Welp...
Dispatch From The Longest Week In My Life...So Far
Egg On My Face
This was me on November 4:
I think Kamala Harris will win the election. I think she’ll win the popular vote by like five to eight million votes, and I think she’ll manage to capture the Electoral College…somehow. (Specific details don’t interest me because I try not to study the minutia of stupid things, and the Electoral College is very, very stupid.)
Point: I think she’ll win.
This is not a prediction. And I’m quite ready to be mistaken in my guess, because my fellow Americans are revealing themselves to be deeply disappointing people.
Boy, was I wrong.
Maybe because I don’t weld myself to politicians’ fates in a parasocial kind of way, I’m not mourning Kamala Harris. In that Nov. 4 piece, I referred to her run as “a basically flawless campaign” and said “she’s run probably the best presidential campaign I’ve ever seen in my life.”
I basically stand by those statements. She made calculations and executed them, ran a competent race, didn’t blow off any specific swing state, pulled in loads of folks and seemed to keep the energy high in contrast to Trump and Vance who were just plain bizarre and horrific. She banked on certain things and what she banked on, she did well. I’m not going to say she was a train wreck simply because that bank turned out to be utterly insolvent in the end.
I mean, a lot of the rest of us parked our nest eggs there as well.
Specifically, I mean the United States Trust, the First Bank of Democracy and Rule of Law and All Good Things Like Not Electing a Rapist-Fascist-Racist-Etc.
If that’s your pitch, then it makes sense to do what Harris did. If the Dobbs decision is killing women (and it is), it makes pragmatic as well as moral sense to rally to that, especially after all the state-level rejections of abortion restrictions in Dobbs’ wake. If you’ve got scads of Constitution-loving figures like decorated generals and legal eagles and even Anti-Trump Republicans, it makes sense to show that they support you.
None of that is crazy. None of that is beyond the pale. I hated a lot of it (I couldn’t bear to watch the DNC for that reason), but it wasn’t from Pluto. Tacking to the “center” isn’t some wacky untested strategy in general elections. It’s literally the standard operating procedure for every presidential election, period. Considering how completely fucking unhinged Donald Trump is and always has been, it’s a better-than-dumb approach.
Here’s Andrew Egger:
But the hard truth, after as staggering a loss as this, is that there may never have been a path for Harris. Biden was too unpopular and got out of the race way too late. And Harris found herself trapped. She needed to run away from Biden to escape the voters’ wrath at his term. But she also needed to run toward him as her only defense against Republican charges that she was too far to the left: After all, that was how she’d positioned herself in 2020 before she joined his ticket. In a polarized, doom-and-gloom electorate, both moves likely cost her more voters than they gained her.
This wasn’t the race she asked for—to be the last person standing to mount a furious defense against the rising tide of Trump’s lawless populism. The campaign she waged, given the circumstances, was likely the strongest anyone in her position could have mustered. In the end, how well or poorly she piloted her campaign just didn’t matter. Trump was blessed in 2016 to run against one of the weakest Democratic candidates ever put forward; this year, he was blessed to run against the woman left holding the bag, however stoically, for a president who had proven incapable of holding it himself.
And here’s Jonathan V. Last, doing the same kind of evenhanded retrospective, only with Joe Biden. It’s worth reading his whole argument:
At the beginning of Joe Biden’s presidency he had a choice.
(1) Biden could treat the Trump years as a dire warning about the American constitutional order and focus his agenda on Trump-proofing our democracy.
This approach would have meant:
Immediately and aggressively pursuing accountability for Donald Trump’s insurrection.
Pushing expansive voting rights protections alongside Electoral College reforms.
Aggressively attacking the oligarch class.
Making the District of Columbia, and possibly Puerto Rico, states.
Expanding the Supreme Court.
It would have been a radical and divisive path. It would have made Biden tremendously unpopular; not all of it could have been accomplished. This approach would have created intra-party fights and large-scale Democratic losses in 2022. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema would have left the party. Democrats would have had to nuke the filibuster and eventually reap the fallout from that decision. Had Biden taken this ruthless approach, it almost certainly would have resulted in Democratic defeat this week and unified Republican control of the government beginning in 2025.
But some of those structural changes would have gotten through.
Maybe we’d have four more Democratic senators. Maybe AWS would have have been severed from the main body of Amazon. Maybe Starlink wouldn’t have a stranglehold on our national security planning. Maybe there’d be a 7–6 liberal majority on the Supreme Court.
