and just worry about equality for some of us. We even sort of tell ourselves that this is our biology [which I am not going to go into, but I disagree with that premise].
Yes, people are always suffering, always in danger and it is nearly always unjust. Not being in danger, in itself, is not an immoral state of being. The fact that I am not materially suffering is not why others are, there is not a suffering quota that must be met. But that is not to say that we should try to console ourselves with the knowledge that a buffer zone made of others’ assured suffering is what keeps us safe. We shouldn’t feel ok with the fact that what allows us to be safe are structures of our society creating a pocket of people who will bear the brunt of our collective inequities. And not only because if our safety requires that pocket, the pocket could one day need to expand so that we are included in it to keep [better] others safe.
It’s time to talk about scapegoats and oddly, Jesus. The idea of the scapegoat is that it is symbolically given the power to become the vessel that holds the sin of others so that when it is ritually killed/sacrificed or released into the desert or whatever it takes with it the sins of the people and they are purified of that sin. It’s sort of magic [it is literally magic]. Sources are a little fuzzy on it, but the general consensus is that god did this magic trick with Jesus and it became Christianity. The idea of there being vessels of our collective sin that can be purged to purify us, is pretty fantastic from a certain perspective [I guess] so long as that scapegoat is a literal goat or something that we can all agree hierarchically is less sovereign than a human [I don’t really believe this about the noble goat, but humans being superior is a fairly powerful and accepted narrative in our culture].
The bigger problem is that sometimes the scapegoat is a fully sovereign person, or like a group of people. And when that happens we seem to get genocide. If you’ve been brushing up on your authoritarian playbook [now’s a good time if you have not], you know that the dehumanization and otherization of actual groups of humans is a common tactic. Leverage a pre-existing prejudice of any majority group [say it is against Jews in Europe, Palestinians in Gaza, immigrants in the US], rhetorically perform the magic trick that turns them from actual people with human rights into a vessel for our collective sin, purge them, and – Bob’s your uncle – chosen people are redeemed!
Outside the containment of a religious ceremony, this thing tends to go awry. I think it is because this historic religious purity has a an actual context [even if it’s a bit nuts] but social purity doesn’t. It’s shockingly difficult to draw a line around a group of people, identities are fuzzy. One of the more darkly interesting things about studying scientific racism or the holocaust and also genetics is that, as we know, these firm categories don’t exist. There are affinity groups, but there are not closed classes. Very quickly, the barrier between any scapegoated class blurs into any non-scapegoated class. We are all fundamentally scapegoatable.
This sentiment is more poetically summarized in Martin Niemoller’s famous poem, “First they came…” that many people have quoted on the internet as a reminder of how authoritarianism creeps into a normal society and becomes insidious. A lot of people explicitly voted for Trump so that he would come for the equivalent classes in our society to the Jews, trade unionists, socialists. The woke libs, the pet-eating immigrants, the LGBTQ community [specifically the T part these days], the mainstream media. These are the new bogeymen who need to be exterminated so that we can, you know, make American Great again [for the “real” Americans who deserve it]. Whether I think that this is achievable or is just hyperbole is not actually important, it is the intent of the rhetoric. It says, “you, my faithful, are suffering and I bring to you a solution to that suffering, vote for me and you will be safe/redeemed, etc.”
We do not have to wonder how fascism comes to America. And I am not going to feel joyful when a lot of Trump voters are the second group to suffer under his rule, though I have seen a lot of angry Harris voters hope for their suffering in the time to come, since they voted for him they deserve it.
