The Week After

This past week has been a time of mourning, fear, and profoundly shameful embarrassment for the United States of America.

How the fuck did this happen?

We elected a malignant narcissist, a racist, a serial rapist, a sociopath, a brazen fraud and con artist, a criminal, as our president, and then we did it again.

Are we that stupid as a people? That horrible?

We saw what this wretched man did the last time he was in office. This time, he said that he’d do worse, and we’re making him president again.

So, yes, we are in fact that stupid and horrible.

We are a stupid people, short-sighted and with terrible memories. We are a horrible people, driven by fears and prejudices and the worst of human traits. The people of this country, at least the majority of people who voted in this election, are the worst, and therefore deserve the worst, and that’s what we’ll get. The economy will not improve under Trump. Inflation won’t reduce. Life will not improve. His policies will only cause damage, pain, and chaos, and be stupidly expensive. Unless you’re a multimillionaire, you’ll be poorer and owe more in taxes each year. Way to stick it to the elites, you dumb schmucks.

While we can blame the people who voted for Trump for being so incredibly stupid and/or malicious, the blame doesn’t rest with them alone. People who chose not to vote for Harris are to blame as well. Bigotry played a role in this election. There are people in this country who didn’t vote for Kamala Harris, not because of her policies or record, but because she’s a woman of color. To be clear, Kamala Harris sucks. She sucks about as much as Hillary Clinton did. But neither of them suck as much as Biden. The fact that Biden beat Trump but neither woman did is not a testament to his virtue, but an indictment of the American people and their regressive sexist and racist culture.

I get not wanting to vote for Harris for valid, non-bigoted reasons. I didn’t want to vote for her, but I did, because I knew the alternative would be worse, and that if the Orange Turd won my state and I hadn’t voted for her, the guilt would be terrible. I understand, for example, the Muslim, Arab-, and Palestinian-Americans, or those who empathize with their communities, and are disgusted with the Biden administration’s enabling of the Palestinian genocide, and Harris’s refusal to ever say a meaningful word against it, but Trump is going to be worse. As bad as Biden has been, and as bad as Harris might’ve been, Trump will manage to be worse. US complicity in the genocide is bound to increase, perhaps even turning to active involvement. With Trump’s full support, the Israeli government and military will be poised to finish the job of wiping Palestinians from existence and seizing all of Gaza and the West Bank and beyond.

This loss, however, is not just the fault of voters, or those that abstained. Kamala Harris and the Democratic party machine that pushed her candidacy through the race bear considerable blame for their failure of a campaign and for the tragedy it allowed to happen. To be fair, thanks to Biden waiting until the last minute to drop out, Harris’s team had to scramble to launch an effective campaign and craft an appealing, cogent platform in a very short time. It is also fair to say that they failed. Harris’s whole strategy seemed to be giving lip service to a few progressive ideas, while running far to the right of the party’s base. She went around spouting conservative talking points, working to seem even tougher on immigrants than Trump, and palling around with the Cheneys, trying to win over a “moderate” conservative base that barely exists, while alienating and rejecting progressives. Rather than defending Israel and promoting fracking to try to win over unicorn Republicans who will vote for a moderately shitty Democratic woman over an incredibly shitty Republican man, maybe she should have offered something substantive and bold to the environmentalists, peaceniks, and the whole rainbow of progressive or at least liberally-inclined folks who could have helped her scrape up enough votes in at least a couple swing states squeak out a win.

Trump got 62,985,106 votes in 2016, enough to beat Hillary Clinton, thanks to the archaic and corrupt electoral college. He got 74,223,975 in 2020, a huge increase, but not enough to beat Biden’s 81+ million. This year, at the time of writing, he’s gotten 72,761,252 votes. In both previous elections, Trump lost the popular vote, by about three million in 2016 and seven million in 2020. But in this election, he beat Harris by approximately five million votes. As a proponent of abolishing the electoral college in favor of the popular vote determining national elections, I can’t make much argument here. Harris lost, by every metric. We can point to how close the race was in a few swing states, how if Harris could’ve gotten just 100-thousand, even 10-thousand, more votes in a couple states, she would’ve eked out a victory, but it’d feel like a disingenuous argument when there are still five million more people in the country who, however inexplicably, voted for Trump over her.

That is an infuriating little aspect of all this, that we can’t deny Trump won. Sure, he lied and cheated his way there, but by the rules of this corrupt game, he won, she lost, we’re all fucked, and there’s very little we can do about it.

Apart from accepting that we’ll never get justice, or a real democracy, within the confines of US electoral politics, but through a revolution that overthrows the whole system. That’s always an option.