Maybe Donald Trump would have been in prison instead of headed to the White House.
Biden’s other option was: (2) Treat the Trump years as an aberration and govern as if it was 2015.
The logic of this position was strong:
Governing in a bipartisan manner was the best way to strengthen the non-Trump elements of the Republican party.
By not aggressively pursuing Trump, Biden avoided turning him into a martyr.
The best way to take down the national temperature was by being calm and carrying on.
Fake-it-till-you-make-it is a real phenomenon. By pretending that everything was normal, perhaps political norms would return.
From the vantage point of January 2021, the path of normalcy was going to be arduous and require a great deal of leadership and political skill from both Biden and Nancy Pelosi. But also: It offered the chance to pass meaningful legislation that would improve the lives of real people.
And if Biden pulled it off, then maybe Democrats could do well in 2022 and hold the White House in 2024.
But even more importantly: Maybe Biden’s normalcy would be contagious. The fever of Trumpism might break and America’s authoritarian moment might pass—so that even if Republicans won in 2024, the party would have returned to health by then.
Obviously, Biden chose the second path.
And to his credit, he executed it almost to perfection. Biden worked with Republicans to pass a number of major bipartisan bills, many of them designed to specifically benefit the real-world circumstances of working-class, red-state Republicans.
The policy side of the Biden administration was more successful that anyone had any right to hope for.
But his larger political project—ending the authoritarian threat—failed utterly and completely.
Democrats got the political wipeout of the first option—all the way down to Manchin and Sinema leaving the party in a huff—but without any of the structural Trump-proofing of the system.
And while Biden’s legislative agenda made life better for working-class people in Republican states, it did absolutely nothing to lower their temperature. Republican voters remained as conspiratorial in their outlook and toxic in their desires as they had been on the morning of January 6, 2021. The only difference is that the Biden administration made them fat and happy, with more jobs and rising wages, so that they could conjure imaginary problems instead of having to deal with real ones.
Biden’s choice turned out to be a mistake. It was a tactical success—he accomplished nearly everything he set out to do in pursuit of that second path—but a strategic failure. The entire enterprise was doomed because it fundamentally misunderstood both (a) the nature of the American people and (b) how far down the path to authoritarianism our institutions had already marched.
Now maybe these facts were unknowable in January 2021 and it’s unfair to fault Biden for making the wrong call. But it’s not like no one was having these discussions. If you go back to the Secret pods from that period, Sarah and I talked about these two paths a lot. At the time, Sarah was firmly in Path #2 camp. But while I was open to Path #1—the radical path, which assumed the worst about the American people—even I wasn’t convinced that it was the correct choice.
It was a hard call; a judgment call. And I remember saying at the time that I was glad I wasn’t the one who had to make it.
Some decisions are just too big.
I have a great deal of both sympathy and admiration for Joe Biden. You know this. As a matter of X’s and O’s, he was one of the best presidents of the modern era. He beat Donald Trump, took on a difficult job, and executed his vision. He handled the various crises that fate presented him with skill. And then he stepped aside when the country needed him to.
He’s a good man and I’m grateful to him for his service.
But he failed the primary mission of his presidency. The reason he failed is because he made the wrong strategic call at the outset. And he made the wrong call because he couldn’t see America clearly and didn’t understand the reality of our position.
The point of this discussion is not to cast blame. It’s to make sure that everyone sees America clearly and understands the reality of our position going forward.
In a funny way, it was JD Vance, and not Joe Biden, who understood what was happening.
“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said in 2021. “If we’re going to push back against it, we have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
This diagnosis is correct. The remaining rump of Americans who are committed to liberalism, the Constitution, and the rule of law had better embrace it.
Joe Biden was given the choice of betting liberal democracy on structures and the levers of power, or on the innate goodness of the American people. He put his entire chip stack on the American people and lost.
We ought not repeat his mistake.
But back to Harris/Walz 2024. In the light of hindsight, all the knives are coming out. Some are keener than others, but that’s the thing about hindsight. Harris and the Dems gambled on certain things, and they lost.
Before anyone gets too angry, though, remember the other part of the equation: Harris and the Dems gambled on certain things about the American electorate and lost. Nobody ever can be 100 percent sure what that fickle, often stupid beast is going to do.
Anyway, she’s out. Gone. Toast. Probably forever. A lot of folks are saying that one of the lessons the Dems will overlearn from her run and from Hillary Clinton’s is never to nominate a woman again. Which is stupid, but this is the Dems we’re talking about.
