Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!

And other reflections on election night

Like you, I am trying to process what just happened in our national election while also trying to maintain my mental and emotional health. Not work for the feeble minded.

I’m sure y’all are seeking out your favorite commentators and writers to help you process what’s just happened. Or you’ve opted to just turn it all off and concentrate on things you can control, like your breath, your emotional eating, or the number of weeds raising a ruckus in whatever small plot of earth you have privilege to tend. 

So if you are on a media diet, today’s bloviating is likely not for you.

Table Setting

Here’s my current theory of the case:

Caveat: I’m about to launch into an extremely facile description of our predicament. My goal here is not to deliver a comprehensive view of history and economics, but rather to highlight a particular thread that wends its way through our history and has come to a conflagration point in our present. 

As the 19th century ended, humans were reckoning with the massive social upheavals wrought by the industrial revolution. The wealthy and the poor had come together in the factory system and discovered that they were in conflict, in much the same way feudal lords had been in conflict with the serfs. Both sides wanted a piece of the pie and they disagreed on how it should be fairly divided. And, just as with feudal lords, our state government tended to side with the wealthy and thus labor was left with scraps which was, I think quite clearly, unjust (if the general goal of society is to maximize well being). 

Thus began a global debate for solutions. Initially, three possible solutions were deemed viable: Capitalism, Communism, and Anarchism. But the body politic will always favor a state (the arbiter of rules for collective action) so states—in particular, the imperialist one’s who had amassed vast amounts of money, armies, and power—prevailed. Anarchism never really had a shot.

This, that, and the other happened — much of which was horrific — and at the end of WWII, we saw the dissolution of the western imperialist empires and the rise of two superpowers: Capitalist America and Communist Russia. The cold war began and with it a new form of imperialism. Basically the world’s nations had to choose which of the two systems they would align with - which trade market they would opt into. That was largely horrific as well.

And then, some thirty years ago, the USSR collapsed. And the world thought that meant that Capitalism had won the great debate and proof was in the pudding: free markets created free people and so the world would now be free to trade freely with liberty and justice for all. 

Winner Takes All

But remember that Capitalism is reliant on capitalists and capitalists have no allegiance to the state (which came as a surprise to many states). They have allegiance to profit and to shareholders. And they most definitely do not have allegiance to labor. In fact, when communism failed, labor as a political entity was basically seen to have failed. Humans were all deemed as individual free agents, expected to fight their own personal battles for supremacy in the labor market. Indeed, in a free market system,labor itself was simply a new market to be mastered. Everyone’s presumed goal was to rise to the level of a capitalist and failure to do so was proof of your personal weakness. Nevermind that society can’t run on capitalists alone - no fireman, nurse, or teacher has ever acted out of pure self interest. 

So we had a new world order where goods and services were available to all and great amounts of wealth were generated and for a while it all seemed to be working. The internet happened. China and India reduced poverty levels at a remarkable clip. Possibility abounded. 

But underneath the veneer of growth, people were being hurt. To assuage the anxiety of billions of people fighting for a relatively tiny number of positions as an elite capitalist, we were told that cheaper goods and services would make us happy. Efficient markets would guarantee affordability, and even the poorest among us would have a bounty compared to the deprivations of feudal farming systems industrialism had replaced. We were told it would be enough.

And it hasn’t been. It hasn’t been enough.

And that’s why Kamala lost. 

Chickens and Roosts and Coming Home

The promises of neoliberal capitalism have failed the vast majority of Americans. Our jobs have been offshored. The cost of living has soared. Our children face a bleak future, forced to tackle climate change and AI’s replacement of human intellect. The vast accumulation of wealth has failed to trickle down. Education, the pathway to class climbing, has failed to prepare us for the modern job market or become so expensive as to be unattainable, not to mention that not everyone is particularly good at book learning. Biden’s broad economic indicators were great, but people were still feeling insecure, broke, and exhausted from working multiple jobs and running side hustles merely to get by. Or, in the case of many of my former colleagues in the tech space, unemployed and feeling unemployable.

Meanwhile, Trump ran on a platform that acknowledged that things are horrible. He routinely decried how our system is broken. And while he and his minions place the blame in surprisingly wrong-headed directions – trans kids, asylum seekers, college students – Americans, it turns out, agree with him.

Kamala represented the status quo and Americans are fed up with the status quo; they have been wounded by it. Americans are depressed and stressed and frustrated and feeling poorer and more insecure than they were four years ago, fourteen years ago, forty years ago. 

Kamala inherited Bill Clinton’s Neoliberal Democratic party – free markets and liberal social sensibilities. Obama and Biden gave us more of the same. But that world order isn’t working anymore. Its promises have turned out to be fictions and Americans are reckoning with that. 

Misdiagnosis

Sadly, the right misidentified the antidote. Instead of focusing on the fictitious assumptions of Neoliberal policy, the right focused on the liberal social sensibilities. The great culture war that’s been waging since Rush Limbaugh first took to air. The demonization of the social justice movement has been their stock in trade, even while the social justice movement is actually fighting for the deeply held American values of liberty and equality under the law. 

[Sidenote #1: I have plenty of critiques of the left’s weaponization of social justice, and while I align with most leftist sensibilities, I also recognize that the left eats its own in a manner that limits its ability to build a collective base. Identity politics has been a boon for understanding the American experience, but it has been a disaster for building strong political coalitions that can actually bring about long term solutions.]

