Now What?
I’ve had lots of feelings about that miserable election: anger, hostility, fear, worry, and more. But life goes on. Now what?
Self-Care
I practiced bankruptcy law for 25 years, mostly representing middle-class people who got hammered by one of the four most common causes of financial distress — divorce, illness/injury, job loss, and financial crashes. Almost all of my clients were shocked and horrified that things had come to the place where they needed to consult a lawyer. I had one piece of advice: take care of yourself. You can’t help anyone else if you’re totally stressed out.
It’s good advice. I took it myself, in fact, I’m still taking it. I did a media cleanse: no billionaire media, quit reading newsletters and Substacks, got off Xitter, and limited my screen time. I watched movies, read novels, talked to my friends over dinner and drinks. I cleaned out closets and drawers, took a close look at expenditures, and talked to my stock broker.
I’ve read this site, and the comments. I moved to Bluesky (@edwalker.bsky.social) and used the starter packs to replace my curated list of follows on Xitter. I’m exercising and eating mindfully. It’s helping.
The Blame Game
I’ve been thinking about why the election turned out so badly. Of course there are many reasons for a huge loss, but these seem make me angriest.
1. Voters. Democracy only works if voters can discriminate among candidates. Donald Trump is a law-breaker, a sexually abusive creep, and a business and governmental failure. People who think this repulsive demented jerk is a plausible candidate and voted for him and people who refused to vote failed the basic test of democracy. There is no excuse for this. With the exception of Muslims who refused to support genocide, discussed below, those people failed as citizens.
2. Billionaire media. The billionaire-owned and controlled media (the “BM”) rehabilitated and enabled Trump. When Trump was impeached for inciting a riot to hold on to power after getting whipped n the 2020 election, the BM announced that the impeachment was futile. Then when the coward Mitch McConnell protected him the BM patted itself on the back and announced that Trump was the leading candidate for 2024. Then he was discovered to have stolen critical national security documents from the government and refused to return them. The BM treated this as spectacle, thrilled by his contempt of law, and continued to treat Trump as the leading Repub candidate.
Meanwhile, the BM’s political reporters decided that inflation was Biden’s fault because of all the government spending on COVID relief, infrastructure and bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US. This was a lie. The primary cause of inflation was supply chain blockages brought on by corporate just-in-time practices. Prices rose as supply dropped, just as predicted by Econ 101 textbooks.
But when supply chain problems eased, prices didn’t come down as predicted by those textbooks. The largest US corporations have oligopolistic market power, and were able to keep prices rising. This was a replay of the mid-1970s when right-wing economists pretended inflation was caused by Keynesian spending instead of the ripple effects of OPEC price hikes. Sadly, BM political reporters lack the capacity to learn from the experience of being bamboozled.
By mid-2023 it was obvious that Biden’s policies were bringing our economy to a soft landing, and many economists (not the right-wing toads) began calling for the Fed to reduce interest rates. The Fed, led by a Republican, refused. That helped keep inflation from falling. BM political reporters blamed Biden for all it.
It doesn’t matter why. They failed. They are to blame.
3. The Democratic Party. Famous Will Rogers quote: “I don’t belong to an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”
The election was a massive failure of Democratic “leadership,” the timid politicians, the know-it-all rich donors with their hands out, and the incompetent consultants. They all failed. They all should head to a monastery or convent and spend the rest of their days in shame and prayers for forgiveness on account al the people Trump will hurt physically and psychologically.
There is no Democratic Party. There are a bunch of politicians who claim the label, and their supporters and apparatchiks. They won’t help a single person now. For years lefties have begged them to do things that will help people directly — things like raising the minimum wage, protecting voting rights, strengthening labor laws, and reducing student debt, legislating abortion rights, and much more. Zippo.
We begged them to attack the policies and the politicians of the stupid party. We begged them to defend against the Ratfuckers’ ugly attacks on teachers, librarians, liberal clerics, college students, intellectuals, scientists, not-White people, asylum-seekers, LGBTQ+ people, and anyone with a brain capable of telling right from wrong. We begged them to communicate forcefully their successes. We begged them to use the power we gave them to help all of us flourish. They refused. They took our money and our time and then punched the dirty fucking hippies for funsies.
Time to clean House and Senate.
All right, big mouth, now whatcha gonna do?
1. There are a couple of things I can do locally, and I’m going to try to do them, hopefully in the company of people better equipped than I to accomplish them.
2. I’m going to continue with my current project of examining what it means to be an individual in current US society. But instead of treating it as a personal project, I’m going to try to make it more useful. More on that later.
3. I think the Democratic Party as currently constituted is purely transactional. It has no center, no reason for existing. There is nothing to bind us to the party. Instead, we are expected to support people who have claimed the label, regardless of whether or not they are furthering our goals.