What I Think I Got Right
If you bothered to read my November 4 piece, you’ll know that the nice things I said about Kamala Harris constituted about one percent of the content. The rest was a depressing analysis about why her victory would absolutely not save us, longterm. It might grant us four years of minor reprieve, maybe some incremental improvement, but ultimately, our electoral and partisan situation wasn’t sustainable.
The thing I ultimately got wrong was that the reckoning came this election instead of the next one or the one after that.
The gist of my argument was that we were being besieged by players in a century-old right-wing long-game who have finally managed to capture just about every bit of turf available, largely thanks to the failure of liberalism to realize it has to constantly fight for its own values and vision and beliefs about how the world needs to be and become.
Instead, we have chickenshit neoliberal institutions and leaders who still imagine we live under some general consensus that things are fine, that reality is real and apparent, that we all can get along civilly so long as we never discuss anything that isn’t directly tied to our silo’d mission statements.
On Nov. 6, John Ganz seemed to second that:
There’s a political lesson there, too, though, that applies to the present moment: having a clear vision of things, even if it is unpleasant or dark, beats no vision or an unclear one. Trump’s campaigns had a clear mythos: a story about what America is and was and where it is going. No Democratic candidate that’s run against him has been able to articulate an opposing vision. This is not particular to this or that candidate, although all of them had individual weaknesses. We can litigate that forever. But it’s really a problem of American liberalism: liberalism is unsure of itself and ameliorative, it’s not a bold vision of the future as it once was in its heyday under LBJ or FDR. Trumpism may be reactionary, but liberalism too, has become too backward-looking—look at my references in the previous sentence. It longs for an old age of consensus instead of gamely going to war to win a new one. American liberalism has also become a land of smug statisticians and wonks who want to test every proposition and shrink from striking out in a new direction, from testing rhetorical appeals in the public arena rather than the statistical survey. Trump and his campaigns were willing to venture boldly and that’s part of what appealed to people. He said, “Follow me and make history,” a dubious claim made by others before him, but it excites people.
My own political orientation certainly also suffers from a certain old-fashionedness, but I’ll just say in my defense I never thought of it as a panacea. Antifascism is a century-old tradition now and the critics of who see in it a longing to recreate an old order are on to something. It’s a politics of memory and meaning that are fading from this world. But it at least has a certain imaginative dimension, it’s an ethos: its mythical core contains a struggle between good and evil. Unfortunately, it doesn’t resonate at this moment. For voters for whom “democracy” was an issue Harris was the obvious choice, but that wasn’t enough people. It’s perhaps too idealistic, too abstract and airy, and not focused enough on practical issues, although for me it’s a social democratic impulse, uniting the struggle for democracy and people’s day-to-day needs. In any case, it’s not a story that the American people get anymore. Maybe they will again now.
The whole idea of the “resistance” was a product of the old antifascist mythos, meant to call forth the French resistance and other groups on the continent. Besides being cringe, what gives that label the lie was that resistants don’t have any institutions to rely upon. The army, the press, the parliament: these have all collapsed in a world where you can speak even metaphorically of a resistance. They have to build their institutions from scratch, they need to develop new political concepts and approaches, recruit new cadres, and form their own world. Relying on old institutional power has failed; Trump and his people have been more agile in adapting to a new media terrain, and so now should liberals and leftists.
As I have been haunted by Francis Fukuyama since 1991 as well, this piece from Matt Pearce also caught my eye, and it speaks obliquely to the suckiness of men as well:
What’s troubling about the authoritarian rot is that many liberal democracies aren’t even losing the argument against a competitive system like communism. Liberal democracy has been losing the argument against itself just fine.
Although the scholars of comparative democracy have been our frontline ground troops providing the analytical hows and whats explaining the global democratic recession, the book I’ve been obsessed with in recent years is Francis Fukuyama’s odd 1992 political philosophy tract “The End of History.”
