who is surprised to discover I have thoughts - My paycheck is higher because I rule; grocery prices are higher because the president sucks. Psychologically, every setback has seven times the impact of every advance because we are fundamentally risk-averse. RESULT: if your wages didn't go up seven times as fast as inflation, your psychological experience is as a loss. EXAMPLE: I had lunch with a buddy once. He was mad because we spent $30 on a pair of sandwiches when it would have been maybe $18 in high school. That he made $180k a year working part time did not factor into the equation. - What does fascism even mean. If you turned 18 on December 7 1941 and immediately enlisted to fight Tojo, you are turning 101 next month. More likely, you are dead. Trump called Kamala Harris a "communist fascist" on the reg. The Democrats can say "no but like, an actual fascist" to which the normies go "you mean like Mussolini" and you say "exactly" and they say "I heard he made the trains run on time" and you say "yeah but like Hitler" and they go "Trump's not Hitler" and let's be honest - we fucking tried that for four years last time and it didn't fucking work so why is it going to work this time. - The purity police are fucking annoying. There's a whole lotta wypepo who are all about "advocacy" and "being an ally" and other wine-mom bullshit that any minority sees right through as white discomfort but a willingness to engage. That engagement, speaking from experience, includes at least an interlude of Airing of Grievances because fucking hell it sucks being a minority and if you're going to have to put up with this white asshole the least he can do is feel a little uncomfortable about being white. Most white people never even get that far, though, because white people primarily hang out with white people, which means policing your friends and casual acquaintances about pronouns and stereotypes and being dragged through the difference between Latino, Chicano and Hispanic despite the fact that everyone in the room is of German-Irish descent. It's super-valuable in the spaces where actual minorities are? But most wypepo are afraid to go there so they just score purity points off each other by playing woker-than-thou. - My people will be fine. If you experienced no material harm from the last Trump administration why would you experience any material harm from this one? COVID? Well that happened to everyone. Skyrocketing healthcare costs? That probably wasn't Trump's fault. What was the statistic George Will pulled out? The RNC spent $100 in advertising for every transgender person in America to scare everyone about transgender people. I think if you live in a blue state you encounter transgender people on the reg. I think if you don't, you don't (so why would we give a fuck about pronouns, see above). They aren't coming for my library! People forget - the Holocaust started in Poland. By the time bombs were falling in Germany Hitler had been in power six years. - The leopard will eat your face last if you're behind it. Lindsay Graham is queer as a three dollar bill and he's done four terms in the house and four in the senate. Did you see how much bullshit the Republicans put up with before they finally shitcanned George Santos? Briscoe Cain is the former cheerleader who booked Four Seasons Total Landscaping - hey, what's he up to lately. But ohhhh shit watch your wide stance. And ohhhhhh fuck never call attention to the leopards. There's this real desire to go "Americans are stupid" and fuck off, man, people are stupid. Demagogues get votes by leaning into the stupid; this time 'round the Democrats kept going "vibe-cession" as if pointing out that the economic figures meant the electorate wasn't entitled to their feelings rather than remembering what happened to Carter. And, to paraphrase the Durants, human history is largely full of unremarkable people leading happy, unremarkable lives. Sometimes they don't. But I made it half-way through Secondhand Time and the through-line in that book is how much Muscovites miss Communism because at least they were all suffering together (when they weren't ratting each other out for a slightly better apartment). I'm relatively sanguine about it now, after a long, dark night of the soul. (1) they want this. (2) Billions were spent convincing them otherwise, they still want this. (3) They've seen it before, and they still want this. The hackneyed liberal angst aphorism is "if you want to know what you would have done during (catastrophe du jour), you're doing it now." Well you know what? There's abso-fucking-lutely nothing any of us could have done to make this turn out any different. People make much of Apted's Up series but almost nobody knows about Bill Moyers' version. Not even Frontline links to the first couple - probably because Apted's is basically "look how posh these posh assholes got, while look how poor these poor assholes got" but Moyers' is basically "let's check in on two families utterly fucked by NAFTA every now and then so we can see how generationally fucked they are." The Democrats gave up on labor in 1981 and gave up pretending to care about labor in 1994. The Republicans, meanwhile, have been "fear the darkies" for so long that their original darkies now see themselves as Republicans. The Democrats have gotten my time, my energy, my support and my money across sixteen fucking elections. But I understand the criticisms. And when people are scared, and people are tired, and people are worried, they choose simplicity.I'm still left to wonder why the Harris turnout was so bad - according to CNN she did worse than Biden did in every district in the country.
