The Dream State

I'm finding it tricky to balance giving myself time and mental space to mourn this defeat with my impulse to start thinking about how to respond.  The first is a necessity, and I don't think I'll be able to think as clearly as I need to until it happens.  So forgive any fragmentation or randomness in what follows; like many of you, I'm still reeling.

My first Pollyann-ish impulse is to say that there's comfort in knowing that so many people are feeling as down as me - but isn't there also something disorienting about the collective sense of helplessness?  It is as if we were all just in a car crash, and are still too disoriented to help anyone else from the accident.

Obviously a big part of this is the sheer unexpectedness of the Trump win.  We are so used to the polls being right and to the basic fact that true surprises are few and far between in our politics.  And of course we have had plenty of time to get scared about what a Trump win would entail.  

I have a sense of having passed through some invisible portal into a cartoonish upside-down universe where the usual physical rules no longer apply.  This is not a great place from which to fashion a response to what is most definitely a contest in our regular old world.  For me, and I suspect for many others, one of the most important steps will be to fully accept and internalize this awful reality in order to combat it.

 

#majorityrules

Like many millions of people today, I'm suffering the emotional effects of the whipsaw upending of expectations that has turned a greyish political future into something that seems ominous and tormenting.  Watching the results at a public venue last night, my initial exultation as I settled in for what I thought would be a tense but victorious romp by Hillary Clinton turned into a wholly unexpected sensation: that of being a rat caught in a maze designed by a sadist, moving east to west in search of a diminishing path of electoral votes that never materialized, switching desperately between the projected newscast and my smart phone, drilling down to county levels, searching for those urban votes that would turn this thing around, in my rodential stupor believing I was somehow still in control of my fate that night, until finally I was stared into a metaphorical and literal wall of red, having the random and inaccurate thought that I was staring into the eye of Sauron (I now realize whose bloodshot eye I was really seeing).

In the end, it was the slipping of Pennsylvania into the Trump column that was my personal reckoning point.  It was a small comfort in that instant that Hillary was looking increasingly likely to win the popular vote, although my satisfaction in that fact, and its importance to our efforts to regroup and dig out of this hole, has grown and will surely grow more in the coming days and weeks, even as it's also a deeply frustrating fact.

In many ways, my formative adult political experience was the Florida recount in 2000.  Even more than the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the recount was a wake-up call that we're engaged in a generations-long, take-no-prisoners struggle over the kind of country we will be.  That progressives allowed that disturbing election to go by without any serious effort to amend the Constitution to abolish the electoral college is one of the bitter legacy we're all swishing around in our mouths today.   Apart from the unfathomable incompetence of George W. Bush, the next eight years were all about catering to the 1% and unleashing pointless, unwinnable wars that have unleashed cycles of violence in the Middle East.   When the bottom fell out, it took a Democratic Party still somewhat rooted in a vision of an activist government that can act on behalf of the majority and the less powerful to stop us from plunging into the abyss of a new Great Depression.

We're at another recount moment.  The first order of business, as I see it, is to make sure that we point out at every opportunity how Donald Trump's election makes a mockery of our majority rules election system.  Pretty ironic that Donald Trump spent the run-up to the election claiming that the system is rigged, only to be the beneficiary of the antiquated and undemocratic electoral college.  You can already seen how his victory is largely being framed as a repudiation of Hillary Clinton, and of the Obama years.  This is hogwash.  A majority of the American population voted for Hillary Clinton.  Let that sink in for a moment.  A majority.  A majority of the population wanted to continue the general policies of the Obama years.  That this squeaker of a victory can or should be used to yank America to the hard right is a joke of the grimmest kind.  We let this happen in 2000, and have been paying the price ever since.  It needs to be resisted and called out from the start.  We can't let Trump pull a George W. Bush and try to fashion a mandate out of whole cloth.