As the Soviet Union collapsed, Fukuyama rehashed Hegel, Nietzsche, Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève to argue — persuasively, in my opinion — that liberal democracy’s final enemy might be boredom. Specifically, a very gendered kind of boredom. Here, Fukuyama’s classically sexist use of “man” as a blanket synonym for “humanity” has aged into haunting specificity:
It is reasonable to wonder whether all people will believe that the kinds of struggles and sacrifices possible in a self-satisfied and prosperous liberal democracy are sufficient to call forth what is highest in man. For are there not reservoirs of idealism that cannot be exhausted — indeed, that are not even touched — if one becomes a developer like Donald Trump, or a mountain climber like Reinhold Meissner, or political like George Bush? Difficult as it is, in many ways, to be these individuals, and for all the recognition they receive, their lives are not the most difficult, and the causes they serve are not the most serious or the most just.
…Supposing that the world has become “filled up,” so to speak, with liberal democracies, such that there exist no tyranny and oppression worth of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.
Democracies aren’t supposed to have heroes. Democracies are the product of heroic eras. After you’ve answered the major questions of legal equality and political recognition, the rest is just conflict resolution.
Well, it turns out that some of the governed don’t consent to undergoing marriage counseling for the sake of the relationship.
The biggest takeaway that resonates to me seems to be that Bernie Sanders was right all along, although there’s absolutely no shortage of blaming The Left for Harris’ defeat, which I’ll get to shortly. Here’s Jared Yates Sexton:
Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again Movement, as designed and carried out by the wealth class, are some of the most incredible and powerful enablers in the history of the United States. Trump built his career on selling these fantasies to willing dupes, promising that his wealth and fame and success were just a purchase or vote away from being transferred over to consumers and supporters. MAGA is a carefully designed illusion that America can return to some ill-defined past moment that never existed. And, in time a great fear and unrest, they found the perfect recipe for electoral success.
…
The Democratic Party and liberals have been living in their own self-fulfilling fantasies for a long time now. They don’t feel as acrid as MAGA’s. They sound better. Look better. They’re pleasing in a way that chooses to prioritize cathartic optimism over bitter hatred. But unfortunately, they are fantasies and magical thinking all the same.
Here are hard truths.
For anyone willing to see it, it has been obvious that America has been moving to the Right for years now. This has been accelerated by Trump and the GOP, but also the capitulation of the Democratic Party and corporate liberal media, all working in tandem to carry out the interests of capitalism.
Our institutions are not inherently good or worthy. They were created by Founders who intentionally designed a system to benefit themselves and white, wealthy men in order to stave off the “dangers” of democracy. They are working as they were intended.
American history is an easily understandable story of how white supremacy, patriarchal misogyny, nativism, and fearmongering have been used to benefit the wealthy.
The past half century has seen a power grab by the wealth class as they have seized back power from the New Deal Consensus, created a new system designed to redistribute wealth from the working and middle classes to themselves, and have ushered in an era of intentional inequality and precarity.
What the Democratic Party has relied on, with a few notable successes, is a political appeal that these things are either not true, not needing addressed, or fundamentally dangerous and unnecessary to discuss. Even as we have seen racism, sexism, nativism, and gay and transphobia become more pronounced and politically effective, we have been told this “isn’t who we are.” That America is “fundamentally good.” That if we can just get past Donald Trump everything would be fine.
These are fantasies. This is magical thinking. None of this has had any real relationship with the truth or reality of the situation. In this, the Democratic Party entered the 2024 Election presenting their magical thinking and their fantasies against the magical thinking and fantasies of Trump and the MAGA Movement. In the conditions we’re experiencing, it is much easier for millions of people to go with the latter. For them, it was at least a decision that meant admitting there was a problem. The solutions, obviously, are not real and are disastrous. But that was the decision nonetheless.
As for blaming the Left, well, the most you might be able to say is that “the Left” stayed home. If that is indeed the profile of the non-voters in 2024, and I’m not certain it is. I think it is equally, if not more, probable that a lot of lefty folks held their noses and voted for Harris despite Gaza, despite cozying up to Republicans and billionaires, despite hardline immigration stances, despite non-bold policy proposals, because we all realized Trump would be worse (and by worse, this ranges from “destroy the Republic” to “obliterate Palestine,” “deport and denaturalize even the remotely tan,” etc.).
I’m seeing a lot of disconnect between ballot lefty-measures and Trump votes, strongly suggesting people are bone stupid. I know, I know, this is one of the reasons, allegedly, why folks “hate elites.” I’m not an elite; I’m a janitor, so, fuck that noise. I’m sorry, but if this chart is even remotely accurate…
…then, we have a serious problem with the American electorate. These people think they are voting for UP when they are actually voting for DOWN. Rebecca Solnit talks a bit about this. So does Heather Cox Richardson.