[Sidenote #2: It’s my understanding, and I’m happy to be told I’m wrong, that our current immigration crisis – which, don’t get it twisted, is a crisis – is based largely on the American appetite for illicit drugs. Central America has been ravaged by the drug trade, by cartels, and by local gangs all of which is funded by our demand for party drugs (Coke), work drugs (adderall, meth), and fuck it, life is too painful drugs (heroin, fentanyl). We’ve created the problem we blame on others.]

I believe we are experiencing a global reckoning on the failure of post cold war neoliberal policy. Strong men and right wing parties are gaining support everywhere. Protectionism is on the rise. 

And reasons for that are plain to see. People are stressed the fuck out and have been for years and years. I mean we literally just experienced a global pandemic which was brutal, especially for the working class who couldn’t “just” work from home. Our collective amygdalas are exhausted. And Trump paid lip service to all that fear. And Kamala didn’t. And Kamala lost. 

Going Forward

And we all lost because Trump isn’t gonna tackle the actual problem. He’s going to punch down and feed the culture war beast. We don’t need a reduction of rights for our most vulnerable citizenry; we need an alternative to global free market corporate capitalism that supports our communities and our people and gives us all a sense of purpose and hope.

I’m not sure what that alternative is. But I know it’s possible and I know that if we don’t come up with it soon, the whole house of cards that is modernity could come crashing down because of fucknuts like Trump and Putin and Netanyahu and Musk and Thiel and Zuckerberg. And you and me.

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Internets of the Day

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– Quote of the Week: 

“[Last] Tuesday, we learned that Democrats don’t actually know how to rig an election.” ― Colin Jost, SNL

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The Good

– Podcasting: As any regular reader knows, I’m a podcast fiend. I live alone with a dog, and podcasts provide me a simulacrum of human conversation that keeps me from feeling lonely. They are my companions. Anyway, this week I was invited to be a guest on my cousin’s podcast Stoneybrook Reunion: The Baby-Sitters Club Book Club. It was fun diving into the psychology of tweenaged girls from 80s and talking about summer camp experiences. Mine mostly involved a lot crying and Jesus. Not the best of times. I’ll be sure to let y’all know when the episode is available if you fit the weird venn diagram of Baby-Sitters Club fan and Tobinski fan, but I suspect my cousin might be the only person who would qualify. 

The Bad:

Unconservative Conservatives: Was just listening to an interview with Yuval Harari and he made the point that the American Republican party, under Trump, has become a revolutionary party, and that that is not the role we want the conservatives in our society to play. Conservatives, traditionally, pump the brakes on change while progressives try to hit the gas. When conservatives hit the gas, they tend to steer the vehicle off the nearest cliff (See Germany, Italy, and Japan of the 20th Century and the Taliban and the Islamic State in our current century.)

The Ugly:

Dastardly Bastards: Who knows what’s actually coming for us, but Trump’s cabinet is shaping up to be a who’s who of fucknuts and buttlickers. Marco Rubio for Secretary of State. Elise Stefanik for UN Ambassador. Dog executioner Kristi Noem for Homeland Security Secretary. Evangelical lunatic Mike Huckabee for Ambassador to Israel. Overt fascist and nosferatu lookalike Stephen Miller for Deputy chief of staff for policy. Oh and as a cherry on top, Trump says he’s just gonna dissolve the Department of Education which, among other things, funds all special needs programs from K to University levels. 

Copy Editing: One of the readers of this newsletter is a professional copy editor (and an all around great guy). After I publish, he will often send me a few notes, pointing out the errors of my ways which are always and sadly more legion than I’d expected.

Anyone who writes will tell you that copy editing your own work is hard. Well, copy editing is hard. Period. But copy editing your own work is even harder and I’m not good at it. Either of them. I’m not a detail oriented dude (but you already knew that seeing as how I write about fixing the entire world all the time and yet can’t put away my clean laundry).

Anyway, this week I decided to ask ChatGPT to help out because I can’t afford an actual copy editor seeing as how I’m unemployed and all. So I fed this whole piece into ChatGPT with this prompt: “Copy edit the following text for grammatical and spelling errors.” It did a serviceable job…I think. But I noticed that it changed “Dastardly Bastards” to “Dastardly Appointees” and you’ll notice from the prompt that I didn’t ask it to make my work more fucking anodyne and respectable. I asked it to add commas between dependent clauses and rectify missing letters.

So I asked ChatGPT “Why did you change the word "bastards" to "appointees"?” and it said: “I changed "bastards" to "appointees" to align with a more formal tone and keep focus on the critique of the individuals' potential roles and actions rather than using informal or inflammatory language. If you prefer, I can absolutely change it back to "bastards" to retain the original, more pointed tone!”

Align with a more formal tone, my fat white ass!

ChatGPT you’re fired for being a try-hard who doesn’t follow instructions and takes liberties with other people’s work. And for stealing all the proprietary text on the entire fucking internet, you piratical rogue!
Also, if you’re wondering why I make so many spelling mistakes and errors of logic and syntax and what nots, this is why. This is why. I’m human. I am flawed and yet worthy of love. ChatGPT is flawed and not worth the a fraction of the megawatts of energy it uses to do shoddy work much less love.

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Finally: