The dems, at the end of the day, tried to sell this election to us with fear. A lot of people felt very afraid, so why did it fail? Because what gets one person to the polls gets another person hiding under their bed with a shotgun, not daring to go out in public. (of course there are multiple factors, but this is one.) This is why Abe Oceanoxia says climate despair is the enemy – if you think you’re all fucked forever, that carries the implication there is nothing you can do about it. No matter how much you yell “unless you vote!,” people’s hearts and minds shut down after the first part of the sentence. I’ll talk about that more another day; here the observation is preface.
Over the next week or so, I’m going to expand on the thesis in the Momma Mia post, and this post is about the reason why. I feel the need to do my part to heal the damage caused by this climate of terror, because barely anybody else in a position of responsibility is looking at it this way. We got skullfucked, and as long as we want to survive, we gotta get unfucked.
There are legit reasons to feel sad and battered. Every human right and human need is going to take massive hits, starting before the end of January next year. People are already dying because of Fascism Part One’s supreme court appointments. It’s gross; it’s sad; it should never have been like this, let alone as bad as it’s going to get. BUT.
People have been overselling how bad it will be, and badly. While everybody will have their lives diminished in some way, at least tangentially, the vast majority of people will survive! And I mean you, my transes! If anything, the lack of immediate goose-stepping murder parties will probably leave people feeling lied to, feeling like the dems were full of shit, which also leaves them open to facilitating that gradualism HJ wrote about.
Also, it was already bad here! The USA – and most of the world at this point – have been run by short-sighted and callous greed for a long time. By discriminatory laws used as bait to get bigots to vote against their own interests. The democrats themselves are rich people protecting rich interests, which is exactly why they fight so half-assed: they profit from losing. Just hang out in the wings being the “reliable opposition” and paid for tut-tutting while republicans make them and their families fabulously wealthy off tax cuts and raiding the public treasure. They are very much the lesser of two evils, and we’d be in a better position to fight if they’d won, but at the end of the day, most of them don’t give a flaming fuck about you and me.
So, bad as it has been under both parties (always measurably worse under the elephants), when it gets worse now, how noticeable is the difference going to be? For the most vulnerable people, it will be. But me: queer enough to not be emotionally damaged by manmoding to survive the daily, good job security, a mortgage i can afford (for now), living in a nicely blue state? Don’t cry for me Argentina. And that tells me that a lot of you can survive as well.
We have been royally burned, and in turn, the entire world has been burned. But you still have every day of the rest of your life to live, and you can live it well. For some of you, it will involve grievous challenges. For some few of you, it may be cut short unnecessarily in any of hundreds of ways that conservative policies increase our odds of dying. BUT. Within that time you have, there is room for love, friendship, video games, violent radicalism, anything that brings you joy.
I am on this rampage because there has to be a realistic middle ground between foolish hopes and suicidal despair. Do not let the terrorists win, my friends, my comrades. Do not take yourself out for them! Live, like a motherfucker, live! Survive. You might even thrive. The world will be a sadder place, and we’ll all be sad about it, but within that, life is possible.
And I need all of you to do this.
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I think in a week or so when we know which way the US House of Representatives will go it’ll be time to check what data we have available about why people say they voted for Trump. Don’t buy everything you hear on that, of course. There will be plenty of claims that all Trump voters aren’t racist mysoginists. And maybe that’s partially true but they were sure as hell willing to let the country be run by an extreme racist and mysoginist. So claims that they’re not either of those things at all is pretty BS.
Personally I want to know what Trump voters think they’ve won. Trump got the white house based on their vote but what do they think they’re getting out of it now? Knowing that can be useful because they’re telling you how to reach them on issues they care about. Even if they’re lying about being racists and mysoginists, that’s fine. We don’t give a shit about meeting them on racist and mysoginist issues anyway. Let them tell us how to reach them on other issues and along the way maybe some of them will find it harder to pretend we’re not people.