As an example, Muslims who voted for Biden were asked to vote for the party’s chosen successor, Kamala Harris, despite her apparent support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its attacks on Lebanon and Hezbollah, its evident attempts to stir up war with Iran, and the close connection between the Israel’s odious warmonger Netanyahu and Trump.
Compare this to the 2012 election. We were asked to support Obama and his team despite their flat refusal to hold Wall Street accountable for causing the Great Crash. We were asked to support Obama’s choice to “foam the runway”, to allow the perps keep all the money they stole and use it to buy up all the houses that went into foreclosure. We were told to ignore the fate of millions of our fellow citizens who suffered loss of homes and savings. I didn’t vote for him. I couldn’t. How could I demand that Muslims support Harris in the face of genocide? How could anyone? Maybe other people felt similarly about other failures to deliver on promises.
The Democratic Party is not our friend, and it’s not going to help. We all have to figure out how to fix the mess that crowd of failures created. The shell of the party remains. I might be able to help with one obvious problem the lack of a governing theory.
4. I’m going to continue to attack the MAGAts on SCOTUS. I know how to read their bullshit opinions, and I know what plausible jurisprudence is, and I can and will show my contempt.
5, I think another serious problem is that we have no way to communicate with a large audience. By we, I mean thoughtful left-leaning writers and thinkers. We have no mass media presence, and we aren’t likely to develop one under a Trump administration.
At the Democratic Convention the Harris team centered a group of what it called “content creators,” people with podcasts. TikTok followers, Instagram accounts, and other ways of communicating. Those reach some of our target audience and could reach more.
Maybe that’s a way forward? Some kind of grouping of these content creators? Some sensible organization that stretches across all these forums? A coherence based on common goals and maybe even a theory? Maybe some way to make a little money?
Conclusion
We’re all going to have to find a way forward. Any thoughts?
_________
Front page photo: Detail of The Last Judgment by Giovanni da Modena, a fresco at the Cathedral of Bologna, Italy. Photo by Artemisia.
I’m picturing my friends who belong to religious orders, and the leaders of their communities that I have met, and I’m trying to imagine their reactions to such folks showing up on their doorsteps.
Some would laugh, and others would shake their heads sadly. All of them, though, would then say something like this: “You know that this isn’t just a place to run away from the world and wallow in your failures and sins, right? After your prayers have helped you get some clarity about the sins for which you are responsible and the damage they have caused others, perhaps you might want to pray for the wisdom to address the problems you’ve caused, then pray for the strength to actually do something that makes things right, or at least makes them better.”
I think there are themes in history (a concept Jacques Barzun focused on his book From Dawn to Decadence) that go in cycles. One of those themes is inclusion and exclusion. I think the world currently is in an ascending exclusion cycle and the US is part of that. Trump is riding the exclusion wave.
The Declaration of Independence is our national raison d’etre. It is an inclusive statement. Everyone’s created equal, everyone’s got unalienable rights, government is created to guard those rights and if it won’t it should be replaced. I think in very simple terms Democrats believe in inclusion and the concept of the Declaration of Independence. I think Republicans believe in exclusion and do not believe in the concepts of the Declaration, most notably everyone’s not created equal. The recent rulings of the Supreme Court are designed to exclude various groups from rights and societal protection and to institutionalize exclusion forever legally throughout the country.
For this election, when Democratic management (I hesitate to say leadership) turned away from perceived inclusion and/or demonstrated an inability to implement it, they suffered a decadence (a falling away by Barzun’s definition) from its membership. The Gaza slaughter partnering is the most notable example. Inflation is also notable because inflation is exclusive by its very nature and Democrats mismanaged the perception of their ability to manage it.
The country’s major internal problem from day one has been the battle between exclusionists and inclusionists. We fought a Civil War over it. The Civil War ended but the there was no accepted legitimacy for the winner’s position as there was, e.g., by Germany and Japan after WWII. We have an accepted, fixated, entrenched exclusionist belief system. In a sort of melding of Marcy’s education post and this one. I think the key to moving forward is education about the cancerous application of exclusion in our society, how it never allows to get where we want to be. I don’t have answer for how to best do that. I imagine Peterr is best qualifed for a viable suggestion.
People like me have educated (in my case) thousands about exclusion over decades. In my case, almost half a century. There are untold numbers of formal and informal teachers who have devoted themselves to this work, sometimes at great personal expense.
My life’s work went nowhere in the end.
In any case, it is a bit late to call for education when the wheels have fallen off the democratic cart.
We need heavy lifting.
Thank you Ed. I appreciate you.
Utterly brilliant.
I have a huge day in front of me, so I cannot comment further this morning. Back to you tomorrow.
p.s. billionaire media — has a ring to it that legacy media, MMM, etc. never did. stealing it now.
And the “BM” acronym fits to a T.