Reckoning

I wasn't going to write anything today. A lot of pundits have already weighed in on the horror that unfolded last night, and a lot of people have already spent a lot of time reading those words, and it's been decades since I had the type of discipline and/or focus required to offer a meaningful analysis — or even the type of comprehensive pep talk you'd want to print out and stick to your fridge. And like most of you, I imagine, I'm still processing all this. Reeling, frankly.

So I'm stuck in this place where I don't really have the words, but I'm a writer, so it always comes down to the words at a time like this, and this is my space and you are my community, and all that is why I'm sitting here purging whatever I might have that passes for thoughts on the state of the nation and what it will likely mean for you and me. (While drinking a beer, naturally.)

When that piece of shit claimed victory in 2016, part of me shut down. I largely lost the urge to engage in social media, not only because I couldn't bear the thought of watching his supporters crow about it, but also because I felt like the only move I had left was to withdraw into real-life circles of friends, practice financial advocacy, and hope everything we were ever told about the long arc of the moral universe turned out to be true. Little by little, I recovered; although my social media presence remains extremely spotty (and is likely to ever remain thus), I suppose I gradually came to believe that some sort of reckoning would eventually come due for him and his clammy gang of venal slapdicks. The thought was heartening, even if the waiting was agonizing.

I think a reckoning has finally arrived, but it isn't for him. It's for us, and the first stage has arrived in the form of appalling election results that force us to see ourselves, as a nation, for who we truly are — and, at bottom, have always been. It's deeply painful for those of us who believe in the social compact, and who don't believe in taking advantage of others simply because we can, and who were raised to view American history as a largely settled process of eventually shaking off a few foundational issues that were mistakenly left unaddressed while the founding fathers were busy conducting the greatest experiment in governance that the world has ever known. The first two items on that list are worth defending to the death, but the third? That was always a lie, and that's what we're facing now.

As an old, straight, white dude, I have a great deal of nostalgia for the '70s, '80s, and '90s. This is fueled by a variety of factors, including the fact that I was a lot younger back then, but primarily, it's a luxury I can afford because I'm an old, straight, white dude. If the world felt kinder and safer and saner back then, well, that had an awful lot to do with the fact that it had been shaped to accommodate me and everyone like me; for everyone else, it was demonstrably, measurably worse. What the MAGAts and their ilk either willfully ignore or cannot comprehend is that any nation that forces certain citizens to hide or deny their identity can never truly be great. Getting to a place of equity is messy and confusing and sometimes painful, but it's still worth it, no matter how strong the impulse to run flailing back to the past. Unfortunately, we're fairly soft and weak as an electorate, and we have the memories of goldfish, so we're historically quite easy to dupe when some authority figure or other comes along and tells us he can fix it if we just sit back, relax, and let him go to work.

Of course, it's hard to be a successful demagogue if you don't have a willing audience, and that's the other part of our problem — the way our governing bodies have shied away from their responsibility to invest in our population and its infrastructure ever since Reagan clip-clopped into Washington with his soothsaying bullshit about government being the problem. We have effectively been a one-party nation ever since; when the Democrats aren't running scared, they're winning national elections by moving to the right. When Tim Walz took tired Republican talking points and turned them on their head a couple of months ago, it might have been the first time in my adult life that a Democrat angling for White House residency proudly owned the party's nominal record of attempting to use the power of government to make life more livable for society's most vulnerable.

There's always a certain amount of latent resentment toward any governing body, but when you spend nearly 45 years bait-and-switching your voters, they're eventually going to get sick of your shit. Democrats abandoned large chunks of their base by angling to the right; modern Republicans, meanwhile, have never followed through on their promises to anybody, with the notable exception of the damage to the Supreme Court wrought by that scrotum-jowled effluvium and his morally bankrupt allies. It's been several generations of lip service, is what I'm saying, and that created a perfect breeding ground for a bloviating would-be populist who's an even bigger liar than any other politician we've seen in our lifetimes, but is still canny enough to realize that you can get away with lying for a pretty long time if you're willing to shovel bullshit that people aren't getting from any other direction.

As I said before, we are historically a very soft and weak group of voters, and that goes at least double whenever we're confronted with the slightest bit of discomfort. I don't mean to downplay any economic hardships faced by my fellow citizens; what I do want to say is that as a people, we've tended to throw tantrums whenever reality dares to suggest that we may not experience ever-expanding prosperity. Ever since Carter took it on the nuts in the '80 election, our politicians have been terrified to increase taxes or even acknowledge the very real notion that economies tend to be cyclical if you aren't jamming your finger on the scale and gaming the system. Reagan gave us the first intoxicating shot of trickle-down economics, and we've been chasing the dragon ever since, all while more and more people grew more and more disaffected.

And now, finally, here we are. An anus-mouthed ignoramus will soon be allowed to grip the levers of power with his grubby little hands even though he completely fucked up almost every single thing he tried the last time he was in this position, and that has a lot to do with a hell of a lot of people being all too willing to cast a vote for burning the whole system down. We're talking about a very large bloc of fuckers, and I don't want to waste our time by breaking them down comprehensively, but anyone who tells you that these election results are all about any one thing — misogyny, bigotry, the price of groceries — is wrong. It was a perfect storm of piss and vitriol, and there aren't enough umbrellas in the world to shield us from what's about to pour down.

And it will pour, make no mistake. Even if these buffoons only manage to pull off a fraction of the bullshit they intend to get away with, it'll still further fray the safety net that they and their quote-unquote ideological forebears have been desperately trying to shred since the aftermath of the New Deal. I'm not a betting man, but I wouldn't place any major sums on the long-term solvency of Social Security, or the future of Medicare, or the ACA. Or birth control. Or... you get the idea. Even for us old, straight, white guys, I think things will soon get fairly bumpy and dark — but my demographic's preferred candidate doesn't need to worry, because there's always some minority group to blame everyone's problems on, and those folks will be left holding the public price tag after this pack of inbred hyenas has finally moved on.

But here's what I want to say about that. It might come across as less than helpful, but as I was sifting through the wreckage this afternoon, I started thinking about how, when my generation learned about world history, it always seemed like the most truly heinous shit was always happening someplace else; someplace far away. And what I'm trying to say by bringing this up is that we've all been more or less unreasonably lucky when it comes to this particular flavor of civic shenanigans; our politicians have done some fairly heinous shit over the last 50 years, but it's mostly been pretty vanilla compared to the type of thing we've watched occur across much of the rest of the world. Those countries, for the most part, have dusted themselves off, sometimes even emerging stronger in the bargain.

I couldn't even begin to predict our response to yesterday's tragedy, even if I wanted to. But it's objectively true that ours is a country built on theft and slavery and genocide, and these are sins we've forever failed to truly confront. Perhaps — perhaps! — in voting to burn it all down, the most ignorant and reactionary and flat-out hateful among us have unwittingly ushered in an era of true reckoning. Perhaps once this hateful old babbling pervert has finally doddered off into whatever dementia-addled personal hell will end up serving as his karmic inheritance, we'll be ready to truly become a nation of liberty and justice for all. I wouldn't bet on it, but again, I am not a betting man.