(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Now We Will Get What We Asked For [1]
[]
Date: 2024-11
To wake up the morning after Election Day was to understand the appeal of oblivion. Regaining consciousness meant assuming the crushing weight of the darkest knowledge. The Motherfucker is back.
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard,” wrote American journalist H.L. Mencken in 1916. Now, everyone will unleash their theories. Salvaging comfort in a situation like this means smoothing down the events so that they conform to our own world view. So people will say: Kamala Harris lost because she did not embrace the policy views that I do. Or: Kamala Harris lost because the ignoble rats on the [left/ right/ middle] did not work hard enough for her. Or: If Kamala Harris had only taken my strategic advice, had spent more time in that state, had crafted her message differently, had used a different slogan, had picked a different advisor, she would have won. In this way we assure ourselves that it is just the candidate and not the world itself that is broken. Recognize that all as wishful thinking. There is no particular reason for a hopeful interpretation of these events. Kamala Harris did not lose this race because of Gaza, even though it would be some small assertion of morality’s importance if that were so. Kamala Harris’s campaign was competent. It was well funded. She was not running against an unknown quantity. She was running against a man that everyone knows too well, a former president whose term we all lived through, a public figure for decades, a man who has not stopped talking for a moment since the 1980s. She was running against a man who lies constantly and is plainly racist and cannot speak a coherent paragraph and has insulted in personal terms the demographic groups covering the majority of the population. People know who she was running against. They know exactly who he is. Most people, it turns out, just prefer him. That is what they like.
Sign up for our weekend newsletter A weekly digest of our best coverage Email Address
The only way to be able to smile today will be to laugh bitterly at the explanations that you will hear about this. Did Americans conclude that their lives were better when Trump was president? He finished his term in 2020, one of the worst years of the 21st century. Hardly a sunny memory. Was it the economy? “The Economy,” as measured by most economists, has been consistently strong under President Biden, and is currently thriving in historic terms. Was it the grave concern that voters in Wisconsin naturally have for the conditions at the Texas border? Was it the strong populist appeal of a rich man spending hours at every rally airing the pettiest of personal grievances? Was it the powerful institutional support of a man who is despised by the leadership of his own party and who was denounced by his own former cabinet members? No. Traditional political analysis dies upon the mountain of Donald Trump. Facts? There are no facts here. He has been lying steadily for a decade and the media has been steadily publishing stories explaining that he is lying and yet he is winning the popular vote. Everyone knows and nobody cares. We in the press have been proven less influential than we had even imagined. Why am I writing this? What does it matter? On Inauguration Day, we can all think back to the quaint little arguments that we had among one another about whether or not this or that New York Times story was honest in its framing of Trump’s latest outrage, and chuckle ruefully. What a worthless and self-indulgent pastime that turned out to be. Newspaper endorsements? Op-ed columns? Television pundits making their most persuasive case that Trump Endangers Democracy? The idea that all would be well if we could only get this stuff right has been laid bare as an illusion treasured by the minority of us who care what the press has to say. Out in the world at large, that is not what most voters give a damn about. The combined investigative and explanatory powers of all of the journalists in America turned out to be less than the power of a bloated, sneering celebrity pointing a short finger at immigrants and saying “They are stealing your country.” The American people want Donald Trump. And now they will get him. He will bring with him a horde of cranks, frauds, religious zealots, gutter racists, and vindictive thugs unprecedented in modern American history. The Nixon White House will look like a zen temple compared to what is coming. Trump’s second term will be a wave of pure malevolence. There will be revenge against his enemies, and there will be assaults on innocent and vulnerable Americans of the sort that our government usually reserves only for people overseas. Fringe lunatics will dictate health policy; Crypto grifters will dictate economic policy; Christian evangelicals will dictate Middle East policy; Flinty corporate lawyers will dictate labor policy; and the mighty American federal government will be run with all the propriety of a late night infomercial selling miracle cures to insomniacs. The cure will be branded “TRUMP,” in large golden letters. It won’t work. There will be no refunds.
Capitalism itself is the grand machine producing all of this, the machine we must attack and, at minimum, remake if we do not want to continue down this road.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://inthesetimes.com/article/trump-victory-election-2024
Published and (C) by Common Dreams
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0..
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/