That’s all a little ways in the future though. I’m frankly depressed and angry over the whole thing and I’ve definitely got a “Fuck those people” mindset right now. And I think it’s always okay to tell people who are openly racist or mysoginistic to fuck off. But at some point in the future when I’m ready to deal with this shitshow I want to peel off as many of the quiet ones as I can. Like with religion, it’s not the loudmouthed assholes who have all the power. It’s the quiet masses milling about them who give them power.
So I’m not willing to tell all Trump voters where they can go. Because politics isn’t about gathering together the best found family ever to stand with you and have your back. It’s about getting your neighbors to vote for the person who does have your back, even if you have to sell them on some other quality of that politician to do it. Stop active harm first. Nudge everyone to be better, kinder human beings when we have the leisure to do that. And insist they be better only when you can afford to do that, which clearly is not now.
i do think their agenda fundamentally is racism against mexicans more than anything, because it’s what they insisted on bringing up apropos of nothing when they decided it was politics time with me at my day job. the shortfall of dem votes i think was influenced as i say by terror, but also may have been primarily misogyny, which is always shockingly pervasive across society here & around the world.
i can believe that while not thinking they’re down with a “final solution,” that their beliefs are superficial shit stoked by demagogues, not going to lead to them watching a klan rally with adoring eyes, or agreeing to wholly murderous methods.
the closest thing to genocide they’ve been ok with so far is border policy. when i say most of my readers are going to be directly unaffected by murder, that’s an assumption most of you are not poor immigrants in rural places, which is a extremely safe assumption on FtB.
but even that demographic will see most of their lives not directly impacted, because of how big this country is, and because of the resistance, and because installing xyklon chambers in eagle pass TX is probably at least a skosh too far for most US fascists.
There is a lot I still don’t understand but this is an accusation I keep hearing and I understand it the least. Who are “the democrats” in this case? Are we talking about the DNC itself? Their donors? State party leadership? Members of Congress? Some nebulous group of unassocated East Coast liberal elites who don’t control anything directly but watch CNN and MSNBC?
Members of Congress: They tend to be rich, yes, but they stand to lose the most (they lose their jobs and their power) when Dems lose. They do what they think is best for their constituents, but there’s only so much that they can actually do without a supermajority, which they will never have.
DNC members: Most are probably not rich. Many are career politicians (so again, stand to lose when the Dems lose), some are chairs of various organizations (established in their careers but probably not rich), many are elected as DNC members through various means.
Liberal elites and high-powered donors: By definition rich. Not interested in losing on purpose.
I am hearing tons of criticism of “The Democrats” for scuttling their own election, but no explanation of who did it or how! If the DNC is out of touch with “ordinary” Americans, how fix?
i’ll let someone else field that if they want to; too busy at the moment.
Understand! We’ve all got limited bandwidth these days, especially for cogent conversation. I appreciate your post nonetheless!
This might not be the answer you’re looking for but there are people in both parties who have a comfortable district that is always going to vote for their party. All they have to do is win their primary and the general election is pretty much assured.
On the Republican side these are the MAGA extremists. They can be as weird as they want to be and their voters will still re-elect them. A publicly stated belief in Jewish space lasers and government weather control comes to mind.
On the Democrat side they tend to be very pro-corporate. Their districts don’t want a Republican so the Democratic candidate is free to pursue whatever corporate interests will donate the most. Nancy Pelosi is a good example of this. She’s fought harder against any progressive changes in the Democratic party than she ever did against conservatives or Republicans.
For either of these groups it doesn’t much matter if their colleagues keep their jobs or not. For some of them it’s actually a bit problematic when they get control because it means they’re expected to do something. Get results. Work.
Any simplistic view of politics is pretty much guaranteed to be wrong and this one is no exception. But that’s a loose explanation of the idea. I don’t think it’s a particularly useful one although it does highlight how much parties fight within themselves to promote or deny particular ideas.