 

 

 

 

Reckonin' Time

So, OK, yeah, I didn't really take out Hot Screen: Politics for a spin during the craziest election season of the last however many years.  What what?  Was it the pressure?  Was I overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the madness?  Or was I simply busy with other things?  We will leave those questions to future historians to sort through, debate, and perhaps enter into awkward hand-to-hand combat over (combat as awkward as that final clause, hey!, the shivs clutched in their soft professorial hands, as they warily circle each other in the staff room florescence, the batshit demands of honor requiring that blood be drawn and a victor declared; damn these new rules of tenure in America circa 2042, designed to take the spring out of the step of those pointy-headed intellectuals, promulgated by the Don Jr.-Ivanka regency that has followed the Donald's three and a half terms. . . but I digress).

Here's my first crumb of comfort that I haven't missed all the action: it may have been a wild ride up to now, but I'm predicting the truly bonkers shit has only just begun.  By "truly bonkers shit," I'm thinking, among other things, of the unparalleled obstruction that the Republican Party will be throwing at President Clinton from T-minus however many days before her actual inauguration.  There's already also sorts of hot(!) talk about denying Hillary the appointment of a Supreme Court justice; more proof, as if any were needed, that the right wing has transformed into true radicalism.  I remain aghast at the racist vote-suppression laws passed in North Carolina and other states, and it looks like I'm not the only one.  As others cannier than I have observed, Republicans have drifted into being the white supremacist party, not a pretty state of affairs for our country by a long shot, but also not a tenable one for the Republicans.  My working theory is that the GOP is as brittle as it is bitter at this point, and one of the main tasks of Democrats and progressives over the next few years is to develop a strategy that accelerates Republican erosion, whether by calling out the undemocratic spirit that currently animates much of the party, or by implementing policies that help those left behind by the current economy (which by my reckoning comprises the majority of our population, but particularly the poor and working class). 

 

 

 

Trump as the Best Argument Yet for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons

So is Donald Trump the best argument yet for the abolition of nuclear weapons, or what?  In a little more than a month, there's a small but real possibility that a man who can't keep his finger off the tweet send button will have the very real ability to deploy genocidal weapons at his sole discretion.  This absolute power over the fate of life on earth has always been incompatible with the most basic notions of democracy, not to mention bedrock ideas of a common humanity incompatible with mass murder as a matter of state policy.  But it's always been much more than a remote possibility that someone of mental or temperamental instability would be elected president.

And let's not deceive ourselves - we've already been here.  Richard Nixon slunk into such belligerent despondency in his final White House days that aides made sure he wouldn't be able to make unilateral decisions to use nuclear weapons.  Ronald Reagan suffered from Alzheimer's during his final years in office.  

So, sure, this is yet another argument against Trump (as if we really needed anymore!), but it may be the most decisive in some ways.  But as it turns out that the Pentagon is making plans for upgrading the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including smaller-scale weapons that could lure policymakers into considering their tactical usefulness, as opposed to deterrent value, it's important to remember that the basic problem is that these weapons exist in the first place. 

Another twist, though - we may have most to fear from the proverbial madmen - but what to think of all the rational minds seeking to perpetuate our ultimately immoral and destabilizing nuclear weaponry?  

 

Ragin' Invasion

Let's start in a place of optimism.  Michael Moore's new documentary, Where to Invade Next, arrives as a cheering, inspiring tonic in the midst of this dark and perilous election season.   I think we all need a reminder that there's life outside America's borders: and not just life, but entire countries that take seriously the quest for human dignity, equality, and justice.  Moore's picking the creme de la creme of social and educational programs from other nations provides a utopian smorgasbord for the tired and weary among us; lo and behold, progress looks a whole lot like common sense and remembering that whole thing about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  What elevates this film are the many interviews with all these durn foreigners who blather sincerely on about the essential need for decent vacation time, helping kids learn without standardized testing, treating workers fairly, and the like.  I defy anyone to say that our present state of affairs is some sort of amazing crescendo of human and economic development:  the working class dispossessed and getting poorer, the middle class grown more desperate as its ranks thin by the day, the upper classes not giving a shit as usual.  Time to remember that free education and health care for all are basic rights, starting points to a better society.  Time to remember that democracy doesn't end when you get to your job; I don't think any of us ever agreed to check our citizenship at the company door.