I grew up in Anaheim Hills, California, but I didn’t attend high school there.  A school in Fullerton had started up a magnet pro­gram to attract students from all over Orange County with an interest in computer science, and in eighth grade a bully had me unhappy enough at my junior high school that I jumped at the chance to switch districts.  At first I carpooled with a girl who lived just up the hill from me: her father would drive us to school in the morning, and my mother would drive us home in the after­noon.  In tenth grade, she got her driver’s license and could drive herself.  I was thirteen, and could not.  However, by this point I’d made a friend named Greg West who lived in Santa Ana and took an OCTD bus to school, and it turned out that the closest bus to my house was the very one he took.  So at 5:50 a.m. every week­day morning I would get on the bus and we would ride to school together, and most afternoons we’d take the same bus home.  We were both on the debate team, and found plenty to debate during these bus rides, as my politics leaned to the left and he billed himself as an arch-conservative.  This was 1988, and while I was excited about the possibility that glasnost and perestroika might bring us peace, he was still an ardent cold warrior; when our English teacher had us write advocacy papers, his called for the U.S. military to invade Nicaragua on behalf of the Contras.  As we started our junior year, though, we agreed that ’88 was the stu­pidest campaign season imaginable.  There was no discussion of any real issues⁠—the Bush campaign, under the direction of Lee Atwater, had successfully made it a referendum on flag burning, pollution in Boston Harbor, and Willie Horton.  “We should run against each other in 2024!” Greg kept saying.  “You can be the Democratic candidate and I’ll be the Republican!”  Of course, he wasn’t actually that serious about his proposed pact.  Neither of us had any plans to go into politics, and even if Greg had, he wouldn’t have been the Republican candidate this year: as he grew up and developed some concern for the welfare of others, he turned away from conservatism and actually wound up be­coming a union lawyer.  The other sticking point was the year he chose for our big clash.  I don’t know why he was so set on 2024.  It was never 2020 or 2028⁠—invariably, ’24 was our year.  But Greg didn’t make it to 2024; he died in 2019, at age forty-six.  The future is not guaranteed to us.

Earlier this year I was thinking about how Greg and I would have reacted had my 2024 self been able to travel back to that OCTD bus and fill them in on how the race had actually shaken out:

“So, want to know who the candidates are in 2024?”

“Nah, what’s the point?  They’re just people around our age, right?  We wouldn’t have heard of them yet.”

“Au contraire!  For instance, the Democratic candidate is the incumbent president, Joe Biden!”

“Joe Biden?  The guy who dropped out last year after a plagiarism scandal?  He actually revived his career after that?  Wow!  But wait… he’s still running thirty-six years from now?  Isn’t he like eighty?”

“Eighty-one, actually.  And the Republican candidate isn’t much younger⁠—hell, he’s older than Reagan is now.”

“Really?  And it’s someone we’ve heard of?  Wait⁠—it’s not Dan Quayle, is it?  Do elections keep getting worse and worse to the point that Dan Quayle could actually be the 2024 Republican nominee?”

“We should be so lucky.  No, it’s someone you know, but he hasn’t formally gone into politics yet.  Here, I’ll give it away⁠—who’s at the top of the New York Times bestseller list right now?”

“Tom Wolfe?  I guess that makes sense⁠—he is a conservative, righ⁠—”

“Non-fiction.”

“…”

“…”

“…Donald Trump won the 2024 Republican primaries?!  Who’s his running mate, Leona Helmsley?!  This is crazy.  Why would any­one think Donald Trump could be president?!”

“He’s already been president.  He won in 2016.”

“He did?!  But wasn’t that a disaster?”

“Yes.  Back in 2000 ‘The Simpsons’ had a joke about how Amer­ica would fare under a President Trump, but they figured he’d just crash the economy the same way he drove all his companies into bankruptcy.  It turns out that he’s a lot worse than that.  He got impeached twice, the second time for getting a mob to attack the Capitol to prevent the certification of the 2020 election… on his watch 1.2 million Americans died in a pandemic, about three quarters of them due to his mishandling of the response… and, I mean, this bus will reach the end of the line before I could cover even one percent of the corruption and malfeasance of his first term, and that’s when he had the Republican old guard holding him back!”

“…”

“…”

“…so, the Simpsons?  You’re telling me that in the year 2000 ‘The Tracey Ullman Show’ will still be on the air?”

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Some observers have pointed out that since the pandemic, a fervor against incumbent governments, irrespective of their politics, has swept the globe.  For instance, voters in Australia in 2022, Brazil in 2022, and the United Kingdom in 2024 threw out right-wing governments to install more left-leaning ones, while voters in Italy in 2022, Argentina in 2023, and New Zealand in 2023 threw out left-leaning governments to install right-wing ones.  The governing centrist party in France was defeated in the 2024 legislative elections by alliances on both the left and the right.  But here’s a chart from my article on the 2020 election, updated with two new lines:

The U.S. electorate hasn’t been riding a global wave of anti-in­cumbent sentiment since the pandemic; it’s been riding a local wave of anti-incumbent sentiment for two solid decades, which has led to a party switch in nine of the past ten elections!  Why?  One narrative about the 2024 results that seems to have found some purchase is that voters were angry about the rocky post-pandemic economy.  But not only does that not explain the ’06–’18 anger, but by many measures, it doesn’t explain the ’24 anger either.  Inflation is at 2.6% and unemployment at 4.1%, both low.  A couple of weeks before the election, the stock market was at record highs.  And GDP was up 2.5% in 2023 and 2.8% in 2024, very respectable numbers for a mature economy.  So what’s there to be angry about?  Let’s take each of these in turn:

Inflation.  The pace at which the U.S. tamed inflation was the envy of the world.  By the first quarter of 2023, U.S. inflation was down to 6.0%, which compared favorably to that in the European G7 countries: the U.K. was at 10.4%, Italy at 9.1%, Germany at 8.7%, and France at 7.2%.  As noted, the U.S. is now at 2.6%, far better off than some of the incoming regime’s models: Orban’s Hungary is at 3.7%, Putin’s Russia at 9.1%, Erdogan’s Türkiye at 60%, and Milei’s Argentina at an eye-popping 250%.  But Ameri­can voters generally neither know nor care what’s happening in the rest of the world.  Nor are most of them equipped to appreci­ate second-order operations like lowering inflation, i.e., slowing a rate of increase.  For an item that would have gone from $100 to $109 to $118.81 to instead go from $100 to $109 to $112.27 doesn’t impress them.  All that the voters who filled in the bubble for Trump knew was that a Big Mac cost $4.89 under Trump and $5.69 under Biden, so therefore Trump was a better president.

Unemployment.  During the lo‑o‑o‑o‑ong process of digging out of the Great Recession, it was unemployment rather than infla­tion that generated the grim headlines.  Five hundred applicants for every job opening!  A slew of “99ers” who’d exhausted their unemployment benefits after spending nearly two full years out of work!  But while unemployment in the U.S. peaked at 14.8% under Trump, the end-of-year numbers under the Biden admini­stration were 3.9%, 3.5%, and 3.7%, with a slight uptick to 4.1% just before the election.  This is essentially what the Employment Act of 1946 defines as full employment.  Also, the U.S. added 22.7 million jobs under Bill Clinton, added only 500,000 under George W. Bush, added 11.6 million under Barack Obama, lost 2.7 million under Donald Trump, and then gained 15.6 million in less than four years under Joe Biden, beating even Clinton’s pace.  So why would voters still hold such a sour view of the economy?  Why on earth would they hand the stewardship of the economy to the Republicans, and specifically to the one Repub­lican with a negative record?

I suspect that to answer this we need to turn from questions of quantity to those of quality.  Time fuckin’ flies, and that “scariest chart in the world” in the pop-up above received its final update more than ten years ago, as the jobs lost in the Great Recession were finally all recovered by the spring of 2014.  When unemploy­ment has lost its terror, people have the luxury of wondering whether the jobs they have are actually any good.  Does your job pay well enough to give you, as Franklin Roosevelt put it in 1936, not only enough to live by, but something to live for?  Have you embarked upon a stable career, or are you a member of the “pre­cariat”?  And are you doing something fulfilling, using your tal­ents to make a meaningful contribution to the world, or are you spending more than half your waking life in hell?  To expand on each of these a bit:

• Pay.  During the last Trump administration, seventy-eight percent of full-time workers said that they lived paycheck to paycheck, and seventy-one percent said that they relied on credit to remain solvent.  These numbers improved un­der Biden, but even in 2024, thirty-seven percent reported that when faced with an emergency expense of as little as four hundred dollars, they would have to rely on credit cards or loans from family or friends.  It’s hard to be en­thusiastic about employment numbers when your own job doesn’t fulfill the basic function of allowing you to stay ahead of your expenses.  Some would argue that, well, these people should just reduce their expenses… but the question here is why people are so unhappy, and rarely is austerity the key to happiness.

• Security.  It may say something that so many of the places that have turned red are places where people used to be able to count on a job at “the mill” or “the mine” or “the plant”⁠—the actual work may have been grueling, but it represented a social contract.  Do this grueling work that needs to be done, and you won’t have to worry about keep­ing a roof over your head and food in the pantry, ever.  Until one day the mill or the mine or the plant closes down, and you’re fighting for a job as a greeter at the local Wal‑Mart while watching Bill Clinton on a talk show explaining that we need to retrain you to be a computer programmer.  There have obviously always been bullshit jobs⁠—a century ago there were jokes about men who went door to door sel­ling vacuum cleaners and encyclopedia sets⁠—but it seems like today’s economy is dominated by the sector that Yuri Slezkine termed “pariah entrepreneurship”.  Listening to interviews with Trump voters, or even just meeting people in real life recently: “What do you do?” “Eyebrow tattoo­ing.”  Or “I import T‑shirts from China and sell them out of my van on this street corner.” One of the reasons that I briefly jumped from tutoring to classroom teaching, even though the work was harder, the hourly pay was lower, and the the hours were much worse, was that I had reached the point that I wanted out of the gig economy and get a secure job⁠—one where my paycheck didn’t depend on phone calls from out of the blue.  But even the classroom job, I discov­ered to my chagrin, turned out to be remarkably light on the security.

• Working conditions.  I didn’t get tenure at that school.  Some of my best friends on the faculty did.  What do we have in common?  A handful of years later, none of us work there anymore.  The conditions were so punishing that neither the pay nor the security could entice them to stay.  Just to pick a statistic more or less at random: school counselors are supposed to have a caseload of 250 students.  For 2023, the actual number nationwide was 385.  In swing state Arizona, it was 667!  And it’s not just education where this sort of thing has been happening.  During the recession, it was common to hear of mass layoffs, with each worker who remained forced to do the work that had previously been the responsibility of three people⁠—and then few of those jobs were replaced during the recovery, because why pay three people to do the job that it turned out one person could do if worked beyond the point of exhaustion?  So the other two go work for Doordash, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics obligingly adds them to the ranks of the em­ployed.

The stock market.  At the beginning of 2024, the wealthiest ten percent of American households owned ninety-three percent of all stocks.  Half of all stocks are held by the wealthiest one per­cent.  So, to the extent that the stock market tells us anything about the health of the economy, it’s probably a contrary indi­cator, as it indicates how much wealth is being vacuumed up by the already obscenely rich.

Gross domestic product.  Ultimately, a lot of the above boils down to this chart right here:

When the income tax was first established in 1913, the top marginal tax rate was six percent.  By 1918 it had been hiked to seventy-seven percent to help finance the American entry into World War I, but the three Republican presidents who followed Woodrow Wilson brought it down in stages so that by 1925 it was back down to twenty-five percent.  This resulted in a windfall for the rich.  They gambled that windfall on the stock market, which imploded, and pretty soon the Great Depression was underway and unemployment was also at twenty-five percent.  The New Deal helped some, but the American economy didn’t fully recover until World War II forced the government to spend at the levels that were needed to finally break the back of the depression.  To keep the country from going too far into debt, the top marginal tax rate was raised to ninety-four percent, even higher than for WWI.  But this time, when the war was over, the tax rates stayed in place: the top marginal tax rate never dipped below ninety-one percent until 1964.  And it didn’t go below seventy percent until 1982.  Throw in the growth of labor unions under the New Deal, and you get what has been called the “Great Compression”, a thirty-year window when wealth was more equitably distribu­ted than ever before or since, resulting in a dramatic expansion of the middle class.  When Millennials lament that they missed out on the era when, on a single income, an average American could buy a suburban house and support a family with several children, this is the era they mean.  Productivity was on the rise, and for pretty much the entirety of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the incomes of everyday people rose even fas­ter⁠—that is, an increasing share of the wealth of the nation was finding its way to the people who actually created it.  This was an era when the heads of companies made about twenty times what their workers made, not hundreds or thousands of times as much.  They bought the big houses on the corners of the streets their employees lived on, not entire Hawaiian islands or yachts the size of football stadiums.