As repugnant as I find Trump’s message, however, I interpret the counter message as conceding the point that this sort of purge of undesirables is something that we mostly hope to be able to incrementally avoid needing to engage with, but ultimately everything is still a zero sum game. So, like, watch out? Like, we don’t want to put anyone in concentration camps or anything, but we’re ok with automating your children’s jobs so that they are forced to live in some sort of corporatized dystopia of indentured servitude. Don’t worry, that will happen far in the future, after you are dead, you can’t help what future generations do, we promise not to cut your social security and medicare please vote for us. This is Diane Feinstein telling the climate kids, “let’s be clear, democrats are capitalists,” or older Harris voters telling college students they need to stop making a fuss about Palestinians because we have to defeat Trump, and actually anyone who demonizes voting for a third party candidate.
I get it, but these are artificially narrowing, self-fulfilling prophecies – and importantly – they appear to not be working. You can’t tell people trying to come into your tent that their opinions are garbage, they need to vote the party line and then you reserve the right to ignore their needs again until after the next primary, because they are obligated to take your side since the other side is so much worse.
Democrats want to leverage the idealism of Big Tent people, but once they are behind in the polls they will absolutely stop those border crossings and start hanging out with the Cheneys and get “tough on crime” by criminalizing homelessness. The counter argument to MAGA is mostly, “we hope you keep voting for us so that your little white children don’t have to be subjected to the same indignities and dangers as non-white children.”
Yes, it is very upsetting, but we will be ok.
As I get older, I more and more find myself cemented in the class of people who have earned the privilege of being ok. And more and more uneasy with it, less and less able to find the words to dissent because I can feel the unsafety creep in. What if I lose my pension? What if I had to find a job without healthcare? Could I lose my kids? Could I lose my house? I have earned my retirement, after all, I don’t want anyone to take that from me, you know, just so kids coming here from Latin America can grow up not in the center of a drug cartel. And it is not helped by the fact that if I renounce all my worldly goods and safety, the machine does not miraculous become just and take care of everyone. No, if I give everything I have away then all I do is assure that someone else takes it and I’m directly inside the class of people who are not ok. Choosing to be more in danger might seem morally better, but it’s pragmatically insane.
Is it bleak?
Yeah, if that were the end of the story, I think it would be very bleak. Good thing it is not. Because, oh yeah, I don’t believe in scarcity, I believe in abundance. I think the zero-sum premise is a sham. There is enough to go around.
For me the work has to be the same now as it was before, which is working to dismantle systems of oppression, yes, but also resisting the tight-fisted fear to defend my right to be ok over anyone else’s. Everyone deserves sustainable human comfort and self determination. That is the vision I want to vote for in 2028, and I believe that a coalition of non-voters and disaffected voters can make that happen in four years. Why? Because we have to. If we don’t, everyone loses. If we do, everyone could win.
Let’s build a longer table not a taller fence.
Note about process:
This was not the post-election essay I wanted to write. No, I wanted to not go so dark. I am actually a fairly optimistic person by nature and I do not think all is lost just because Trump has been elected, even though a lot probably is about to be lost. I’ve always been a registered Independent, have rarely liked anything about the Republican party of my lifetime [though McCain was ok, until he wasn’t and then he was again], and I increasingly dislike the Democratic party. I didn’t want to write a piece that blamed anyone for this election other than perhaps Trump himself, but even in that case I recognize Trump as a sort of eruption of the logical consequences of how this thing has been going. He is not so much an agent as a desire for attention, and he has therefore become what people wanted to pay attention to.
I realize that this reads like it’s blaming democrats, but I actually think that everyone is much more responsible than our current system allows them to understand. So that is to say in a piece where I wanted to say, “No one is to blame for this,” I hope I said, “everyone, including me, is to blame for this. Do better.” If we can’t stand squarely in the center of the ideals we say we believe in then we don’t get to have nice things. As the adults in the room, we have to make it possible to get the world that everyone deserves. That isn’t going to be possible if one party is insane and the other party is trying for all the world to not upset anyone so they can look like the least worst choice and the other-other party [one third of the electorate] can’t find anyone to vote for.
This isn’t working, we need to try something else. It would be great if the thing that we try turns out to be not fascism because I am an American patriot and who wants my country to be better than that.
The Oracle of Z 