Understandable--To A Point--Angers

But sooner or later, they become Pot, Meet Kettle

Recriminations, accusations, betrayals. Whose fault is it? Who can we string up?

It’s our favorite game these days.

And let me hasten to add here: it’s all really, really valid as hell. It’s totally okay to be pissed off.

I mean, we just lost democracy in America, via proper democratic processes.¹ Those processes may have been long since sucked clean of their content like a lobster claw at an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet, but hey—that’s what happens when you forget the substance of what democracy means and preserve only the value-neutral outer shell of things.

As I say, it’s okay to be mad. And to look for folks to be mad at.

At least for a while.

Anger at Trumpists

If we look at the charts of exit poll coming out (which are always shaky and still in process), we can be mad at:

Image courtesy of the BBC

• Men

• White People

• Gen X-ish folks

• Non-college educateds

…i.e., the Usual Suspects.

I should back up here a second.

While it’s true that Men Suck, and White People Suck, (pause for the irrepressible “Not all ____!” which shall then be ignored), some people of my acquaintance have recently been shocked to learn that gambling with democracy is going on in the Gen X establishment, to pull from Casablanca’s Capt. Louis Renault. Yes, folks, Gen X has long been a reeeelly conservative voting cohort, despite how cool we thought we were in hindsight. I know it’s sad, but it’s been going on a long time. (I blame Reagan, but since when don’t I blame Reagan?)

As for the non-college set, this is a flip of the older scripts, and not just the way-old scripts where Dems were the party of the union guys before they embraced the knowledge workers. Even the 2008 Obama coalition profiles have flipped—he got more of these non-college educateds than Harris did this year, according to at least one chart I’ve seen.

But this shouldn’t surprise us. Trump aimed for these folks. These folks are the least likely to read factual accounts in legitimate sources about issues, the campaign, the candidates, or, well, you know, read. These folks are more likely to get their impressions of the race from social media and cousin Larry. There’s a whole host of social incentives from lifestyles and work cultures that incline the non-college educateds to gravitate toward the information environments that favored Trump.

As a member of, let’s see…all four of the failing demographics listed above, I feel I can serve as a folk translator with some street cred here. I not only resemble these people, I have many white, male, Gen X, non-college educated friends, though I mainly trot them out to prove I don’t have an elitist bone in my body. Not a one. So there.

(Autobiography working title: Fuckup Elegy. NYT, give me a jingle.)

Interestingly, Trump voters almost seem to get a pass in a strange way. Those folks tend to trigger the Moral Injury response I wrote about in my last entry. That is, they tend to get written off in the Anger Phase of The Five Stages of Grief over the Death of Democracy: Well, we knew how they were going to break all along.

This, I believe, is a mistake. It exempts them from moral and civic agency, even if there are very good systemic reasons for why they have fucked up so badly. (Matt Pearce gives us a very clear explanation of the structural reasons behind the stupidification problem underlying media consumption and disinformation’s hold on people in this excellent piece, which you should read in full.)

It’s wrong, and condescending, and ultimately dehumanizing, for us to ignore Trumpists in our blame games as if their votes were a fait accompli or inevitable, even if it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to devote massive resources to court them in the short window of time the truncated campaign season allowed. They are still responsible for their actions, regardless of the social forces burying them under a mountain of algorithmic bullshit. Knowing about the algorithmic bullshit can temper our anger with some amount of pity, and maybe even some understanding, but this is like understanding why the serial killer became a serial killer: so we can address the social causes that give rise to serial killers to reduce the numbers of serial killers in the future, not to let the current millions of serial killers off the hook.

So, yes, be mad at the Trumpists. They failed us. They failed their responsibilities as citizens. Those responsibilities are heavy and hard, all the more so in a world of deep-fakes and Xitter and deeply deluded Aunt Betty who thinks QAnon is speaking to her and her alone through her glitchy hearing aid and good ol’ Jeremy from the bar who’s always sending out those dank Facebook memes dragging Ka-MA-la, that ho.

Anger at Harris/The Dems

But folks are mad at a whole lot of other people as well. We’re mad at Harris and her campaign. Why? Oh, pick something.