Fortunately for the plutocrats, America’s flourishing middle class came with a self-destruct button.  The Democratic Party of the mid-twentieth century was an odd coalition of, on the one hand, liberals who supported the progressive policies that had led to the Great Compression, and on the other, racist Southerners who wouldn’t vote Republican because Abraham Lincoln was a Re­publican and he’d freed the slaves.  The latter group had spent a century fighting to ensure that emancipation didn’t amount to much and that the freed slaves and their descendants would constitute a permanent underclass in American society, one that certainly wouldn’t get to enjoy the prosperity of the mid-twenti­eth century, or even basic civil rights.  When African-Americans found success in the 1950s and ’60s fighting for an end to the Jim Crow system that had denied them those rights, a Democratic administration signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act into law.  Morally, it was the right thing to do; politically, it opened the door for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to lure those racist Southerners into the Republican camp, with its very different set of economic policies.  The extent to which that sty­mied progress toward integration is debatable.  Less debatable is that it undid the Great Compression.  Over the course of the 1980s the top marginal tax rate was slashed from seventy per­cent down to thirty, and while productivity continued along its postwar trajectory, median income growth slowed catastrophic­ally.  Again, look at the chart.  Since the two lines diverged, wages have been close to flat.  Here’s another version of that chart that starts with my birthdate in 1974:

When I entered the workforce in 1994, real median wages had shrunk five percent over the course of my lifetime.  By 2012, they’d only grown four percent since I was born!  Yet GDP was up by half.  That means that nearly all that excess wealth⁠—again, half the size of the entire 1974 U.S. economy!⁠—had found its way into the pockets of the rich.  According to RAND’s calculations, from 1975 to 2018 the top one percent siphoned forty-seven tril­lion dollars away from the bottom ninety percent.  The authors of this study assert that in 2018, not just every household but every individual in that bottom ninety percent would have made an extra $8500 in that one year alone⁠—money that instead got fun­neled to the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.  Why do people think the economy is bad if the aggregate numbers are so good?  If you want to point to one reason, that’s it!

🙧 2

Of course, you can’t just point to one reason.  It’s almost com­forting to think that people are unhappy for a reason rooted in reality.  But in many cases the real explanation is that they’re pickled in propaganda and are angry about the economy because they’ve been told to be angry about it.  Over and over in the days following the election, I read accounts of people trying to con­vince (usually older, male) relatives to vote for Kamala Harris, only to be met by the same line: “Trump’s economy was better!”  So, first, “Trump’s economy” isn’t even a thing.  To whatever extent the state of an economy can be chalked up to a president at all, it only makes sense to do so after his policies have had a chance to take hold.  There are cases in which that can happen more or less immediately, as when Franklin Roosevelt inspired renewed confidence in the strength of U.S. banks, or as might happen if the economy crashes in response to tariffs Trump im­poses in his second term.  But it usually takes a little while for the effects of economic policies to manifest themselves.  For in­stance, George Bush was left holding the bag when Reagan’s 1986 tax shift sent the economy into a recession in 1990, so that Bush had to run for re-election with unemployment at eight percent.  Bill Clinton did get a second term, so he got to enjoy the roaring economy sparked by his 1993 economic reforms⁠—though that economy probably owes even more credit to Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.  On the flip side, Clinton and his team made some terrible economic decisions, such as repealing Glass-Steagall, which were big contributors to the economic collapse of 2008 that brought George W. Bush’s approval down to a startling minus forty-five.  Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus took ages to pull the economy out of doldrums, but like Clinton, he did secure a second term, by the end of which things were humming to such an extent that he was able to leave office with his ap­proval at plus twenty-two.  So those upward slopes we see on the graph after Trump took office aren’t “Trump’s economy”⁠—he hadn’t done anything yet.  Those lines reflect the momentum of Obama’s economy.  But right-wing media immediately changed its tune about the state of the economy as the calendar apps ticked over to 2017, and we can expect that to happen again.  The moment Trump is sworn in again, look for Fox News and its ilk to blare, “Wow, look at that Trump economy! The Dow over 40,000, unemployment at only 4.1%, and inflation down to 2.6%!”

But it wasn’t just the propaganda outfits that took this tack.  The legacy news media has become functionally identical to right-wing outlets because it has made its supreme virtue not truth, but “balance”.  If ever the truth was balanced between the two parties in the U.S. system, it certainly isn’t now.  One party put up a candidate who was convicted of thirty-four felonies during the campaign!  And judged liable for sexual abuse in another case!  And had three other trials going, one for corruptly trying to over­turn the 2020 election, one for violently trying to overturn the 2020 election, and one for stealing classified documents, a worri­some thing for someone in the pocket of an enemy power.  Report the basic truth, and you come away correctly depicting Donald Trump as one of the worst human beings ever to walk the earth.  Meanwhile, Joe Biden is by most accounts a pretty decent fellow.  Certainly not flawless⁠—infuriatingly spineless when it comes to getting rolled by Netanyahu, for instance, and about as wrong as could be in judging the qualities needed in an attorney general in the aftermath of Trump’s first term.  But present damaging sto­ries about Trump and damaging stories about Biden with their proper levels of alarm, and those scales don’t balance.  So, as in 2016, when Donald Trump’s admission that his practice when meeting women was to “grab them by the pussy” was put for­ward as a wash against something involving which servers deli­vered Hillary Clinton’s emails, the legacy media cast about for something to hit Biden with and thereby balance the scales.  Or, should I say, lazily cast about, generally just repeating whatever the Republican attack lines were.  “Groceries cost too much!”  All right, yes, I did notice when a carton of eggs went from $3.99 to $4.49.  It didn’t strike me as cause to spend three years hammer­ing the idea that inflation was crippling the life of the nation.  Especially since, after that jump, the price has stayed at $4.49 for a couple of years now.  “Biden’s old!”  According to a University of Pennsylvania study, after Trump appointee Robert Hur described Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory”, the New York Times published no fewer than twenty-six unique stories about Biden’s age over the span of one week.  In the same time frame, Trump declared that, if elected, unless our European allies did as he directed, he would pull the U.S. out of NATO and encourage Russia to attack those countries.  The Times deemed this worthy of mentioning in ten stories.  Before I happened across this study, I did my own quick survey of Times headlines, and there it was, over and over, for years.  “At 79, Biden Is Testing the Boundaries of Age and the Presidency”.  (Trump will be seventy-nine less than a year after taking office.)  “How Old Is Too Old to Be Presi­dent? Biden Report Raises Uncomfortable Question Again”.  (Left out of the headline: as noted, that “Biden Report” was authored by a Republican operative.)  Then there’s the old ouroboros play: “Biden’s Age and Memory Rise to Center of 2024 Presidential Campaign”.  It’s a Times headline about the fact that the issue is “rising to the center of the campaign” due to previous Times headlines!

When Biden dropped out of the race and was replaced by the relatively young Kamala Harris, some Democrats naively hailed it as a deft piece of judo: now Trump would be the old one!  He’d be the one whose cognitive decline would be trumpeted every day in the press!  Because sure, Biden had a stutter, and had slowed down a bit, but he’d also spent fifty years in Washington and knew his way around the issues.  By contrast, Trump’s own sec­retary of state called Trump a moron, his national security advi­sor said he had the intelligence of a kindergartener, and they were both being kind: not only is his every appearance a display of appalling ignorance and stupidity, but age has sapped him of whatever mental discipline he might once have been able to sum­mon.  Many observers have noted his diminished inhibitions⁠—launching into long disquisitions about Arnold Palmer’s penis, miming fellatio onstage, etc.⁠—and his even more diminished co­herence.  Look at the unedited transcript of any Trump rally, and it’s not even word salad⁠—more like word coleslaw at this point.  Here’s an excerpt I picked more or less at random, from his rally on January 6 of this year⁠—the third anniversary of his inciting a mob to storm the Capitol:

We have great people in our military.  Took out ISIS in four months.  We have great, great people.  Um… I, I had, I met some warrior generals that were⁠—they could beat anyone.  The people that took out ISIS were unbelievable.  Raisin Caine, you know that story, right?  General Raisin Caine.  I⁠—this⁠—we love Raisin Caine!  But we have⁠—I said, “What’s your name?”  “Caine, sir.”  “Oh, what’s your first name?”  “Well, they called me Raisin.”  I said, “Wait a minute. Your name is Raisin Caine? I love you, general. That’s what I’m, that’s what I’m lookin’ for! I’m not lookin’ for these stiffs that you see on television.”  “Oh, I’m so ashamed. I walked down to the church with the president and he held a Bible.”  You know, they attacked that church.  You know, that church was on fire the day before.  And it got very lucky.  We auth­orized it.  They built a fireproof.  The area of that church was built along with the White House.  And it’s amazing.  Two weeks before that, they completed the job of fireproofing the basement of the church.  They started a fire in the basement, and it didn’t spread because of the fireproofing, but they, but it got very badly damaged.  But it didn’t spread because⁠—she’s laughing.  It’s true, right?  And it was sort of luck, I guess.  But I went down and I held the Bible high and Milley said, “Oh, I shouldn’t have walked with him.”  But no, he should have walked with the president.  He should have been proud to walk with the president.  That was the end of him!  That was the end of him!

And the other thing, you know, I, I love studying the, uh… if you take a look, I mean, the wars, I don’t know what it is.  The Civil War was so fascinating, so horrible.  It was so hor­rible, but so fascinating.  It was, uh… I don’t know, it was just different.  I just find it.  I’m so attracted to seeing it.  So many mistakes were made.  See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you.  I think you could have negotiated that.  All the people died.  So many people died, you know, that was the disaster.  If you got hit by a bullet in the leg, you were essentially going to die or lose the leg.  That’s why you had so many people, no legs, no arms.  If you got hit in the arm or the leg, it meant you were up, because the infection, gangrene, it was just such a, you know, sort of a horrible time.  But that’s⁠—I was thinking to myself because I was reading something and I said, “This is something that could have been negotiated,” you know, and it was just for all those people to die.  And they died vicious­ly.  That was a vicious, vicious… war.  And, uh, in many ways, look, they were all⁠—there’s nothing nice about it.  But boy, that was a, that was a tough one for our country.  But I think it’s, uh, you know, Abraham Lincoln.  Of course, if he negoti­ated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lin­coln was.  Uh… he would have been president, but he would have been president, and he would have been⁠—he wouldn’t have been the Abraham Lincoln, would have been different, but that would have been okay.  It’s, uh, it would have been a, a thing that⁠—and I, I know it very well.  I know the whole process that they went through, and they just couldn’t get along.  And that would have been something that could have been negotiated and they wouldn’t have had that problem, but it was a tole⁠—it was a hell of a time.

How did the New York Times headline its story about this de­mented babbling?  “Trump goes on offense in Iowa on Jan. 6 anniversary”.  It’s an example of a practice that frustrated obser­vers of the legacy media came to refer to as “sanewashing”: pro­viding flattering capsule summaries of Trump’s rambling, giving no indication that the speech described was not statesmanlike oratory but verbal diarrhea.  What was newsworthy was not the list of whatever points the reporters thought they could glean from Trump’s incoherent blather, but the incoherence itself.  I don’t want this article to devolve into a showcase of Trump’s gibberish, but here’s a moment that actually did get at least a little play in the mainstream news.  A woman at the Economic Club of New York asked Donald Trump, “If you win in November, can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable, and if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?”  Trump’s reply:

Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down⁠—you know, I was, uh, somebody, we had, uh, Senator Marco Rubio and my daughter, Ivanka, was so, uh, impactful on that issue.  It’s a very important issue.  But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that⁠—because, look, child care is child care.  It’s, couldn’t⁠—you know, it’s some­thing, you have to have it.  In this country, you have to have it.  But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to but they’ll get used to it very quickly.  And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.  Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s gonna take care.  We’re gonna have⁠—I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time.  Coupled with, uh, the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country⁠—because I have to say with child care, I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth.  But growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, uh, that I just told you about.  We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care, uh, is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.  We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world.  Let’s help other people.  But we’re gonna take care of our country first.  This is about America first.  It’s about “make America great again”.  We have to do it, because right now we’re a failing nation.  So we’ll take care of it.  Thank you.  Very good question.

Clearly, the story here is that Trump was asked about a pretty basic plank of his economic platform, and not only did he try to bullshit his way around the fact that he had no answer, but he sounded like Miss Teen South Carolina in the process.  Who knows⁠—maybe he was taking notes on what he overheard when he barged into the dressing rooms at the teen beauty pageants he used to run, a practice he used to boast about.  And how did the New York Times headline its story about this flailing non-an­swer?  “Trump Praises Tariffs”.

And when called out on their role in greasing the skids for fas­cism, journalists have tended to respond not by defending their choices, but minimizing their impact.  “There’s [sic] so many people who think that if the American media had used slightly different language to describe Trump, Americans wouldn’t like him,” tweeted one.  “And I’m sorry to tell you we have less influ­ence than ever. We understand this better than you do”.  While trying to dig up this quote, I discovered that the author had recently posted a follow-up asserting that “all the people who spent the last twelve months close-reading NYT story structure were wasting their time”, because a Data for Progress survey had shown that those who followed the news broke 52/46 for Kamala Harris while Donald Trump was up 52/31 among those who listed their news consumption as “none at all”.  I’m not sure that’s quite the defense this guy seems to think it is⁠—that forty-six percent of people could follow the news and still consider Donald Trump an acceptable candidate strikes me as a pretty damning indict­ment of the failure of the news to make clear that he is not.  But, yes⁠—as bad as the legacy media has been in serving as a check on fascism, I suppose that to complain about it is a bit like fuss­ing over the ant problem in the kitchen when termites are about to bring the whole house down.

One of the big initial takeaways from the 2016 election was that finding out what voters were hearing had become exponentially harder.  A generation earlier, we’d heard that AM radio, once thought to have been effectively killed off by FM, had come to be dominated by right-wing talk stations, with prescient observers warning anyone who would listen not to underestimate what might happen when every tractor, every shop floor, every long-haul truck had a radio blasting Rush Limbaugh and his clones around the clock.  Then Fox News came to the fore, leaving milli­ons grieving that their elderly parents were spending their re­tirement years stewing in the invective of the likes of Bill O’Reil­ly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and every day growing that much more unrecognizable: even the good parents were now frightened and hateful.  But these were still broadcasts, out in public view.  What 2016 brought to light was how many people had been swayed by preposterous stories that had been making the rounds under the radar, passed around by racist uncles on Facebook.  The example that stuck with me was that of the West Virginians the Boston Globe profiled who insisted that Hillary Clinton had ordered up thirty thousand guillotines that she was going to use to execute the sorts of people who voted for Trump.  “All you got to do is pull it up on the Internet,” one of them explained.  This is lunacy, not far removed from the notion that she’s a shape-shifting lizard from the Draco constellation, but all it took for some Russian troll farm to convince them was to get those words onto their smartphone screens, because their grip on reality was just that weak.  The buzzwords at the time were that we were living in a “post-truth world” full of “fake news”.  The latter term almost immediately became infamous, as Trump seized upon it and applied it to any story in the main­stream media that he didn’t like⁠—and as his legions of followers started using it the same way, it was soon robbed of its power to refer to the sorts of disinformation it was meant to describe, such as the guillotine story.  As scholars of fascism explained, the point of disingenously crying “fake news! fake news!” was less to get people to believe that true things are false, or that false things are true, than to get them to stop believing that there even is such a thing as truth.

But that was 2016.  I didn’t know what Facebook’s algorithms were feeding people⁠—I thought that, like me, folks were just getting baby pictures and vacation photos from the randos who’d sat behind them in fifth grade⁠—but at least I’d heard of Face­book.  The updated takeaway from 2024 is even more unnerving.  My only real experience with it is very tangential.  In December of last year I got a flat out on the highway near Martinez⁠—I told that story in the penultimate item in that month’s minutiae ar­ticle.  This was the second time I’d needed a tire changed in less than a year.  That March, when I still lived in Albany, California, I’d taken the car to Albany Tire, where I’d had good experiences in the early 2010s… only to discover that, in 2023, they now had Newsmax playing in the waiting room.  Not even Fox News⁠—one of those even farther-right networks that had started up on the basis that Fox News was just a bunch of pinko commies.  So, no more Albany Tire for me.  In any case, the December flat came after I’d moved to El Cerrito, so after making an appointment at the tire shop just up the road, I called for another tow.  I rode along for the couple of minutes it took to get there.  I was used to being subjected to execrable music in tow trucks, but on this driver’s radio was just a couple of guys talking.  As the tire shop came into view, I was taken aback to hear them start insulting women⁠—and then, a moment later, horrified when one of them revealed himself to be Andrew Tate.  What the fuck?!  I only knew of this guy because he’d popped up in the news a couple of times: first, because he’d taunted climate activist Greta Thunberg about the emissions from his fleet of cars, and then, because he’d been placed under house arrest in Romania, where he was charged with rape and running a sex trafficking ring.  And, what, he had a podcast?  And this guy downloaded it?  Where the fuck do you even get an Andrew Tate podcast?  Is this what has replaced Rush Limbaugh?  Are the farmers and shop workers and tow truck drivers all steeped in misogynistic poison by rapists with Eastern European empires of sex slaves?  Do I actually have to be nostal­gic for the racist uncles trading stories about guillotines?  Actual­ly, that’s another thing⁠—the West Virginian guys fit the descrip­tion of the kind you’d expect to be wearing red caps in the day­time and white hoods at night.  But during the 2024 campaign, there were rumblings that Trump was somehow gaining ground with many of the very demographics he’d spent his life vilify­ing⁠—showing that there would have to be more to saving demo­cracy than just waiting for Boomers to die off and waiting for the share of the population the Census Bureau called “Non-Hispanic White” to dwindle.  And here was a case in point: a relatively young African-American guy, living in the bluest metro area in the country, getting his brain rewired for patriarchal fascism.  And I don’t even know by what channels this propaganda is get­ting to people anymore.

Therefore, I obviously have no idea how to go about combating it, either.  Especially scary to me is that this right-wing noise ma­chine has been up and running in various forms for over thirty years now and no one else seems to have any solutions either.  Counterprogramming doesn’t seem to work.  So when you spin the dial on the AM band you get nothing but Rush Limbaugh?  All right, we’ll start up our own station!  With Al Franken and Ja­neane Garofalo!  That got a tenth Limbaugh’s audience and quick­ly died.  Fox News is setting the agenda for the rest of the news media?  Here’s Al Gore with a cable news channel to serve as a liberal alternative!  It had so little impact that few even noticed when it arrived or when it disappeared.  The obvious response is that the audience just isn’t there⁠—that it’s like a TV station try­ing to compete with the Super Bowl by putting on opera.  But votes from the Fox News era tell a different story:

That’s not a ten to one ratio in the right wing’s favor.  Most years there are more blue votes than red ones.  So is it a mismatch of medium and audience, then?  The flattering interpretation is to say that a reluctance to unquestioningly consume propaganda is part of what distinguishes the left from the right.  Or that hatred and fearmongering lock the brain into a primitive neurological reward cycle in a way that love and open-mindedness don’t.  But not only does that seem obnoxiously self-congratulatory, I doubt it’s even true⁠—I certainly prefer to get my news from outlets that share my ideological viewpoint⁠—and, worst of all, it doesn’t actually offer any solutions. 

🙧 3

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, I thought that education might be part of the solution, and one I could even contribute to.  Maybe critical thinking skills could inoculate some minds against right-wing propaganda!  That was one of the realignments pun­dits had observed in 2016, after all: while once high education levels had, if anything, steered people toward the Republicans⁠—because the educated tended to have better jobs with higher incomes, and dating back to the nineteenth century the Repub­licans had been the party of the rich⁠—now it looked like a direct correspondence had emerged between low education and Repub­lican vote share.  The flip makes sense, as Trump is the stupidest candidate ever put forward by a major party, with historians ranking him dead last in intelligence among the presidents⁠—be­hind the likes of Warren Harding and Andrew Johnson⁠—and lin­guists flagging him as a huge outlier among politicians in speak­ing below a fourth-grade level, making noted dullard George W. Bush look like an orator for the ages by comparison.  Trump’s ideas would also make most fourth-graders roll their eyes.  Try­ing to stop hurricanes by dropping nuclear bombs on them?  Or stop wildfires by raking the forests?  Or stop covid by injecting people with bleach?  But here’s the thing.  You know how Trump wouldn’t shut up about “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” at his 2024 rallies?  The premise of The Silence of the Lambs was that Clarice Starling consults Hannibal Lecter in the Buffalo Bill case on the theory that one serial killer might have insights into another serial killer that sane people might not have.  Similarly, Trump’s defining political gift has been that he is stupid enough to have some insight into what stupid voters will go for.  Barack Obama, campaigning for Kamala Harris in October, expressed no small amount of exasperation about one example of this.  During the first covid lockdown in 2020.03, the Democratic Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, which sent $1200 to adults who made up to $75,000 a year.  Don­ald Trump’s demand in exchange for signing the bill into law was that the aid go out in the form of paper checks with his name on them, along with a letter bearing his sawtooth signature.  The Democratic calculus in going along with this seems to have been that it wasn’t worth delaying the checks to put up a fight.  After all, everyone knows that the power of the purse lies with Con­gress, not the president!  If anything, Trump will make himself look bad by gauchely trying to claim credit for a bill that passed in a unanimous, bipartisan vote!  And… millions of voters gave him credit.  Obama actually sputtered in frustration recounting this.  “Some folks would be like, ‘Well, Donald Trump sent me a check!’” he groaned. 

I was groaning myself during the presidential debate in Septem­ber, when Kamala Harris rolled out what was apparently going to be the Democratic line on one of the very few policy proposals Trump had put forward: tariffs on all imports.  “My opponent has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax,” Harris said, “which would be a twenty percent tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month.”  Now, it has long been observed that Democrats have been quite bad at tagging concepts with phrases that stick.  Republicans seem to do it effortlessly: an example that springs to mind is the estate tax.  Currently, $13,610,000 can be passed to heirs tax-free, so over ninety-nine percent of inheri­tances have no tax collected on them at all.  But above that line, a portion is collected by the government, up to a top rate of forty percent.  Thus, only most of a massive hoard of wealth goes to descendants who did nothing to earn it, while some goes to fund vital goods and services for ordinary people.  Republicans started calling this the “death tax”, and suddenly you had legions of AM radio listeners who made eighteen thousand dollars a year de­manding its repeal.  So I’m sure Harris’s consultants batted around ways to similarly reframe tariffs in a way voters wouldn’t like.  Hey, how about we just call them a “sales tax”?  People hate sales taxes, right?  Maybe not as catchy as “death taxes” but it’ll do the job!  Except it didn’t do the job at all, because Harris didn’t actually say that she was referring to Trump’s proposed tariffs, and even if she had, just calling them “sales taxes” wouldn’t have had any impact.  Why do so few modern Democrats try to follow in the footsteps of FDR?  When Franklin Roosevelt took to the radio for his first “fireside chat” as president, the nation was in the midst of a banking crisis.  So how did he start his address to all the folks listening in their living rooms?  He explained how banks work!  Because he recognized that “comparatively few” Americans could truthfully say that they “understand the me­chanics of banking”, and “the overwhelming majority of you who use banks for the making of deposits and the drawing of checks” were mystified by the crisis because they had only a nebulous idea of what a bank even was!  Only a handful of people outside the world of finance had ever heard of “fractional reserve”⁠—when Roosevelt explained that “when you deposit money in a bank, the bank does not put the money into a safe deposit vault”, listeners were shocked!  And that is the level at which I was plead­ing for Harris to pitch her critique.  “People don’t know what tariffs even are!” I uselessly protested to my screen.  “You don’t need a focus-group phrase! Just take your sixty seconds and explain how tariffs work!”  Instead she trotted out her zinger, and Trump just replied, “I have no sales tax. That’s an incorrect statement. She knows that. We’re doing tariffs on other coun­tries.”  And millions of people thought, “Oh, Harris was lying. She said Trump wanted a sales tax but he actually wants a tariff. Those lying politicians! Always with the lying!”  And then after voting for Trump and seeing that he’d won, they finally went to Google and typed in “what is a tariff”.

While battling Ted Cruz for the Republican nomination in 2016, Trump famously declared, after finishing +37 among Nevada voters with a high school education or less, “We won with poorly educated [sic]. I love the poorly educated!”  It will undoubtedly come as no surprise that misinformed voters went for Trump by wide margins: +26 among those who thought violent crime was at all-time highs in 2024 (it had fallen to pre-pandemic levels, and even pandemic levels were lower than any year from 1970 to 2010), +19 among those who thought the inflation rate was rising in 2024 (it was falling, as discussed above), +17 among those who thought U.S./Mexico border crossings hadn’t fallen in 2024 (they had, by nearly 80%).  I also mentioned above that Trump had done very well among uninformed voters who simply didn’t fol­low the news.  What has baffled pundits for close to a decade now has been the fact that Trump has been able to get not just the misinformed but also the uninformed to not only favor him but actually vote for him.  And often only for him!  In the five swing states that had Senate races, Trump received nearly 570,000 votes⁠—over five percent of his total in those states!⁠—on ballots that were blank apart from the presidential race.  Many of those 570,000 voters had never cast a ballot before, and many will likely never vote again; I guess we’ll see whether any of us get to.  Another element of the postmortem articles about the 2024 elec­tion that jumped out at me was this: I spent a whole bunch of pixels above talking about disinformation, but I kept running into quotes from voters⁠—inevitably Trump voters⁠—who had cast a ballot on the basis of the most perfunctory disinformation there is: the denial.  “I voted for Trump because he said he wouldn’t have a sales tax!” “I voted for Trump because he said he had nothing to do with Project 2025!” “I voted for Trump be­cause he said he wouldn’t ban abortion!”  “I voted for Trump be­cause he said he wouldn’t cut the ACA, just Obamacare!”  These voters were often young, and often female⁠—the exact demo­graphic that Harris was supposed to win by overwhelming mar­gins.  Yet the clear implication is that they didn’t even consider voting for the Democratic ticket.  For them the choice was to vote for Trump or not to vote at all.  They had a few concerns about him: I’m glad my state has no abortion ban! Will Trump take the Texas laws nationwide?  The man caught in over thirty thousand documented lies during his first term said no, these voters said okey-doke, and they oblingingly signed up for four more years with him in charge.  In 2016 my response to this sort of thing was that clearly these voters had never had to do a worksheet on trustworthy vs. untrustworthy sources.  In 2024 I’m more in­clined to believe that they did once have to do such worksheets and voted this way in part as a slap at those of us who drew those worksheets up.

