Post Election Remarks 2024

10 November, 2024. 1,995 words.

Elections, amirite?

To write something or not to write something.

What Happened

The facts are that Trump won decisively, and gained ground well beyond the swing states. There’s no other way to spin it. None of the Republican plans to manufacture election fraud were necessary, and I assume they’re now hastily deleting all their incriminating email correspondence about it.

Unfortunately I wasn’t particularly surprised by the result. I dared to hope, but as soon as I saw how long it was taking to call Virginia, my rational brain knew Trump was going to have a good night. It wasn’t difficult to see the Democratic Party was in trouble over the last four years.

It’s understandably difficult to process.

I saw an interview with Jon Stewart after the 2016 election that stuck with me. It was extremely helpful for me in trying to put the surrealistic post-2016 United States into a context that did not depend on a reference to the movie Idiocracy. I’m pretty sure it was this one: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jon-stewart-the-daily-show-former-host-election-2016-donald-trump-republicans/ Sorry it’s not on YouTube.

It helped me adjust my expectations and understand what the vague phrase “the American experiment” actually means. (In short: Half of America has always hated the other half, and it’s always been impossible for America to work as one country, but here we are, defying all common sense.) My perception of modern politics is still informed by that interview, and I think it still applies.

You may find the rest of this post unhelpful or offensive, because here are some things I won’t be doing:

Expressing any fear or uncertainty.
Hurling insults at voters.
Blaming voter ignorance.
Blaming Biden (though he deserves some, not that it would have mattered if there had been a primary).
Blaming Harris.
Blaming corporate media.
Blaming billionaires.
Blaming the Electoral College.
Crediting Trump.

I voted for Harris and for all the Democrats down ballot. I did that knowing full well Democrats would win Virginia handily, so my vote didn’t matter, and I could have stayed home. (It turns out Virginia was a lot closer than expected.)

Fun fact: Where I live, I did not receive any mail about the election all year, and did not see a single yard sign for any candidates except one state Senator. Neither campaign cared the slightest about my area. Nor any of the third parties.

Do I like Harris? Not especially. I mean, she’s okay, and I certainly like her more than Clinton (who I also voted for, fyi). But I thought she would be a weak president who would basically just keep the lights on for four years, and Republicans in the House and Senate would block any attempts she made to enact any policy. I imagine that was the view of almost everyone with a vague perception of political reality.

Still, Harris is way better than a twice-impeached convicted felon joking about incarcerating journalists while actively undermining election integrity.

I’m very cynical about government and American democracy. I’m a small-I independent, and will never associate with any political party, because I believe both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are hopelessly corrupt oligarchies driven by secret backroom coalitions.

So if I were to level any blame for the Harris loss, it would be on The Democratic Party–the national organization, that is. This is a harsh opinion, but I don’t see how it can be credibly denied that they’re no longer a viable political force in America. Everyone in charge over there should be fired immediately. I expect internal carnage, and it seems impossible they can regroup before 2026.

Though, to be fair, Democrats held a couple of key Senate seats so they’ll only be out of the conversation for 2-4 years, not until the heat death of the universe.

Do I think this is the end of America and democracy? There is an argument to be made that democracy is already dead when most people don’t follow politics, local and national news outlets are owned by a handful of partisan corporations, and only one of the two parties accepts unfavorable election results. And, you know, because social media.

But overall, no, I don’t think there will be much change in the current status quo. Whatever kind of democracy we have in 2024 America is good for business. I’ve never seen Trump as a fundamentalist looking to reshape America into a dystopian Taliban-style medieval hellscape. I think his main goals are to play golf, cash checks, stay out of jail, and bask in attention.

Steven Miller on the other hand… that’s a different story. When you see him stumping (don’t click that link unless you want YouTube to show you Steven Miller videos forever), it’s very hard not to see him as a genetic clone made from the DNA of Goebbels himself. If I were a news-watcher (which I am, off and on), I’d ignore all Trump news and focus on Steven Miller news.

To provide some measure of hope, I still think there are guardrails in the Constitution even if all three branches of government are now Republican. States are still a thing, and I don’t know who else remembers this, but we did see an example of state governors balking the federal government during COVID. (Granted, not everyone can benefit from that.)

What’s Next?

For the country? I have no idea, but I’m still optimistic that the total collapse of everything into bickering territories of nuclear-armed crypto warlords won’t be until after I’m dead.

For me? Also unknown. I mean, I’m not going anywhere. I don’t have a passport anymore.