• She pandered too much to “identity politics” with her Zoom meetings for every demographic group imaginable, as if Trump’s victory wasn’t the ultimate victory of America’s longest-running form of identity politics, as Jill Filipovic noted in Slate.

• Her campaign advisors told her to back off the “they’re weird” stuff and pivot to bipartisan embraces of people like the Cheneys, so be mad at her for listening to them or burn down the homes of those advisors for being horrible, out of touch dipshits.

• She should have run away from Biden’s record. Or defended it more strongly on inflation. Or both somehow.

• She should have platformed Palestinians.

• She should have gone back in time, undone the neoliberal turn and abandonment of unions and the working class, prevented the rise of the Federalist Society, gotten Bernie elected, yada, yada, yada.

To this we can add litigations over whether Biden should have quit earlier, whether his inner circle should have pushed him out sooner, whether he should have conducted his entire presidency differently, whether we should have elected someone entirely different one or two elections ago. Whether we were first betrayed by Bill Clinton, by the sainted Jimmy Carter who began to open the door for neoliberalism, or by this or that segment of the Dems who failed to recognize—or were too chickenshit to stand against—the rising tide of the right-wing. Hell, I’m still pissed at Ruth Bader Ginsburg for not stepping down while Obama was in office, but saying so in my town’s clutch of progressives would double the number of groups shooting paintballs at my house.

Paintball remains from the eve of Election Day, 2024

Anger at Non-Voters

People are mad at their fellow Democrats for not turning out enough. I kinda get this insofar as I have solidly been in the camp of “Democracy at stake” since DJT slithered down the escalator. I’ve even been paying for The Bulwark. That’s how far I’ve gone.

But I’m not a coastal elite in a six-figure job with stock options or whatever the signifiers are these days. I’ve lived most of my life in a red state alongside people I often felt were admirable in their own ways but deeply deluded and misled. You could feel the Democratic option dying more and more each day as Rush Limbaugh and imitators bathed the brainpans of my neighbors in vitriol and national level Dems drifted more and more into abstractions and away from any kind of fighting faith because it seemed too “grubby.” It might entail getting grease on their hands and they’d have to use Lava in the tiny mechanic’s restroom and dry off with one of those roller towels. Ew.

Point being, I’ve seen this coming for a long time, and I hoped, really hoped against my better judgment, that enough people could still be animated enough to believe that Dems really offered a meaningful path out of decline. Could I argue in good faith that they did? Nah, not really.

So I’m not ultimately surprised that patience ran out. Disinfo bullshit overcame residual hope for a meaningful alternative, especially in the face of Republican advances and obstructionism on so many fronts these past several years. And hell, there may have been chicanery, but the narrative of loss is pretty much set, so….

Our Stool Is in No Way Malodorous

But as much as I’m disappointed that people on “our side” didn’t swamp the ballot boxes, being ultra-mad at them smacks of polishing our own virtues as people who cared just the right amount, because we did vote, while they did not. As if voting were the end-all-be-all of preserving and extending multiracial, egalitarian, pluralistic democracy, or liberation for all.

Sorry, folks, if those closing phrases resonate for you, you know damn well you probably haven’t done enough yourself over a lifetime of living in an increasingly failing democracy. The best you can say is, “At least I voted! Those fairweather pseudo-progressives didn’t even bother to do that one simple thing!”

While I realize voting is getting harder to do, this is like living in Cancer Alley and dragging people for not getting an annual well-check when you were oh-so responsible enough to do so. Meantime, you (and maybe they) did next-to-nothing the rest of the year to stop the poisoning of the air and water with industrial pollutants under color of law and official policy, funded by the corporate and powerful using their bought-and-paid-for legislators.

My point is that there is a vast difference between voting and activating (like we saw in the George Floyd protests around the country)—and a vast difference between activating and organizing. And even if you manage to pass through those finer and ever more winnowing screens of political engagement to end up a day-in-day-out organizer against the overall climate of harm that’s killing folks,

1. organizing takes buttloads of time to pay off,

2. it’s usually trashed by people who focus only on electoral politics (“Oh no! The Defund the Police people are going to ruin our chances in the election!”), and

3. it’s the ultimate contest of David v. Goliath in that we’re talking local networks of small people trying to stand up against often the richest and most powerful men and corporations and political lackeys on the planet.