Universal education is a relatively recent social innovation.  Sur­prisingly, the American school system has its roots not in Eng­land but in Prussia, where Frederick the Great launched a pro­gram to place both boys and girls in compulsory classes, taught by trained educators, starting at age five and ending when the children reached their teens, at which point some could continue on to secondary school and from there possibly to university.  Popularized in the U.S. by Horace Mann, the aims of the Ameri­can version of the system were described by Ellwood Cubberley, the founder of the school of education at Stanford University, as “social efficiency, civic virtue, and character”.  Social efficiency: instead of farmers teaching their children how to farm and busi­nessmen teaching their sons how to run a business, give all chil­dren a foundation to pursue whatever path their talents and in­terests take them.  Maybe that business would be better run by one of the farmer’s kids!  Civic virtue: a republic depends on the ability of its citizens to serve well in their roles as decision makers: to stay informed about the issues of the day, to be good judges of character, and so forth.  A concept that frequently comes up on the AP U.S. History exam is that of “republican motherhood”, the notion that it was important to educate girls in civic virtues, even in the days when women couldn’t vote, be­cause the groundwork for good citizenship couldn’t wait for chil­dren to get to school⁠—they had to start learning the American way from their mothers while still in the cradle.  As for character, a couple of years ago I took a class on the Nordic countries from a professor whose previous area of specialization had been mod­ern Asia.  He brought up the fact that, in multiple indices track­ing corruption around the world, Nordic countries made up four of the six least corrupt nations on the globe.  Some chalked this up to factors such as wealth, ethnic homogeneity, and freedom from colonialism, he said, but he didn’t buy those arguments.  Bangladesh was ethnically homogenous but grotesquely corrupt.  South Korea was ethnically homogenous and rich, but its score did not impress.  On the flip side, he said, look at Finland.  Finland had spent more than a century under Russian occupation.  Fin­land had been extremely poor between the two world wars.  Yet, even then, it had been remarkable for its low corruption.  His contention was that the main cause was the character that Fin­nish culture tried to inculcate in each successive generation: one based on trust in others, a commitment to fairness, a disrespect for undue privilege, and an unwillingness to let infractions slide.  Much the same was true for the other countries at the top of the list, he contended; the one exception was Singapore, where cor­ruption was kept in check by a combination of high salaries, to make bribes less tempting, and harsh punishments.  But top-down solutions didn’t work outside of microstates, he said, so if the likes of Bernie Sanders really wanted the United States to start taking cues from the Nordic countries, only a full-spectrum bottom-up approach could hope to have any success.

The reason I say “full-spectrum” is that it just doesn’t work to put the entire burden of instilling rising generations with char­acter and civic virtue, the sort of citizenship needed for a repub­lic to function, onto the education system.  One of the reasons working in public education is so punishing is that it is expected to serve as the remedy for all sorts of societal ills, in flagrant disregard of the exchange rate between prevention and cure.  For instance, the school where I taught had a larger than average achievement gap between students identified as white and those who were not.  This reflected the unusually wide gap in the lived experience of these students.  White students in this town were likely to be children of professors, successful artists, tech work­ers, and the like; many lived in multi-million-dollar homes up in the hills.  The circumstances of non-white students tended to be quite different.  Many were very recent immigrants who had fled from war zones.  Others were immigrants of a more local sort, commuting a fair distance to school from impoverished neigh­borhoods outside of town.  Some didn’t even have fixed addres­ses.  Over the years, the school had tried many initiatives to try to reduce the achievement gap.  Honors classes were abolished in the name of shared experience and peer-to-peer education.  Homework was eliminated, on the basis that you can’t expect students to write essays in a homeless shelter, or when they have a bunch of younger siblings they’re relied upon to look after as soon as class is out.  When I left, there was a vigorous debate going on about the possibility of instituting separate grading systems, so that white students would be penalized for late work and non-white students would not.  One math teacher was stead­fast in maintaining that all of this was counterproductive: year after year in the email discussion threads, he argued that trying to find ways to make up for differences in privilege was like com­ing up with better ways to bail out a sinking boat⁠—it just made it that much easier to put off fixing the damage that was swamping the boat in the first place.  “People tell us that we should stay in our classrooms and do impossible things, ‘because you need to recognize that you are powerless to change the way things are,’” he wrote.  “But that is not true! We have power, and if we act collectively we have a lot of power. Protest the massive socio­economic inequality in our city, state, country, and world.”  He called for teachers⁠—not just us, but basically all teachers⁠—to go on strike demanding “a combination of progressive taxation, guaranteed income, increased minimum wage, and high quality universal healthcare”.  Anything less was pointless.  “Research going back at least four decades shows that the primary factor in predicting a child’s academic success is their family’s wealth. De­spite what the neoliberals want us to believe, we cannot educate our way to equality,” he insisted⁠—italics his.

Yet teachers remain charged with doing the impossible and edu­cating our way to, if not equality, then at least civilization.  But usually the civic virtue and character elements of education aren’t a big part of the pitch to students to get them to take it seriously⁠—the social efficiency is.  It isn’t long before kids are bombarded with the message, both inside and outside the class­room, that unless their families have money or connections to prop them up, how well they do in school is largely going to de­termine their lot in life.  And the stakes are higher than they used to be.  Again, there was a time when, if school wasn’t your thing, you could still get a job at the mill or the mine or the plant and lead a solid middle-class life.  But as the middle class has been hollowed out, life outcomes have become a lot more polarized.  It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that either you’re the cardiologist performing heart bypasses or you’re flipping the burgers that make all those bypasses necessary.  In some places this has made education fiercely competitive, which brings its own set of problems⁠—it kills the joy of learning and undermines the spirit of peer collaboration that, at least according to teacher credentialing programs, modern education is supposed to be built around.  But in other places the problems are quite differ­ent.  American schools are funded at the state and local levels.  Therefore, if you’re in a poor area⁠—say, one of the vast rural regions in the red states that went for Trump close to unani­mously⁠—how well are you going to learn, and how well are you going to be able to compete for future opportunities against students in more affluent districts, when your school relies on a slew of fill-in teachers on emergency credentials, teaching in di­lapidated classrooms with few supplies?  (Actually, in some areas qualified teachers are so hard to come by that districts have given up finding them locally⁠—in rural schools foreign language classes, for instance, are often conducted online these days.) 

And the effect of poverty on school quality pales in comparison to its effect on students.  Neglectful or abusive home lives, stress responses trained on constant danger, simple hunger⁠—they all cause behavioral problems that teachers are expected to over­come by waving the magic wand of “classroom management”.  But I’ve read plenty of articles about teachers getting hired in the sorts of places Trump won⁠—teachers who weren’t outsiders, but products of deep red rural America themselves⁠—and even when these issues weren’t major factors, these teachers were soon looking for other work due to, as one of them put it, “just the level of disrespect and non-interest” they encountered.  And this wasn’t adolescent rebellion: the teachers in these articles taught elementary school.  How do kids that young develop such an antipathy to education that they torment their teachers?  If the question were about a kid, you might look into personal rea­sons.  It might be chalked up to the oddly tautological “opposi­tional defiance”, say.  Or maybe the child finds school difficult and frustrating due to a lack of “scholastic aptitude”; after all, by definition half the population is below median intelligence.  But when it’s nearly everyone?  That’s something these students must be picking up from their community.  And we do see region­al hostility to education, both in terms of policy (such as teacher pay) and more directly, with parent protests and angry appear­ances by community residents at school board meetings.  Why the hostility?

Some of it is about the content of public school instruction.  When children take a science class and learn that the Earth is not six thousand years old but 4.54 billion, and that the proof is not what a handful of Iron Age priests put forward as the re­vealed word of an unseen god but rather radiometric dating that you can verify for yourself once you learn how to use a mass spectrometer, the churches don’t like it because it undermines their authority, and the churchgoers don’t like it because it un­dermines their identity.  When children take a history class and learn about, say, the 1921 Tulsa massacre⁠—in which a white mob firebombed one of the wealthiest African-American neighbor­hoods in the country, burning the forty-block district to the ground, murdering dozens and injuring hundreds⁠—those who identify with the mob demand that the incident be removed from the curriculum.  They call teaching such things “woke”, and while that term has become an epithet on the right for “anything I don’t like”, in this case it fits with the original meaning: it’s a long-suppressed incident whose revelation has the potential to wake people up to some of the themes of American history.  In this case the theme is, why are people with African ancestry poorer than other groups in the U.S.?  Because wealth has been systematically denied to them.  This was most obvious over the course of centuries of slavery, when the fruits of their labor were flat-out stolen, but more recently the practice of redlining and the design of New Deal policies largely kept them from sharing in the gains the middle class accrued during the Great Compres­sion⁠—and, in between, we see terror and violence employed in places like Tulsa to destroy whatever affluence they may have been able to obtain.  The “fuck your feelings” folks don’t want their kids to hear about this because they fear it might make them feel bad about being white.  It may even encourage them to think that perhaps basing society around a racial hierarchy is bad, when, as Lyndon Johnson pointed out, that hierarchy is the only thing keeping many of these people off the very bottom of the social totem pole.  And thus they demand that schools keep their kids asleep.

The thing is, you can look into the roots of ideology like this, but ideology quickly becomes its own thing.  A community may have initial grievances that make them hostile to intellectual inquiry, but pretty soon anti-intellectualism is part of the local culture in and of itself.  Again, there are cultures in which academic achievement is not just prized but demanded, where an A is shameful because it’s not an A+, and they have their own prob­lems.  But in the sorts of places that voted for Trump, academic achievement is more likely to be despised.  Schools, meant to be learning communities, become social hierarchies where the val­ued qualities are not mental or moral, but material (are you wearing the right clothes?) or even physical (doesn’t the arche­typal American high school have football players and cheerlead­ers at the top?).  Kids with good grades are scorned, and not just at school.  This old Simpsons joke in which Rainier Wolfcastle describes his upcoming movie didn’t just come out of nowhere:

Now, you might think, okay, sure, that’s not a social environment that’s going to turn out well-informed citizens with critical thinking skills.  You’ll be able to collect a lot of their votes just by blatantly lying about basic facts and by proposing to tackle problems with simplistic solutions that would only make things worse.  But that’s actually not where I’m going with this.  I’m more interested in the anger.  Again, if the message is “your lot in life is largely determined by how well you do in school”, but you and your community don’t value doing well in school, you’re going to be angry at the fundamental underpinnings of society in our age of education.  Officials whose constituencies hail from these sorts of places thus leverage that anger in their favor by making performative ignorance part of their political personae.  We saw it in the first presidential debate of 2000, when Al Gore ran through some of the math in George W. Bush’s proposals, mentioning that a hundred billion dollars would be cut from Medicare to pay for a tax cut for the wealthiest one percent, and that Medicare premiums would go up eighteen to forty-seven percent.  Bush’s reply?  “Look, this is a man who has great num­bers. He talks about numbers. I’m beginning to think not only did he invent the Internet, but he invented the calculator.”  Put aside the canned zinger⁠—to me the real key is the contempt packed into the line “he talks about numbers”, aimed at collecting the votes of everyone who ever flunked a math class and hates those fuckin’ nerds who talk about percents and shit.  Nowadays you have the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene insisting that COVID‑19 must have been a Chinese bioweapon, turning a deaf ear to viro­logists’ explanations of how a bat coronavirus could have natu­rally evolved to infect humans via an intermediate host: “I don’t believe in that type of so-called science,” she scoffed.  “I don’t believe in evolution. I believe in God.” Is Greene actually that stupid?  Yes, but she also knows that she can collect all the votes of everyone who ever flunked a biology test because the teacher wanted students to answer on the basis of all that confusing stuff about mutation and natural selection that the reverend says will send us to hell.  And now, as we proceed ever deeper into our second Gilded Age, more and more people find that the message about the importance of doing well in school was right.  You didn’t follow Rainier Wolfcastle’s son to that fancy East Coast college, and now your lot in life sucks.  No blue-collar middle-class life for you.  Instead, just like the teachers warned, you end­ed up spending day after soul-crushing day mindlessly ringing up purchases of imported Chinese crap at the Wal‑Mart, relying on food stamps to be able to eat because your paycheck isn’t enough to live on.  And you’re angry.  So you vote for the guy who’s going to take away your food stamps.  That may not seem like a very logical response.  But you see it as a way to lash out at whoever set the rules of the game that you lost.