(It should be noted, at least in passing, that the tech bros and social media moguls we have today got their start in large part thanks to the neoliberal knowledge economy of Third Way Democrats like Bill Clinton embracing Silicon Valley back in the day as they pivoted away from traditional Democratic turnout engines like labor unions, which are supported by most Americans, warred upon by the billionaires backing Trump, and stomped on by the SCOTUS Six.)
It sure seems like Americans like lefty policies in lots of places when they’re asked to vote on them. If turnout for Harris was down, did it have anything to do with the lackluster, neoliberal-sounding “opportunity economy” abstraction (straight out of 1993) vs. concrete policy promises? Another thing I wrote the day before the election:
…if the Democrats have to accommodate more and more of a right-drifting polity every election to prove that they are not “radical Left socialists pushing the woke agenda” just to squeak past the post and eke out an increasingly difficult and stacked Electoral College win, how long can we say that the Democratic Party remains in any way responsive to what the people want? Leftists have been making this argument for some time now, and the longer this dynamic continues, the harder it is to disagree with them.
What’s The Matter With Kansas America?
What seems like a long time ago (2004), Thomas Frank wrote What’s The Matter With Kansas?, which argued that “conservative” voters get played: they vote “against their interests” by electing Republicans who cut taxes and funnel money to the rich and corporate, who in turn screw the people over with reduced public services and extortionate, predatory capitalism. Why do they keep doing this? Because Republicans campaign on bullshit “culture war” issues that “conservatives” eat up like red meat.
I have a few problems with this thesis.
First, “culture war” issues are often, if not almost always, issues of civil and human rights of real, living people just as deserving of dignity and respect as anyone else, so fuck the dismissive tone, Tom. Abortion was a “culture war” issue and try to get dismissive about women dying of sepsis and bleeding out in parking lots.
Saying that people “vote against their interests” tends to reduce all “interests” to pocketbook issues in a kind of vulgar Marxism. But people have loads of interests. Among them status and esteem, and these start to get into relative comparisons, like men comparing themselves to women, whites comparing themselves to Blacks, established immigrants comparing themselves to new immigrants, etc. So the desire to feel superior to other people is one helluva drug and a major “interest” in how people feel about the state of their worlds.
Finally, “conservatives” just plain…aren’t anymore. They’ve been transformed into reactionary, deluded nutbags.
But other than these points, Frank’s not entirely wrong. He’s just not entirely right, either.
If we look at the toxic (dis)information environments Trump supporters live in, we have to think back on Thomas Frank’s argument. Yes, with the Dobbs decision, the anti-abortion dog more or less caught the car (though it can still proceed to disassemble and eat that whole goddamn Buick, as we shall soon witness), but that didn’t stop the bait-and-switch dynamic, thanks to the rise these past 20 years of social media, especially algorithmically weaponized, bot-infested, unmoderated social media.
On abortion, things are simple, and at least semi-factual. The Left and at least most Democrats stand for bodily autonomy, for choice, for reproductive health care, and that either includes or sometimes front-and-centers abortion. The frothing Right opposes all of the above, although ballot measures in the wake of Dobbs show, shall we say, buyer’s remorse even in red states.
On nearly every other “culture war,” i.e., civil/human rights issue, however, it’s a goddamn LSD trip from hell. Harris is not a “low IQ communist.” Trump won’t “deport only the bad ones.” Tariffs won’t punish foreign countries. Kids aren’t coming home from school suddenly “transed.”
But if you’re running against an incumbent or the avatar of one, you kvetch about the state of things. And if the factual state of things is actually positive,1 you fabricate—and self-selecting social media information environments allow you to do so with impunity.
Jamelle Bouie’s Bluesky post is pretty accurate, I think:
He writes:
So far the only explanation I’ve seen that doesn’t smack of “If only she’d listen to me she would have won” is “global discontent with incumbents because of inflation and post-pandemic malaise + toxic information environments”
Couple of things here, which many others have also noted:
There’s nothing really wrong with “if she’d only listened to me” takes—assuming one was in a position to be listened to, or in a position to help shape what comes next—if you’re right about your argument.
Globally—you may have seen the charts—incumbents did get walloped on inflation.
But—the US, objectively, under Biden, so as far as Harris-as-incumbent-stand-in should go, kicked inflation’s ass relative to everywhere else in the world.
But—you actually have to know this fact to appreciate it, and your toxic information environment is not going to teach it to you, so in a way, the inflation + toxic information environment is kinda the same phenomenon.