I've been discussing this with friends the past week. There's a bunch of "if only she would've..." takes but I don't buy any of them. The 'every incumbant has lost this year' is going around a lot, and I think it is part of it, but it also feels like a nice economic scapegoat for libs - a safe haven of logic to avoid facing what I think is the harsher reality, which is that people do want this, whatever their imagined version of the next four years of this is. Over here, after the dust of the election had settled, the consensus of the PVV's victory comes down to people voting for the extreme-right because they want stronger immigration. It's as simple as that. In previous elections the PVV were ostracized because of the whole far-right thing, but this election the neolibs said they wouldn't ostracize the party any longer. Suddenly, a PVV vote wasn't wasted anymore, so anyone who wanted to put their anti-immigration vote to good use flocked to the PVV. I think there's a faint parallel to Trump's victory here - the simple answer could be that people hated the past four years (case in point: Biden approval ratings), and with the GOP now magawashed/normalized you're not gonna have a fight anymore with your family for voting President Chump. --- Personally I am also pondering if I should re-adjust my belief that people vote for what's best for their country, instead of what feels best for themselves. Sigh.(3) They've seen it before, and they still want this.
And when people are scared, and people are tired, and people are worried, they choose simplicity.
Prior to COVID I believed that people will generally do the right thing. After COVID I believe that people will generally do what they see everyone else doing. With liberals that generally means pulling behind a strong leader that has the requisite number of purity points and guttersniping around a weak leader who can't be everything to everyone. With conservatives that generally means following whoever is in charge, regardless of their charge towards the future or off a cliff like lemmings. One of the few bright spots of demagoguery is it isn't transferable. If you want your party to survive the demagogue you need to find another demagogue with more charisma than the last. I have an inkling I'll be spending some time on Berlusconi just to investigate some personal blind spots.Personally I am also pondering if I should re-adjust my belief that people vote for what's best for their country, instead of what feels best for themselves.
From the few Trump voters I've talked to (some of which are pro LGBT "allies") - what they think is best for themselves was absolutely the reason.
Part of the problem with screaming about fascism is that the claim is vague, and political rhetoric is absolutely full of “most important election in the history of forever.” Fascism is vague because we do an absolutely terrible job in explaining what it is and what it actually means. Most people know precisely two things about fascism. First, Auswitz, and second, goose stepping and straight arm salutes. This doesn’t explain anything, and can lull people into a very false sense of security because until someone hangs up a swastika or starts making angry speeches about minorities, it simply doesn’t look like fascism to the average American who was given a Marvel Comic Universe understanding of fascism. Second, we’ve been playing the exact same game in every election. George W Bush was a threat to democratic ideals. That was 24 years ago. Every election I can remember has had democracy on the ballot and has been the most consequential election ever. It’s been done so much by all parties that nobody’s going to be convinced to vote for someone because their opponent is a “danger to our democracy.” It’s been done too many times. And people are now pretty suspicious of “my opponent is Literally Hitler” not because it cannot happen, it obviously can, but because it’s been used for decades as cover for basically not having to convince anyone you can do the job. Trump is Fascist, okay so tell me, what are you going to do about Russia? Or the price of food? Or education? Or … anything of actual importance to regular people who are listening to you prattle on about democracy while they’re figuring out whether or not they can cut something else out of the budget because gas is high and groceries are high, and they just want to live life.
I think part of the problem with screaming about fascism is that most people are actually fine with fascism. Discussions about government and its failings follow a very predictable path that is wholly dependent on the civic engagement of my conversational partner: the less engaged they are, the more they want "the president" to cut through the red tape and do what they want. We don't lionize bureaucrats, we lionize leaders. Tony Judt drew a very different lesson from WWII and the post-war period than Arendt or anyone else: everyone was cool with genocide. Not a single home was returned to a Jew. Nobody tried to make surviving concentration camps welcome. The post-war economic expansion in Europe wasn't driven by dynamism, it was driven by the repossession of the 20% of European economic holdings held by a murdered ethnic sect. I've voted in every presidential election since Bush V. Clinton and I disagree with your assessment. "A danger to democracy" wasn't on the table until 2020. At the same time, most of those elections were still governed by the Voter Rights Act and most of the candidates were credible legislators - the Left lost their fucking minds over the idea of an actor becoming president but he'd also done two credible terms as governor of California. That said? I (barely) remember discussions around gas rationing in 1979, when inflation was 11%. Reagan won that election 44m-35m, 489-49.