The tagline for my 2020 election article was “Eleven million vote to watch the world burn”⁠—a reference to the fact that sixty-three million people had voted for Trump in 2016, when he’d never held office and was therefore still something of an unknown quantity… and then in 2020, after four years of chaos, corrup­tion, and catastrophe, he upped that to seventy-four million!  The fact that Trump was destroying America motivated eleven million people who hadn’t voted for him the first time around to opt to give him a second term.  However, the eternally high “wrong track” numbers got more than fifteen million people who hadn’t voted for Hillary Clinton to vote for Joe Biden.  Trump exists in a perpetual state of rage, but the narcissistic injury that came with getting voted out sent him into a meltdown, especially after his attempt to cling to power via a combination of bureaucratic mal­feasance and mob violence (temporarily) failed.  Having racked up even more crimes in the effort, it became clear that his only chance to avoid dying in prison was a combination of breathtak­ing fecklessness on the part of the new Democratic administra­tion and somehow becoming the only president other than Gro­ver Cleveland to return to the White House after getting voted out.  He retreated into revenge fantasies, ranting on social media, and even on the campaign trail, about the day that he could jail or even kill prosecutors and judges for the crime of prosecuting and judging his many, many crimes.  This was basically the only line of attack that Trump’s Republican rivals were willing to bring to bear, for fear of alienating the Trump cult that makes up the majority of the Republican base: that, oh, yeah, Trump had been an awesome president, for sure, but sadly he was stuck in the past, talking incessantly about the 2020 election and his per­sonal grievances, when we needed to be focused on the future and the battle against the woke mind virus!!  But Trump, as al­ways, doubled down.  Michelle Obama has spent Trump’s entire political career declaring that Trump “is not who we are”; Trump was willing to bet that he was.  “I am your retribution” became his new slogan.  To some it seemed nonsensical⁠—did he think tens of millions of voters cared about getting back at Jack Smith?  But apparently what tens of millions of voters heard was this: you don’t need to be part of the Trump cult to vote for him.  You can stay in your intellectually lazy “Politicians? I don’t like any of ’em!” comfort zone.  Because you’re not voting for a per­son⁠—you’re voting for retribution.  This is how you get back at the system that pushed you behind this cash register, or into this Amazon warehouse, or beside this deep fryer.  It’s not, of course!  It’s the predatory capitalists who bankrolled Trump’s campaign and whom he has been selecting for key government posts who pushed you into that Wal‑Mart, stealing your $8500 a year in order to pump their own net worths up into the nine- to twelve-digit range.  That’s another one of those themes you can learn about in history class: manipulating the working class to get it punching down instead of up.  One of the most commonly heard criticisms of Trumpism is that it takes the anger people feel at the bailed-out banks that foreclose on their houses, at the health insurance companies that after decades of premium payments deny their claims, and directs it at vulnerable populations: im­migrants, trans people.  But my main takeaway from the 2024 election is a bit different.  Earlier I wrote about a few of the roots of anti-intellectualism.  And just now I suggested that another of those roots is anger stemming from the perception of many people that the established structure of American society, parti­cularly the education system, functions as a barrier between them and a satisfactory life.  The equity courses in my teacher credentialing program seemed to be largely in sympathy with this notion!  Personally, I’d place the lion’s share of the blame on the way the structure of American society has been warped by post‑1980 capitalism, such that those barriers do become more formidable with each passing year.  But those courses argued that, no, education actually does serve to perpetuate social injus­tice more than remedy it, and we need to fix that.  The retribu­tionists don’t want to fix it, though.  They want to smash it.  They’ve had enough of what Cubberley termed “social efficien­cy”.  But education’s role in directing people into suitable work, which these folks reject, is tangled up with its promotion of civic virtue and character.  And so they reject those things too.  This allows them to support Trump.

Let’s return to that stage where Barack Obama was complaining that “Some folks would be like, ‘Well, Donald Trump sent me a check!’”  He continued: “Let me make sure you all understand this⁠—Joe Biden sent you a check during the pandemic, just like I gave people relief during the Great Recession.  The thing is, we didn’t put our name on it, because it wasn’t about feeding our egos, it wasn’t about advancing our politics, it was about helping people!”  It was a message that went hand in hand with one of the main messages of the Harris campaign: Donald Trump is all about himself, but we Democrats want to help you!  Here’s Harris herself during the debate: “I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch. You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about ‘windmills cause cancer’. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and bore­dom. And I will tell you the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you. You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams, and your, your desires. And I’ll tell you, I believe you deserve a president who actually puts you first. And I pledge to you that I will.”  I’m sure that seemed like a winning line to take.  He’s egocentric!  We’re altruistic!  He only cares about himself!  We care about you!  But to the voting bloc that served as king­makers in 2024, this kind of talk is counterproductive.  Oh, so the Democrats want to help others, do they?  Well, you know who says we’re all supposed to help others?  School!  So fuck that!  It’s all bullshit!  Outside school walls, outside the progressive bubble, Americans spend their lives immersed in a culture of self-pro­motion: the music they listen to, the social media they scroll through… though it’s not like this is anything new.  Just ask P. T. Barnum.  So Donald Trump slapping his name on everything from Trump Vodka to Trump Steaks to the Trump Bible feels real to them.  Humility feels fake.  It also leads Democrats into a trap, because the cynics can ask, oh, if you want to help us so much, why haven’t you?  What have you ever done?  And Democrats can try rattling off their recent accomplishments⁠—what about the American Rescue Plan? what about the Infrastructure Invest­ment and Jobs Act? what about the Inflation Reduction Act?⁠—but the voters have never heard of these things, because recent Democratic leaders have found it gauche to tout their accomp­lishments in a way that would break through to this segment of the public.  Of course, all the problems I’ve been laying out in this article are operating simultaneously, so we also have to take into account the right-wing propaganda machine I discussed above, which does its best to stifle positive news or paint it as negative.  Look at the one Democratic accomplishment that did get the name of a Democratic leader attached to it: the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans tried to smear as “Obamacare” when they thought it would be unpopular.  When Republicans tried to hobble the law by striking portions of it, such as the individual mandate, it actually increased the ACA’s popularity because the parts that remained, people liked.  Medicaid expansion!  No de­nial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions!  No cancellation of coverage due to actually getting sick!  Premium assistance payments!  Loss aversion comes into play here as well: what real­ly solidified support for the ACA was Trump’s attempt to get rid of it in 2017, thwarted by John McCain.  So there you go, right?  A Democratic accomplishment people actually know about!  Except, as with tariffs, this overestimates what people know.  What actu­ally happened was that public opinion of Obamacare and the ACA diverged.  And in those cases when I’ve seen low-information voters told that Obamacare is the ACA, time and time again I’ve seen the same response: first comes the denial, then they look it up, then it sinks in, and then comes the flailing attempt to flee from cognitive dissonance.  I saw an interview with one woman who said, “Okay, it does say here that Obamacare is the ACA, but that means we should keep the ACA but get rid of the Obamacare parts, because Obama is bad.” 

Another exchange I’ve seen multiple times on interview seg­ments like these, at Trump rallies and conservative conferences and the like, has gone like this:

• “Meteorologists argue that greenhouses gases trap heat in the atmosphere, which then warms the oceans and inten­sifies hurricanes, like the one that just hit this area.  Does all this devastation change your mind about the need to fight climate change?”

• “No!  Climate change is a hoax!  We all know who’s really responsible for these hurricanes!”

• “Who?”

• “It’s the government!  They’ve been able to control the weather for decades!  They steered this hurricane over here!”

• “So if Trump wins another term, then he’ll be in control of the weather and any hurricanes can be blamed on him?”

• “Well… it’s not really the U.S. government.  They’re not the ones in control.”

• “Oh? Then who is?”

• “…I’d rather not say.”

Almost invariably, it’s elderly women I’ve seen get rhetorically cornered like this and break out the “I’d rather not say” line.  They’re old enough to have internalized the sense that, outside like-minded circles, you’re not supposed to just come out and say that the Jews are secretly running the world.  That makes you sound like a Nazi, and until recently there was little debate that Nazis were bad.  So bad that, not long ago, calling an American politican a fascist was widely seen as crossing a red line.  In 2004, moveon.org⁠—not even an official Democratic organiza­tion⁠—sponsored a contest for homemade thirty-second ads at­tacking George W. Bush.  Of the 1500 entries posted, two com­pared Bush to Hitler, and both the Republican Party and the legacy media had a little freakout about it, demanding apologies and thundering that this just went to show that the Democrats were all loonies.  But there was no such red line in the bottom half of the Internet, to the point that Mike Godwin posited that all online arguments that lasted long enough eventually led to someone getting called a Nazi.  But that just served as further evidence of the universal agreement that Nazis were bad, with each side accusing the other of being the real Nazis.  Jonah Gold­berg had a bestseller in 2008 with his “stop saying Nazis are right-wing” book Liberal Fascism, for instance.  But these days there is a growing contingent who would chastise Goldberg for smearing the good name of fascism by associating it with liber­als.  I once saw one of those urbanist types grumble that way too many people would happily tolerate outright fascism if it meant a five percent decrease in garbage on the street, only to be del­uged with replies saying things like “How about one percent?” and “I’ll take five percent more garbage if it means we can have fas­cism!”  After all, the young brownshirts argue, you know who says the Nazis were evil?  School!  So fuck that!  Why, I saw a whole bunch of videos explaining that Hitler just loved his coun­try and was trying to protect it from, you know, certain people!  Globalists!  The enemy within!  When Kamala Harris called Don­ald Trump a fascist⁠—echoing Trump’s own former chief of staff, John Kelly⁠—it was meant to serve as a clarion call that the re­public was in serious jeopardy.  This was a presidential candidate saying it, not some pundit or comment section troll.  It was not hyperbole but a serious warning.  For a candidate⁠—a former president!⁠—like Donald Trump to take as his models the likes of Erdoğan, Orbán, Putin, and Xi goes against every tenet of civic virtue Americans are supposed to embrace.  But enough have now rejected civic virtue that it has fundamentally changed the character of the nation and opened us up to a fascist takeover. 

There was a moment when it looked like we might have escaped this fate.  After the Trump/Biden debate, with its subsequent chorus of calls for Biden to drop out, some expressed skepticism: Biden’s poll numbers were poor, but whose would be better?  Pundits fantasized about an impromptu “Thunderdome” pri­mary, but realistically, if Biden were to go, his replacement would have to be his running mate.  The problem was that Kamala Har­ris was no more liked than Biden was.  Still, observers of the poli­tical world were impressed by how seamless the transition was, as the Democratic Party immediately and enthusiastically backed its new standard bearer.  And Harris’s popularity skyrocketed!  What was more, her matchup numbers rose in tandem with her personal popularity.  Soon she was six points ahead of Trump in the polling averages.  Some of this was the excitement of avoid­ing a rematch between an 81-year-old incumbent president and a 78-year-old former president, both of whom had been direly un­popular pretty much throughout their terms.  But some of it was that Democrats had hit upon a winning line against the Republi­can ticket, with Harris’s soon-to-be running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, leading the way: accurately calling Trump and his running mate J. D. Vance weird.  Walz said that he meant things like book banning and intruding into women’s health care deci­sions.  Others pointed out some of the fixations that came up over and over at Trump’s rallies (windmills are “killing all your birds”, modern toilets need to be flushed fifteen times per bath­room visit) or odd moments like when he stared directly at the sun during a partial solar eclipse or when he couldn’t figure out how to close an umbrella so he just dropped it and walked away.  Still others observed that defining image from every Trump rally was of him stiffly jerking his fists around, making faces beneath a thick layer of unblended bronzer, to the tune of a late‑’70s disco anthem about furtive sex among homeless gay men.  When the charges of weirdness seemed to be sticking, Trump resorted to his usual fallbacks of “no, you” and “not me”.  About Walz, Trump said, “He’s weird. I’d say a step further than weird. Weird is a nice word by comparison.”  About himself and Vance, Trump said, “J. D. is not weird. He’s a solid rock. I happen to be a very solid rock. We’re not weird. We’re other things, perhaps, but we’re not weird.”  Which is a very weird way to defend yourself against charges that you’re weird.  In any case, the Democrats seemed to be on to something.  Ridicule is the key to defeating an authoritarian, a number of progressive voices explained.  Trying to scare people into your camp by painting the other side as dan­gerous is counterproductive, because it suggests that the other side is strong, and for a decisive portion of the electorate, that’s what matters⁠—they’ll happily vote for wrong over right, or evil over good, so long as they feel that they’re voting for strong over weak.  And then the consultants got their fingerprints on things.  “Weird” was out.  Instead, what was the Harris campaign’s clos­ing argument?  That Trump was a dangerous fascist.  In another era, even a very recent one, what the Harris campaign pulled off would have been hailed as a masterpiece of political positioning.  I once audited a game theory class that started just like this, with exercises about placing candidates on a political spectrum in order to maximize their appeal to voters.  Harris locked down the support of virtually the entire Democratic Party, plus that of many pre-Trump Republican office holders, plus that of many who served in Trump’s first administration!  When you’ve been endorsed by everyone from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney, what does that even leave?

Well, first, it leaves everyone to the right of shadow autocrat and neocon imperialist Dick Cheney: Christianist theocrats; the Trump cult, i.e., theocrats for whom Trump is their Christ figure; and fascists.  But it also leaves a vast reservoir of people who aren’t really on the political spectrum at all, who have no buy-in to even the most basic tenets of American politics.  Harris closed out her campaign with a series of appearances with Liz Cheney, once the third-ranking Republican in the House, as a demonstra­tion of how vital it was for everyone who believed in representa­tive democracy to back Harris.  But apparently that is no longer a majority, if it ever really was.  After all, where do they try to teach you that belief in representative democracy is a fundamen­tal element of civic virtue?  School!  So fuck that!  Day after day of the teacher in government class acting like it matters which fake politicians we pick⁠—nothing ever gets better!  Me, I don’t like any of ’em!  For a minute there it looked like maybe the Democrats were offering something different, but I turned on that debate, and from Kamala Harris it was just some blah-blah-blah about tax deductions and small businesses and shit.  Are you kidding me?  I don’t know anyone who’s starting a business!  Voters like this don’t really fit onto the traditional left-right continuum⁠—these are the sorts of people who in the 2016 and 2020 cycles backed Bernie Sanders and then switched to Trump.  It might seem ideologically incoherent to go from a self-described demo­cratic socialist to a far-right wannabe strongman, and it is, but Sanders talked about how “we need a revolution in this country”, and Trump talked about “draining the swamp”, so if your only policy goal is to shake things up, you might well think one’s as good as the other.  More recently, when outspoken progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discovered that many voters in her dis­trict had voted for her and Trump on the same ballot, she asked them to volunteer their reasons why, and the results tended to hit the same themes.  You both care about working people like us!  (The idea of Donald Trump caring about anyone other than Donald Trump is preposterous, but I think we’ve pretty well covered these voters’ distinctive combination of cynicism and gullibility.)  You’re both real, not like those fake politicians!  And you both want to really change things!  The Harris campaign, backed by the Clintons and the Bushes and the Cheneys and the Obamas and the Bidens and the old guard of Trumpers, repre­senting the entirety of the political establishment, warned that giving Trump a second term would destroy the institutions that defined America.  What this strategy didn’t take into account was that this is precisely what millions want.  Three million more in 2024 than in 2020, apparently.  While those who wanted Ameri­can institutions to continue numbered six million fewer.

🙧 4

The Republicans seemed well aware of the ideological ground on which the campaign was truly being fought.  I mean, obviously Trump didn’t.  He’s stupid.  But the ideologues standing behind him, the likes of J. D. Vance and Stephen Miller, directly attacked the idea that America is defined by its institutions.  Listening to them make their case brought me back to a debate club meeting back in high school that had stretched well into the evening.  As we chowed down on some Little Caesars, one of the seniors declared that he hated the song “America the Beautiful”.  “It makes it sound like what’s great about America is that we have fields and mountains,” he grumbled.  “Almost every country can say it has pretty scenery.  What’s important about America is our ideals!  Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!  Government of the people, by the people, for the people!  Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press!  You could move America to the Sahara or the Amazon, and as long as we still kept those ideals, it’d still be America!  Because America isn’t a place⁠—America is an idea!”  Cut to thirty-five years later, and the Republicans were saying the exact opposite.  At their convention, featured speaker William Pekrul declared, “America, people say, people is, is an i⁠—America is an idea. But I believe America is much more than that. America, America is our home!”  Vance followed up by repeating that “America is not just an idea,” before going on a long rhetorical excursion about where he wants to be buried.  “That’s Kentucky coal country,” he said, where people “love this country not only because it’s a good idea, but because in their bones they know that this is their home, and it will be their children’s home, and they would die fighting to protect it.”  He went on in this vein for a while, eventually wrap­ping up with this: “That’s not just an idea, my friends, that’s not just a set of principle [sic] […] That is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.”

The problem with all this “America is a place” talk is that Amer­ica isn’t a place.  It is a whole bunch of places.  I used to move around a lot, so I got to know quite a few.  In 1999, I was living in an affluent Southern California exurb carved out of the old Nohl Ranch.  In 2000, I was still ensconced in the hills, but I’d traded eucalyptus for evergreens and blazing sun for gray Northwestern skies.  In 2001, I only ever really saw little slivers of the sky be­tween skyscrapers, having moved to New York City⁠—and when a patch of sky did open up late that summer, it was for apocalyptic reasons.  In 2002, I fled to western New England’s bucolic Pio­neer Valley, making my living tutoring at an elite private acade­my that dated back to the eighteenth century.  You know what all these disparate locales had in common?  The fact that they had fuck all in common with Kentucky coal country!  Or go back to that first verse of “America the Beautiful”.  Amber waves of grain?  Purple mountain majesties?  Katharine Lee Bates wrote that specifically about traveling through the wheat fields of Kan­sas and arriving at Pikes Peak in Colorado.  The vast majority of the population doesn’t live near any of that stuff!  It’s foreign territory if you’re packed on a subway train under the New York island, or munching on trail mix in a redwood forest, or dipping your toes in the Gulf Stream waters⁠—places which are also for­eign to each other.  This isn’t to say that a diverse array of places can’t share a culture or come together as a unified polity.  But in the case of the U.S., they don’t.  The idea that the Republicans’ precious “homeland” is coterminous with our national borders is a joke.  Would J. D. Vance’s “very good people” from Appalachia “die fighting” for San Francisco?  C’mon.  The way the MAGA crowd talks about that part of “our home”, they’d be more in­clined to die fighting against it.

Many have called it paradoxical that the far right has claimed patriotism for itself, while rejecting everything America is sup­posed to stand for and hating half the people in it.  Look at a pic­ture of a Tea Party demonstration from back in the early days of the Obama administration, and you’ll find all sorts of patriotic paraphernalia: Betsy Ross flags, Uncle Sam hats, Statue of Liber­ty crowns, Revolution-era tricorner hats, and the like.  The pro­testers and the politicians they elected, such as Tea Party Caucus chair Michele Bachmann, declared that “adherence to the Consti­tution” was central to their movement.  Yet few of the rank and file could say what was in said document.  Some could, but their stated policy goals involved, at minimum, several far-reaching constitutional amendments, and for the more ambitious, a con­vention to rewrite the whole thing⁠—i.e., the exact opposite of ad­herence.  But the paradox is easily resolved by following Gottlob Frege’s lead in drawing a distinction between sense and refer­ence.  The reference of the word “sun” is a gigantic ball of hydro­gen fusing into helium about ninety-three million miles from Earth.  That could not have been the sense of the word “sun” to anyone prior to about a hundred years ago.  To the author of an 1863 article in Scientific American, the word “sun” meant “an in­candescent body” whose “light is rather that of a glowing metal than that of a glowing furnace”.  Similarly, “the Constitution” may be a reference to a document written in the late eighteenth century laying out the fundamental structure of American gov­ernment.  But the teabaggers’ sense of the Constitution was just “the way things were back in the good ol’ days”.

Which brings us to “the United States of America”.  For the mo­ment, let’s stipulate that the reference of this term is a globally recognized nation-state, its blue areas included, whose govern­ment is structured along the lines set forth in the Constitution.  But if your sense of the term, and all its associated symbols like the flags and hats, is a particular chunk of land out in Dollar Gen­eral country, you’re free to hate the cities and vote for fascists and still chant “U‑S‑A! U‑S‑A!” without irony.  Or maybe your sense of America isn’t entirely geographical⁠—maybe it’s cultural.  For you, America is anywhere people eat the same food you do, watch the same sports you do, have the same accent you do.  But that’s still going to be pretty regional, and it still doesn’t have anything to do with my old debate teammate’s sense of “the Uni­ted States of America” as a set of political principles indepen­dent of region or culture.  One bit of… I think the Kids These Days™ call it “copium”… that I ran across a lot during Trump’s first term was that surely the U.S. would be much better able to resist authoritarianism than Germany in 1933 or Russia in 2000 because of our robust, centuries-old democratic traditions; dem­ocracy failed in these other countries because it had only been around for a few years and the political culture had imprinted on the likes of Bismarck and Stalin.  But like I said above, it seems like for the majority of Americans, representative democracy is something you’re told you’re supposed to believe in, the same way you’re supposed to do your schoolwork without cheating and you’re supposed to wait until you’re twenty-one to drink, and people buy into it to roughly the same extent as they do these other things.  I mean, hell, we’ve raised multiple generations of American girls on Disney princesses, to the point that the theme parks hold coronation ceremonies on American soil⁠—how is any kind of democratic spirit supposed to take hold when we’re ac­tively counterprogramming it at these impressionable ages?  I guess that the one political principle that right-wingers do claim to espouse is “freedom”: “I’m proud to be an American, where [sic] at least I know I’m free” and all that.  But of course freedom doesn’t really mesh well with fascism either.  What do these folks mean by “freedom”?  Freedom of the press?  Trump fantasizes out loud about murdering journalists.  Freedom of assembly?  Trump tried to get the military to shoot protesters.  Freedom of speech?  Red Florida has banned thousands of books.  Freedom of religion?  These folks tend to be Christian nationalists, which is why Trump, the grifter-in-chief, sells them Bibles.  Freedom from want?  They elect people who take money from those in need and funnel it to billionaires.  Freedom from fear?  Republican poli­ticking basically consists of pounding the buttons on the Psycho-Man’s control box, and fear is at the top.  But if your sense of “freedom” is “freedom from a changing world”, well, fascism does promise that, even though it’s impossible to deliver.

I said above that, for a moment, we’d stipulate that “the United States of America” even has a reference.  That moment’s over.  There are important differences among the examples I’ve just given.  The existence of the sun is what John Searle, following in the footsteps of Elizabeth Anscombe, calls a “brute fact”.  The sun exists independent of human minds.  The Constitution doesn’t, really.  Yes, the existence of a piece of parchment with some ink on it is a brute fact, but that it lays out the fundamental structure of American government is what Searle calls an “insti­tutional fact”.  The Constitution, as a text rather than a mere ob­ject, only exists to the extent that there also exist minds capable of interpreting it as a text.  And the fact that different minds might disagree, ingenuously or disingenuously, about how to interpret that text⁠—which is the main reason the Supreme Court exists⁠—muddies the sense/reference distinction.  Even if we posit that the reference of “the Constitution” is a specific string of words, if we don’t agree on the meaning of those words, it’s an empty stipulation.  And “the United States of America” is an even murkier case.  It doesn’t even have as much brute existence as the Constitution.  If you needed to show the U.S. to someone, what would you point at?  “America is a place” suggests that you can point at a piece of land.  All right, I just pointed at my back yard.  I live in California.  Is California part of the U.S.?  In 1840 the answer was no.  In 1850 the answer was yes.  So apparently American-ness (and Mexican-ness, and Spanish-ness, and Oh­lone-ness, and Hokan-ness) is not inherent in the land itself.  The existence of a country is purely an institutional fact.  That is to say, it is not objective but intersubjective.  Consider the defini­tion of a word in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass:

        “[…] There’s glory for you!”
        “I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.
        Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously.  “Of course you don’t⁠—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
        “But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argu­ment,’” Alice objected.
        “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean⁠—nei­ther more nor less.”

Let’s posit that some truths are objective.  Two plus two equals four.  O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four said two plus two could equal five if the party said so, but if you calculate your missile trajectories on that basis, you won’t score a lot of hits.  Even O’Brien acknowledged that proceeding as if two plus two equals four was often “convenient” for the party’s purposes.  But inter­subjective truths, like the definition of a word, come down to a numbers game.  If you’re the only person who uses a word in a way that deviates from its accepted definitions, like Humpty Dumpty above, that’s just an error, though I’m sure you can find plenty of people on Reddit to jump in and say errors don’t exist and it’s all just linguistic drift.  But if you can get enough people to come with you, then people who insist the deviation is an er­ror will find themselves fighting a losing battle.  While working on my presidents series I learned that the word “dude” once meant something akin to “dandy” or “fop”; it was coined in 1883 and became the hot new word of that year, like “enshittification” last year.  The use of “dude” as a term for men in general was actually not recorded until 1966.  But the original meaning has been almost entirely lost⁠—I lived nearly forty years before find­ing out about it.  In a way, it’s a shame, because swapping specifi­city for generality makes language a less useful tool for commu­nication, though I suppose people find the new meaning valuable in signaling informality.  In any case, since the existence of the United States of America is an institutional fact, it too is defined intersubjectively.  Is representative democracy a defining ele­ment of the nation?  Seventy-seven million voted that it is not.  Are they in error, or have they redefined America?  I’d like to suggest a third possibility.  Let me start with a prime example of the aforementioned enshittification.