You can kinda blame the Dems for bad messaging on this—they didn’t shout it from the mountaintops everywhere and all the time. But Dems suck at messaging, they rely on legacy, “objective” media to do that for them, they don’t have their own massive media empires to disseminate their own messages (whether true or not) like the Right, and Biden mad the choice early on (see above) to try to unify and be bipartisan rather than…well, fight.
In Closing
Look.
People who believe in a multiracial, egalitarian, pluralistic democracy—or anything even grander than this—are on the backfoot. But they always kinda have been.
People who focus primarily on elections are pretty wrecked right now.2 Part of this is a tendency, born of electoral-politics focus, to believe in “set it and forget it.” The machine will do it all if you just twist the dial to the right setting and then go about your business.
I’m not trying to pour salt on any wounds here. Just a wake-up call. We do NOT get the world we want without work. For a hundred years, the Right has been working, failing, getting up, and working some more to instantiate its vision of the world they want, and they pulled so many levers along the way. They captured courts. They founded institutions and think tanks. They built companies, made millions then donated bigly to scads of weirdos with fringe ideas and tried those ideas out again and again until some of them took hold, and now some of those ideas are law and policy. They staged riots in Brooks Brothers suits, rallies in tri-corner hats, and then a coup in appropriated Native cosplay and kevlar.
It looks like they finally won a biggie with billionaires controlling the information environment and exploiting the long-rightward and -hateward shift they’d been pushing (with little pushback and much capitulation) for so long. Undermining education, transfixing us with short-attention-span consumer culture and entertainment, killing public spaces and cross-cutting ties, decimating organized labor, making us more and more atomized and self-obsessed. I’m not saying this was all the conscious work of some cabal, but these trends all work to the advantage of these dicks, and this just happens to be one big moment when a lot of it comes together in a big bad way.
Things will be bad. Probably a mix of incompetent, chaotic, horrifically effective, and disastrous.
But if there’s one lesson here it’s that, all along, we should have been more aligned with, more shoulder-to-shoulder with, the folks doing the bleeding edge of organizing, thinking, advocating, working to make a better world. And I mean all along. They were right. They were working to meet people where they were and move them to a better place, to join a movement for a better world. By contrast, the Dems took people’s stated preferences and catered to them, only offering up a message or vision when it was time to get folks jazzed enough to vote again. Every person who clucked their tongues at movements whose messaging was too out there, too scary, for electoral success for Democrats, I suggest you do some soul-searching. Chasing “moderates” or “independents” or “low information voters” or what-have-you…aligning with Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban at this late hour in defense of a “democracy” people don’t even understand…well, it got us here.
The Right pushed lies and fears until so many voters knew only lies about the world and their fellow citizens and hated and feared them and believed themselves to be good and righteous and immune from any possible harms that might come. We’ll see how that pans out for them.
Trying to trim our convictions and policies and language and beliefs until we were palatable to these voters was always a losing proposition. It always looked milquetoast and insincere and spineless, and it really was, but we rationalized it in the name of squeaking through to another victory to stave off something objectively worse. Well, objectively worse has arrived, again, with what looks like a helluva mandate, though based on ignorance and fear and hate. Leopards will eat faces. It will be hard to have sympathy or empathy for those complicit in their own undoing, but there are few of us who don’t carry at least some complicity in this, no?
A better world doesn’t make itself. Adam Smith’s invisible hand doesn’t even work in economics anymore, so why should we imagine it will produce healthy societies? Why should we imagine that each of us, just going about our lives, working on ourselves, free to be you and me, by itself, will yield the world we want? Maybe that could work—in the absence of a dedicated movement of people who want the exact opposite and who devote every day to making it happen.
But we don’t happen to live there.
Positive in the macro sense, at least. But macro economics is not salient to a populist movement, though you can teach them to use big words. One problem with Harris’ campaign was her stress of the macro successes (true enough) without enough concrete attention to the micro. Trouble is, when you get to the micro-stuff, you have to start moving Left if you want to keep telling the truth, and that would mean upsetting the bougie contingent and the billionaires.
So are people who don’t think electoral politics are the end-all-be-all, like movement activists, organizers, etc. But their focus is on the harm they will see happening in the communities they actively work with day in and day out, and the mountains of added difficulties, the new risks and threats they will face as they try to do their already difficult work, the few options they’ve been offering being closed down.