So unless you’ve been doing actual organizing (which I sure as hell haven’t²), I think you’re permitted to be mad at non-voters from our side…but only for a while, and only to a certain extent.

Because—against the kinds of long-running, massively funded, insidiously successful work by the Right to capture and control our institutions and information environments—only a strong and long-running organizational effort by people out there doing that work really had a chance to serve as a counterweight. Even if we had a 30 percent union membership rate in this country again, with all the political education and outreach infrastructure that entailed, the Right would still have those evangelical churches and all the new digital and media platforms.

One Final Note

I know we’re all feeling isolated, abandoned, betrayed, under threat—either directly or vicariously via people we know and love or just groups with know of and do not hate. I know that there’s a fierce desire to DO SOMETHING!

But we dabblers in social change—yes, We—need to pull up and refrain from making snap judgments about actions in the wake of severe emotional stressors. Probably the easiest thing to do right now, apart from posting or sharing stuff on Zuckerberg’s platform, is spending money.

Spending money has the added, soporific “benefit” of pumping that dopamine, especially when it gives us a little trinket to look at or wear. If we can invest said trinket with some self-righteous, identitarian symbolism, oh! More dopamine! Gimme, gimme!

It is in this context that I wish to point to something truly beneath comment, but sadly necessary anyway: blue bracelets and safety pins adorned with little pearls (real or fake, I don’t care enough to investigate).

Not making this up

I’m sure there are other such totems. I see ads from the Human Rights Campaign and other big orgs flogging merch to wear that ostensibly signals my own personal uprightness, supposedly alerting others to my own virtuous status as “a safe person” or just “not one of Them.”

According to folks I know, at least one of the pearl-adorned safety pins is going for $60 online. The ask floating around is to buy one to give to your bestie, and she (the pitch is currently to Kansas women who supported Harris) can gift you one in return. That’s $120.

For that amount, you and your bestie can swap tchotchkes to self-soothe, or you could send that money to an organization or individual who might use it to pay for airfare to get an endangered trans person out of a hostile state and into one that has more legal protections (for now). You could fund some serious purchasing at a Food Bank. You could find the most marginalized community you and Bestie care most strongly about and help an organization (probably one you’ve never before heard of) them do a smidge more actual, on-the-ground organizing.

You won’t get jewelry. You won’t be able to wear a pretty thing (that might, if things really go to shit, serve as a self-purchased Star of David the bad guys can use as evidence you should be sent to the gulag). You might never, ever, ever know how your money manifested in one iota of improvement in the world because some tiny org busting its ass on the ground for the most marginalized of the most endangered isn’t going to send you a glossy personalized pamphlet profiling the starving child in Namibia your donation helped to send to school.

But

1. you’ll be training your brain to live in the kind of world that may be coming. Not just low-dopamine-input, but high tariffs = no more pricey gewgaws and learning that happiness and fulfillment doesn’t come from a store, per the Whos down in Whoville;

2. you’ll be eschewing performative virtue-signalling that helps no one in the end;

3. and you may actually be helping to save or extend people’s lives.

And the bracelet? The time you spend making one for pennies could be better spent in volunteering.

Quit worrying about you being perceived as “one of the good ones.” It’s not about you. Worrying about how you’re perceived is the mindset that makes for fair-weather friends, centrist sell-outs, chickenshits who give away the farm for short-term “victories” while the entire cultural terrain is pulled out from under them, MLK’s “white moderates,” and others who ultimately cannot be trusted³ by the folks actually doing the kind of work we will need to survive and maybe one day transcend this nightmare.

1. I’ve argued that we lost it with the Trump Immunity decision. You could argue we lost it with Citizens United. Or with Bush v. Gore. Or, or, or… All pretty valid.

2. I’m mainly screaming at comfortable but flummoxed liberals in my region. These folks, usually a tad older than me, may be under many of the same delusions I have suffered, but perhaps I’m emerging from them a little earlier, so I can urge them to do likewise.

3. If you want more of a lesson on this, check out Ally Henny on Facebook for a very weary tutorial.