In 2022, Elon Musk spent forty-four billion dollars⁠—more than the government of Pakistan, a country of a quarter of a billion people, spent on everything combined that year⁠—to buy his favor­ite social media network, Twitter.  Pretty much the first thing he did was have the algorithm tweaked to put his own posts at the top of everyone’s feed, so that before you could see what your friends were up to, you had look at wojak memes retweeted by a man in his fifties.  Come the ’24 campaign season, by which point he had renamed the platform “X”, he had the site promoting the candidate he’d endorsed, Donald Trump.  In between, he had al­gorithmically amplified disinformation from authoritarian re­gimes, such as Russia and China, with whom he has close person­al and business relationships; reinstated accounts suspended for hate speech and harassment, and removed the ability to block them; and replaced identity verification with a payment system⁠—for eight bucks, impersonate anyone you like!  Those who re­mained on Twitter found themselves trying to carry on their business in a place that had decayed into a sewer full of Nazis, porn bots, and scammers.  Why not just leave?, many asked, but network effects create a lot of inertia.  If you’ve amassed an audi­ence of millions, or thousands, or even hundreds, you’re unlikely to blithely decamp to some upstart service where you’ll be able to assemble only a tiny fraction of the audience.  It’s that inertia that makes enshittification possible.  But, after the election, sud­denly people did leave.  By the tens of millions, people abandoned the former Twitter for a clone of the pre-Musk Twitter called Bluesky.  Some have pointed out that Bluesky also depends on venture capital and is simply a few steps earlier in the process of enshittification, but for now, it does feel like a successful reloca­tion to a more civilized place, leaving the chuds to splash around in their sewer.  So why can’t we do that in real life?

There was once a time when if things were going badly in your home country, there was at least one country where you could make a new home: the United States of America.  Immigration was one of the top issues in the 2024 election, with Trump pivot­ing from promising to build a wall to promising mass deporta­tions: over ten million people would be rounded up and tossed out.  As in 2016, critics pointed out that we are a nation of immi­grants; Trump’s own mother was an immigrant, as were his pa­ternal grandparents and two of his three wives.  Watching inter­views with opponents of immigration, I would run into the same exchange over and over:

• “You say ‘America is for Americans and Americans only’, but your own grandparents were immigrants!  If the U.S. had taken your stance in 1907, you wouldn’t even be here yourself!”

• “Yeah, but my grandparents came over legally!  It’s different!”

But prior to 1891 there was no such thing as “legal” or “illegal” immigration⁠—you just showed up and got to work.  Even after Ellis Island was opened, you didn’t need a passport or a visa or anything⁠—it was basically a minimal inspection to make sure you weren’t about to drop dead of cholera, and even if you were, you’d probably just be sent into quarantine, not barred outright.  From what I can tell⁠—and I’ve spent many an hour looking into this⁠—there is no such country today.  You can’t just fly into Van­couver or Melbourne and say, hey, things seem to be going a little better in your country than in mine, so I’d like to move here for a few years!  Even having a well-paying online job, so you won’t be competing with locals for employment or at risk of going on ben­efits, doesn’t help.  And sure⁠—as I’ve mentioned in past articles, I can understand countries’ reluctance to just open their borders to all comers.  For instance, France prides itself on being a secu­lar society.  If you’re a French citizen and you don’t want religi­ous people coming in and chipping away at the wall between church and state, I think it’s fair to say that if you don’t believe in laïcité, you can’t move to France.  In 1979, Sweden famously banned corporal punishment of children; for forty-five years, spanking your kids has been illegal there.  If you’re a Swedish citizen and you don’t want people from societies where beating children is part of the culture coming in and flouting this law, I think it’s fair to say that if you don’t believe in absolute non-violence toward those in your care, you can’t move to Sweden.  These are articulable and admirable values.  And a polity should be based on shared values, a shared sense of what constitutes a good fundamental set of laws to live by with only the details at the margins to be hammered out, or else it is no longer a polity but rather a disputed territory.  I’ve been lamenting that a huge swath of the American electorate has abandoned democracy, or revealed that it had never valued democracy to begin with, but democracy doesn’t work outside the context of a polity.  Majority rule is only tolerable to the extent that what each side wants is tolerable to the other.

When you have a broad agreement on basic political principles, watching an election go the wrong way is an occasion for disap­pointment rather than despair.  Take the 2020 Democratic pri­maries.  I voted for Elizabeth Warren.  When Bernie Sanders won the first few contests, I was nervous about what that might mean for the general election, but if he were to become president, I thought, that would be awesome!  Then Jim Clyburn rescued Joe Biden’s floundering candidacy, and over the course of just a few days Biden went from distant also-ran to prospective nominee.  And I thought, well, he was far from my first choice, but I’m okay with living in a country where Joe Biden is president.  That is most emphatically not what happens when you add Republican candidates to the mix.  A comparison I often hear is to choosing what to eat; John Cole once wrote that modern American demo­cracy was like “trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her prefer­ence would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax”.  David Sedaris famously offered up the image of a plane trip on which the flight attendant asks a passenger whether he’d like the chicken or a pile of shit with broken glass in it, and being an undecided voter, the passenger takes a long pause and asks how the chicken is cooked.  But even though this wasn’t the point of Sedaris’s analo­gy, I think it points up a fundamental flaw with democracy.  Dem­ocracy was a tremendous improvement over despotism, as under despotism only the despot gets what he wants.  Under democra­cy, the majority (or, in the case of the 2024 popular vote, the plu­rality) get what they want.  But on Sedaris’s plane, all the passen­gers get what they want!  Those who order the chicken get the chicken, and those who order the pile of shit get the pile of shit!  So why can’t we figure out a way for those who want Harris as president to get Harris, and those who want Trump to get Trump?  Wouldn’t it be better to make 98.3% of the electorate happy than 49.9%?  Same for Cole’s: if you’ve reached that kind of impasse, you don’t flip a coin to decide whether to eat at Oliveto or Wheel Works.  You break up.  Earlier I was talking about lingu­istic drift, but language doesn’t just evolve in a linear fashion⁠—it diverges.  When a mistake or innovation starts to spread, some speakers adopt the change and others don’t.  That’s how we wind up with new dialects and eventually new languages.  In centuries past, this divergence both reflected and reinforced the division of one society into two.  But that can become clear when the lingui­stic divergence is merely one of accent, or nothing at all.  It’s like I tell my students when their AP U.S. History courses reach the 1850s: the U.S. had always been two distinct societies awkwardly welded together, but now both sides were starting to realize that they were two enemy societies and the weld couldn’t hold for­ever.

Abraham Lincoln and the Union Army may have applied a for­cible spot weld after eleven slave states broke away, but Recon­struction failed to make the 1870s look much different from the 1850s.  In 1871, Ulysses Grant’s attorney general Amos Akerman reported that “our southern population hate the government of the United States, because they understand it emphatically to represent northern sentiment”, and well over a century later, it was widely understood that an internal cold war was still raging in the supposedly “United” States.  This was reflected in the image to the right, which popped up all over the Internet in the aftermath of the 2004 election.  It’s not the map that would be drawn today.  Even at the time people criticized it: “Alberta should be in Jesusland!”  But it does highlight a number of absurdities in the world as it stands.  For one: this appeared at a time when George W. Bush of the Republican Party had just been elected to a second term, while Canada’s prime minister was Paul Martin of the Liberal Party, which had held office since 1993.  But from 2009 to 2015, that polarity was flipped, with Barack Obama of the Democratic Party as president of the United States while Canada’s prime minister was Stephen Harper of the Conservative Party.  As I type this, the two coun­tries are aligned, with Democrat Joe Biden and Liberal Justin Trudeau clinging to power in the U.S. and Canada respectively.  They will almost certainly be aligned again in 2025, with Repub­lican Donald Trump taking office in January, while Conservative Pierre Poilievre is the prohibitive favorite to become Canada’s next prime minister.  Polls have the Conservatives at only 44%, but Canada uses a plurality “first past the post” system in a country with five major parties.  51% currently say they will vote for more left-leaning parties, but with that vote split four ways (21% Liberal, 21% NDP, 7% Bloc, 2% Green), the Conservatives are at the moment projected to win 226 out of 343 seats.  The basic idea behind the Canada/Jesusland map, however outdated and inaccurate, is that if you were going to divide the territory of the U.S. and Canada into two countries, you could construct borders such that most of the population in both new countries would be happy with their governments nearly all the time, while right now, no matter how the elections come out half the population in each country ends up miserable.  And why?  What’s the basis for the current division?  Is it that Seattle and Jacksonville share a deep cultural bond, while Seattle and Vancouver are so unutter­ably foreign to one another that we need to involve passports and customs clearance? Is it that residents of Red Deer, Alberta, would feel totally out of their element in Montana, but right at home in Montreal?  It’s ludicrous.  But because it’s where histori­cal happenstance has led us, few acknowledge the sheer idiocy of our political geography.

And you might say, all right, let’s say we magically pull off a Czechoslovakian divorce.  Red America and Blue America are now independent nations.  How long does either one stay unified?  Above I talked about how the broad agreement among voters in a primary election means that any winner will be at least accept­able to the vast majority of them.  But what happens when that’s no longer true?  When the Bernie areas want to split from the Biden areas, and they split and split again, until you’ve got the People’s Front of Judea declaring that they can’t share a polity with the Judean People’s Front?  How many pieces should the country splinter into?  Well… for a start, how about fifty?  This land may get called “America”⁠—though residents of other coun­tries in North and South America understandably have gripes about that⁠—but the political entity located here is generally ab­breviated to “United States”.  The number of countries referred to by political structure rather than geographical location is tiny.  For the United States to bill itself this way suggests that we con­sider it really important for the world to know that we are a col­lection of distinct political entities, not a unitary republic.  It’s the reason the Senate votes like the United Nations:

The idea here was that states should have equal voting power because they were not mere administrative divisions; they were societies of different sizes but equally sovereign, with distinct purposes behind each one.  One had been chartered as a haven for Puritans, another for Quakers, another for Catholics.  One was built around a traders’ metropolis; another was a planters’ aris­tocracy.  Some states had originally calved off from bigger ones because of ideological or economic differences: Rhode Island in the name of separation between church and state, North Carolina because it had developed very differently from the region around Charleston.  Each state has its own chief executive, its own legis­lature, its own court system, its own constitution, its own flag.  William Paterson, largely responsible for the Senate system, argued “that the people of America were sharpsighted and not to be deceived”, and that when they called for the Constitutional Convention, “the idea of a national government as contradistin­guished from a federal one never entered into the mind of any of them”.  But it certainly entered into the mind of many of the del­egates, who pushed for a much stronger central government and a legislature based on proportional representation⁠—the system that was soon adopted by the House of Representatives.  Despite Paterson’s insistence that his home state of “New Jersey will never confederate on the plan before the committee” because “she would be swallowed up”, and that he would “rather submit to a monarch, to a despot, than to such a fate”, New Jersey was in fact swallowed up along with the other states, which have become little more than the administrative divisions mentioned above.  The notion that states should represent distinct societies had clearly gone out the window when California was admitted as a single state, as if there were some great cultural affinity between Humboldt Bay and the Imperial Valley, while the Dakota Territory was split in half, suggesting an unbridgeable gulf be­tween Grand Forks and Sioux Falls.  In reality, it was divided in half because Gilded Age Republicans wanted to add four Repub­lican senators rather than just two.  A legacy of Paterson’s “New Jersey Plan” is that in the next Congress, the the thirty-two Republican senators from Wyoming, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, West Virginia, Idaho, Nebraska, Mississippi, Kansas, Arkansas, Iowa, Utah, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Louisi­ana will represent fewer people combined than the two Demo­cratic senators from California will.  That is, as the power of the federal government has grown, the sense of the states as distinct societies has been discarded except to the extent that it can be used for fuckery. 

It’s a shame, because it sure seems like we had the opportunity to do a much better job of maximizing the number of people who get what they want.  Part of the idea behind independence was that government should be local⁠—the colonists chafed at laws set by a king and parliament on the other side of the ocean.  Well, so much for that⁠—now we’ve got this sprawling behemoth of a country, and those of us who live along the Pacific are about to be subject to the caprices of a New York City con artist who spends most of his time holed up in South Florida, nearly as far away from us as London from Boston.  The authors of A Pattern Language argued that when a polity encompasses more than about ten million, “people become remote from the large-scale processes of government”, and that’s what we see today⁠—gov­ernment is so remote to most people that they treat it like a TV show and vote in a game show host for the lulz.  The borders of territories and even states also used to be, if not as dynamic as I might like, not as ossified as they are today.  Whenever I write about how a polity should be, as (again) A Pattern Language puts it, “small and autonomous enough to serve as an indepen­dent sphere of culture”, people write in to say that even suppos­edly uniform regions tend to be 60/40 on most political issues.  But redrawing the lines can help to keep like-minded people together, as those who serve on redistricting commissions can attest.  And even more important is a key principle we estab­lished immediately after independence: freedom of movement for the citizens of any state within all of them.  If your state passed an abortion ban and you’re worried about bleeding out in a hospital parking lot after being denied care, you actually can just move to a state with no ban.  Go to Oregon!  Go to Colorado!  Go to Minnesota!  Heck, go to Alaska if you still want Republicans in charge for some reason!  And again, whenever I say this, peo­ple write in to object that it’s not so easy⁠—moving is expensive, and most people can’t just up and leave their jobs and their sup­port networks.  Maybe not.  But at least there’s no legal barrier, the way there is if you want to move to Canada or Australia.  And that’s sort of the thing⁠—while I would move to Vancouver or Mel­bourne to try to escape fascism, I don’t actually want to move to those places.  I’ve already found a home, both politically and oth­erwise.  So I’d prefer to stay in California⁠—just an independent one.  Unlike the high school I attended, the high school where I used to teach didn’t have flags in the classrooms, but when I was assigned a room, I discovered that the previous teacher had put up a U.S. flag; I took it down and put California’s bear flag in its place.  I still have that bear flag hanging right behind me in my online class­room.  California has forty million people, too many to fit the strictures above, so if the world magically adopted the system in A Pattern Language, my country would probably look like this: a smallish piece of a single state, but still the area of Ireland, the population of Belgium, and the GDP of Spain.  And I’m sure there would be interstate compacts forged to work closely with other blue regions.  What would stop is what hap­pens now, which is submitting taxes to the federal government and only receiving a fraction back in federal expenditures, with the excess going to subsidize places like Mississippi and West Virginia that are hostile to our values.