I can’t officially retire and collect government checks funded by underpaid young people for 12 more years, but it’d be nice if I could unofficially retire much sooner than that. I’m quite lucky to own a house in an area with a relatively low cost of living. On the other hand, my aching bod wouldn’t mind a slightly warmer winter climate to live in.

After 2016, I started a new blog with a very funny, randomly-generated name to write out my responses to the insanity I saw on Twitter in the post-Trump America, a minor return to my local Virginia politics blogging in the mid-to-late 2000s. I never told anyone because it was clear from prevailing currents that nobody would be interested in my brand of political observations.

I don’t look at politics like normal humans do. Most people in the political opinion space rant about idealism and bogeymen and anger and fear and disappointment and vengeance, and groupthink so hard you can feel the groupthink juices spurting out of the screen. (An imperfect metaphor, but suitably graphic.)

I do this weird thing where I try to remain unemotional, try to avoid popular opinions, try not to get tripped up by “my priors”*, try to think of satiric barbs that make fun of the culture of politics, and try to avoid triggering code phrases. I never want to discuss or debate politics. I just say what I think is funny or interesting or educational and move on. I link to relevant sources and never try to tell people what to do or how to vote. I look at things that confirm my beliefs and things that don’t. I tend to write from the perspective of an individual citizen on a long journey of trying to understand a complex multicultural sociopolitical world steeped in history that precedes me by thousands of years, while trying to protect myself from all the big business interests stacked against me and the daily firehoses of misinformation and disinformation aimed at me. I write about politics like I’m debugging software.

* “Priors” is a new-to-me buzzword in political circles I’ve heard a lot in the last week that means “prior beliefs or assumptions.” By the way, that link was a great blog post and is a good example of the kind of political posts I like to write.

As a blogging style, it didn’t work in the mid-to-late 2000s and it didn’t work in 2016. What you want to do, as a political blogger seeking to dominate the world, is rant about bad people, collect email addresses, and sell them to candidates. And sell merch. Always sell merch. Maybe if you’re really lucky, a local candidate will hire you to build their boring web site and your career as a political consultant will take off.

Anyway, eventually I got bored writing about that weird Trumptasia fever dream and stopped somewhere in 2017.

This year, even though I’m not on Twitter anymore and have only seen a handful of blog post reactions to the election and almost no comment sections, it’s really tempting to start that sort of writing again.

As one tiny example, I saw a post mentioned recently that provides a list of quality “new media” (which, incidentally, is now some 20 years old) news sources to use. I looked at the list. It was like time-traveling right back to 2006. Daily Kos? A news source?

Sweet summer children, I’m sure everyone means well but that list on first glance is a classic left-wing echo chamber. It’s not news. It’s news reactions. And the ones I clicked on were all clickbaity and ad-driven, so just as much in the style of old media as CNN or whatever. Not to mention the guy who provided the list used to work at one of the places, which took two seconds to find out.

Next I expect to see somebody from the right trying to tell me that Red State, TownHall, and Hot Air are quality news sources. (At least the right side of the political opinion marketplace has the decency to label their web sites “conservative news.” Not so much with that list on the left.)

If you want news, you still need to go to real agencies who hire reporters, like the Associated Press or Reuters, and you kind of have to pay them. Then you need to go to a bunch of other television networks and papers that you like and also that you hate, and sometimes you have to pay them, too, and then you have to read a bunch of extremely dull government press releases (at least they’re free!), and then you need to search for reliable news from your state and county (good luck), and then aggregate all that news together to synthesize a fuzzy picture of the world. Sadly nobody is going to do it for you.

Anyway, seeing lists like that inspires me to try to write something to counter that sort of low-hanging fruit of misinformation, well-meaning though it might be. The most damaging misinformation is the kind where people are earnestly trying to help.

But, you know, my cynicism level at this stage of my political journey prevents me from thinking the world isn’t already too far gone, and my words are ultimately useless. You can’t really tell people they’re wrong. Usually people have to learn from their own mistakes.

And as horrifying as it sounds, even if I did manage to write some stuff, the future of the world is in the hands of the younger generations now. Unfortunately, as a person who used to be young, I know for a fact that younger people do not listen to older people.

But I doubt I will write anything more [about politics] because most of all, it frickin’ hurts by back to write a lot and I have a frickin’ cataract in my left eye. So I’m just going to sit here and hope somebody else starts writing political blogs like I used to. Maybe that Humean Being substack will suffice. The couple posts I read are actually quite refreshing. I wish them luck remaining aloof.

(And while I’m throwing out random links, in the podcast medium, I also like the no-nonsense brusqueness of Politics Politics Politics, a dude I found quite recently from his occasional association with The Daily Tech News Show.)

What Happened

What’s Next?

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