The Biden administration’s big economic packages illustrated how this happens.  Trump wouldn’t even give California disaster aid for its 2018 wildfires until his aides showed him that the particular districts affected had voted for him.  Meanwhile, Biden and the Democrats made sure that many of the benefits in their legislation would be directed to red areas.  These packages passed on party-line votes: in the House, the vote on the Ameri­can Rescue Plan Act was zero Republicans yes, 210 no; on the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, two Republicans yes, 201 no; on the Inflation Reduction Act, zero Republicans yes, 212 no.  Then, those Republicans turned around and campaigned on that legislation: for instance, you had Nancy Mace⁠—not one of the yes votes⁠—holding a press conference to announce that she had brought South Carolina a new transit hub.  And her voters decided that she was therefore doing a great job and gave the Democrats no credit.  And Biden said he had no second thoughts about the allocation of spending because he had “pledged to be a president for all Americans”.  I wonder what Joe Biden’s sense of “Americans” is.  Is it just anyone who lives within its borders?  Is America a place?  If so, he ceded that debate to the Republicans before it began⁠—and people said his performance in the June debate was bad!  Or is belief in the principles he would have been taught in civics class part of the definition?  Because if so, you don’t demonstrate that you’re a “president for all Americans” by sending their tax dollars to a bunch of fascists who happen to inhabit the middle north latitudes of the Western Hemisphere.  But I suppose this is academic.  Now that those fascists have gotten their way, that money will be going not to the red states but into the pockets of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. 

🙧 Postscript 1

So I guess all of the above means that my takeaway from this election was something like this.  A startlingly large majority of people think that the country is going down the tubes.  And they’ve thought so for twenty years!  This suggests that not a single year of inflation but a long-term change is to blame.  The most likely suspect is the unraveling of the Great Compression and the consequent hollowing out of the middle class; for all but those at the very top, who have captured nearly all the additional wealth produced each year for the past half century, the result has been insecurity for the better off, immiseration for the worse.  It’s a situation that might be expected to spark rage at the plutocratic class.  However, those plutocrats have spent dec­ades building out an extraordinarily effective propaganda ma­chine to capture the hearts and minds of the disaffected and direct that rage against the institutions that stand in the pluto­crats’ way: the regulatory state, the education system, demo­cracy itself.  Turning against these institutions has also meant turning against the morality that underlies them, allowing the ascent of a depraved criminal to the highest office in the land.

But there are those who say that all of the above is bullshit, par­ticularly insofar as it looks to economics as the base from which the rest proceeds.  Economic anxiety is just a fig leaf excuse, they say.  The real reasons Kamala Harris lost are very simple: sexism and racism.  I can’t really spend another twenty thousand words getting into this side of things, but I couldn’t help but note this.  The social justice movement, both inside and outside academia, has coined a number of phrases that have caught on for crystal­lizing concepts that now had succinct, repeatable labels.  “White privilege” is one.  “Toxic masculinity” is another.  These phrases almost invariably find right-wing rage focused upon them⁠—using them identifies someone as the enemy.  One such phrase is “rape culture”, used to describe societies in which rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse, and sexual harassment are ignored, covered up, trivialized, and normalized.  So what did Trump do almost im­mediately after getting elected?  He an­nounced that his pick for attorney general was Matt Gaetz, known first and foremost for a sex trafficking scandal.  For de­fense secretary he picked Pete Hegseth, who had paid off a sexual assault claim and whose own mother had called him “an abuser of women”.  And for health secretary he chose Robert Kennedy Jr., who had been revealed to have forced himself on his children’s babysitter, which he chalked up to “a very, very rambunctious youth” (though he was in his forties at the time).  For his later selections, Trump picked a bunch of billionaires, not even trying to disguise the country’s transformation into a plutocratic oligarchy… but, yeah, the sex crime crew came first, and that’s not about economics.  It’s about an adjudicated rapist, with the backing of seventy-seven million voters, demonstrating that this sort of record is not disqualify­ing.  That is, it was specifically a move to advance the cause of rape culture.  And sure enough, school hallways throughout the nation were soon filled with boys taunting girls with chants of “your body, my choice”.

🙧 Postscript 2

My 2012 election article did talk a bit about why the results had turned out the way they had, but mostly it was about how people thought the results would play out.  Here’s how the article began:

I have mentioned in the past that the poll results on the ESPN web site make no sense to me.  An ESPN poll will ask a question like “Who will win tonight’s game between the Phoenix Suns and the Memphis Grizzlies?”, and a look at the results map will show that 92% of Arizona voters have gone for the Suns and 96% of Tennessee voters have gone for the Grizzlies.  But the question didn’t ask who the voters wanted to win, but who they thought would win.  Apparently over ninety percent of the population, or at least of espn.com visitors, are optimists.  I don’t understand optimism.

In 2012, both sides seemed oddly certain that their side was going to win.  Democrats pointed to the polling averages: Sam Wang had Barack Obama with a 99% chance of re-election, and Nate Silver put the figure at 91%.  But when I looked at what twelve of the most well-known conservative pundits were saying, I found that every single one of them predicted that Mitt Romney would win⁠—with most of them confident of a landslide.  David Brooks scoffed at the statisticians: “Experts with fancy computer models are terrible at predicting human behavior.”  Karl Rove said that “the anecdotal and intangible evidence” pointed to a Romney victory.  Peggy Noonan agreed that for Romney “the vibrations are right”.  After Romney lost, the liberal blogs had a good laugh: that’s faith-based prognostication for ya!  Here in the reality-based community, we go by polls, not “vibrations”!

Cut to twelve years later, and from the moment Harris took over from Biden and jumped out to a six-point lead, seemingly every poster on those same liberal blogs was treating it like a foregone conclusion that Harris would win, and win big⁠—even as that lead in the polls dwindled.  Oh, don’t worry about the polls!, they’d say.  The pollsters are just nervous about the fact that they un­derstated Trump’s support in 2016 and 2020.  They’re overcor­recting!  And look, most of the pollsters are actually Republican-affiliated!  They’re flooding the zone with junk polls so Trump can claim fraud again!  And who gets polled these days anyway?  Like, who answers calls from an unknown number?  Who, upon finding it’s a pollster, actually sits and answers all the questions?  And answers them honestly?  Anyway, the polls aren’t accounting for the fact that everything has changed since the Supreme Court struck down Roe.  You know, in 2016 and 2020 my neighborhood was filled with Trump signs, and now I barely see any!  Kamala’s rallies are like rock concerts, full of joy and energy, while Trump just drones for two hours and people leave early!  Look, Michael Moore was the one guy who said Trump would win in 2016, and he says this year Kamala will win!  And here’s a professor who’s called the last ten elections correctly with his famous formula, and he says all signs point to Harris!  So forget that the polling averages all have it as a 50/50 race!  The vibrations are right!

So this kind of talk isn’t about left vs. right⁠—it’s just optimists vs. pessimists.  Except that once Biden had stepped back, pessi­mists seemed nowhere in evidence.  I looked at over five hundred predictions in the comments threads on various liberal blogs.  How many had Trump winning?  Zero!  The big debate was whe­ther Harris would win just the “blue wall” swing states, leading to months of attempts by the Trump camp to overturn the 270–268 result; whether she would win by a margin comparable to Biden’s in 2020, with over three hundred electoral votes; or whe­ther she would really blow the whole thing wide open, taking the popular vote by fifteen and flipping both Florida and Texas.  But not a single comment I found had Trump winning.  And, I mean, what the fuck?  Are there really no pessimists out there?  Not even any contrarians?  Were the posts predicting a Republican trifecta deleted as the work of trolls trying to depress turnout or something?  It really had me questioning my grip on reality.  Like, okay, sure, Democrats did very well in the 2018 midterms, won a trifecta in 2020, and kept the usual midterm bloodbath down to more of a paper cut in 2022.  Abortion rights had won big in places you wouldn’t expect them to.  But still, such confidence?  Sam Wang had the 2016 election at 99.9%+ for Clinton, and she lost.  In 2024, Wang had Trump favored from the second week of October onward.  Nate Silver’s crew at fivethirtyeight.com had the 2020 election at 89% for Biden, only for Trump to come within 21,600 flipped votes of re-election.  Silver left to go work for far-right billionaire oligarch Peter Thiel, but those who remained also had Trump favored, until at the last moment they put each candidate’s odds at precisely 50%.  So you’ve managed to roll a one on a thousand-sided die, you rolled a two on a ten-sider, but you’re absolutely certain the coin flip is going to go your way?  And it’s not just you?  Everybody is absolutely certain?

In 2012 I said that I didn’t understand optimism.  I meant that in a couple of ways.  As noted at the very top of this article, I went to a computer science magnet school in Orange County, meaning that many of my classmates were both rationalistic and evangeli­cal.  They thought Pascal’s Wager was an brilliant checkmate to atheists.  If God doesn’t exist, then it doesn’t matter whe­ther you believe in him or not!  But if God does exist, then if you believe in him you’ll go to heaven, and if you don’t you’ll go to hell!  So sim­ple game theory dictates that the logical choice is to believe in God, because there are no negative consequences in either scen­ario!  When I would counter that you can’t just choose to believe something, they would look at me funny.  My understanding is that Pascal’s rebuttal to this argument was basically “fake it till you make it”⁠—pretend to believe for long enough, and you will eventually fall into the habits of belief and forget that it was a pretense.  I suppose people make the same argument today about Internet radicalization: hang out on 4chan pretending to be a Na­zi for the edgy lulz and before long you actually are a Nazi.  But still, I can’t really wrap my head around the idea that you can just decide to think that things will turn out for the best.  Won’t there always be that kernel of doubt beneath the bravado?  And I don’t really get optimism from a game theory perspective either.  If you always expect things to turn out for the best, doesn’t that mean that you can never be pleasantly surprised?  That, at best, you have the mild satisfaction of fulfilled expectations, while when things don’t go as you might have liked, you’re not braced for it? 

What I do think I understand a bit better now than I did in 2012 is the appeal of optimism.  There’s an old saying that worry is interest you pay on trouble before it arrives, but the opposite is also true.  As the calendar ticked over to November, the polling world was hit by a bombshell: Ann Selzer had Harris up by three⁠—in Iowa.  Following this stuff pretty closely, I knew Selzer was the most respected pollster in the business, reknowned for her accuracy and her resistence to “herding”.  In 2016, she’d had Trump way ahead of Clinton in Iowa, one of the very few hints of the political earthquake that was coming.  So here’s a real au­thority, not just some rando in a comments section, with hard data backing up all these predictions of a Harris landslide⁠—be­cause if Iowa went blue, that was consistent with a total north of 340 electoral votes.  Maybe these optimists were so confident, and so unanimous, because they were right!  And, I gotta say, the feeling of relief was blissful.  I guess you could say that it was interest I received on a happy event that never came to pass.  So is that what the optimists are in it for?  The chance to splash around in a sea of happy neurochemicals that may not have any correspondence to reality?  I would say that that doesn’t explain the unanimity I found, but I guess people do say that smart­phones are addictive because of the dopamine hits⁠—so powerful that now those phones are close to ubiquitous.  Piggybacking on that neurological mechanism is part of what has made right-wing radicalization via social media so effective.  Meanwhile, I’ve never owned a smartphone, so that’s another case in which the entire rest of the world seems to have marched off in one direc­tion while I stand here scratching my head.

🙧 Postscript 3

And I think that finally wraps it up for my 2024 election article.  I don’t know whether there will be a 2028 election article, because I don’t know whether there will be a 2028 election⁠—at least not a fully legitimate one.  On that note, here’s a song to finish this off.  It’s about George W. Bush, yet most of the lyrics seem to apply much better to the returning president-elect.  After all, Bush nev­er actually told his supporters that once he was in office, they’d never have to vote again.  Trump did.

“President Forever” (Local H, 2003)

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