To wake up the morning after Election Day was to understand the appeal of oblivion. Regaining consciousness meant assuming the crushing weight of the darkest knowledge. The Motherfucker is back.
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard,” wrote American journalist H.L. Mencken in 1916.
Now, everyone will unleash their theories. Salvaging comfort in a situation like this means smoothing down the events so that they conform to our own world view. So people will say: Kamala Harris lost because she did not embrace the policy views that I do. Or: Kamala Harris lost because the ignoble rats on the [left/ right/ middle] did not work hard enough for her. Or: If Kamala Harris had only taken my strategic advice, had spent more time in that state, had crafted her message differently, had used a different slogan, had picked a different advisor, she would have won. In this way we assure ourselves that it is just the candidate and not the world itself that is broken.
Recognize that all as wishful thinking. There is no particular reason for a hopeful interpretation of these events. Kamala Harris did not lose this race because of Gaza, even though it would be some small assertion of morality’s importance if that were so. Kamala Harris’s campaign was competent. It was well funded. She was not running against an unknown quantity. She was running against a man that everyone knows too well, a former president whose term we all lived through, a public figure for decades, a man who has not stopped talking for a moment since the 1980s. She was running against a man who lies constantly and is plainly racist and cannot speak a coherent paragraph and has insulted in personal terms the demographic groups covering the majority of the population. People know who she was running against. They know exactly who he is. Most people, it turns out, just prefer him. That is what they like.
The only way to be able to smile today will be to laugh bitterly at the explanations that you will hear about this. Did Americans conclude that their lives were better when Trump was president? He finished his term in 2020, one of the worst years of the 21st century. Hardly a sunny memory. Was it the economy? “The Economy,” as measured by most economists, has been consistently strong under President Biden, and is currently thriving in historic terms. Was it the grave concern that voters in Wisconsin naturally have for the conditions at the Texas border? Was it the strong populist appeal of a rich man spending hours at every rally airing the pettiest of personal grievances? Was it the powerful institutional support of a man who is despised by the leadership of his own party and who was denounced by his own former cabinet members?
No. Traditional political analysis dies upon the mountain of Donald Trump. Facts? There are no facts here. He has been lying steadily for a decade and the media has been steadily publishing stories explaining that he is lying and yet he is winning the popular vote. Everyone knows and nobody cares. We in the press have been proven less influential than we had even imagined. Why am I writing this? What does it matter? On Inauguration Day, we can all think back to the quaint little arguments that we had among one another about whether or not this or that New York Times story was honest in its framing of Trump’s latest outrage, and chuckle ruefully. What a worthless and self-indulgent pastime that turned out to be.
Newspaper endorsements? Op-ed columns? Television pundits making their most persuasive case that Trump Endangers Democracy? The idea that all would be well if we could only get this stuff right has been laid bare as an illusion treasured by the minority of us who care what the press has to say. Out in the world at large, that is not what most voters give a damn about. The combined investigative and explanatory powers of all of the journalists in America turned out to be less than the power of a bloated, sneering celebrity pointing a short finger at immigrants and saying “They are stealing your country.”
The American people want Donald Trump. And now they will get him. He will bring with him a horde of cranks, frauds, religious zealots, gutter racists, and vindictive thugs unprecedented in modern American history. The Nixon White House will look like a zen temple compared to what is coming. Trump’s second term will be a wave of pure malevolence. There will be revenge against his enemies, and there will be assaults on innocent and vulnerable Americans of the sort that our government usually reserves only for people overseas. Fringe lunatics will dictate health policy; Crypto grifters will dictate economic policy; Christian evangelicals will dictate Middle East policy; Flinty corporate lawyers will dictate labor policy; and the mighty American federal government will be run with all the propriety of a late night infomercial selling miracle cures to insomniacs. The cure will be branded “TRUMP,” in large golden letters. It won’t work. There will be no refunds.
Should I reiterate the prescription for reform? Will it make us feel better? We have an antidemocratic government structure, plagued by institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College which marginalize the majority of the population. We must reform the Supreme Court lest we suffer decades of a far-right veto over all progressive policies. And capitalism, capitalism itself, is the grand machine producing all of this, the machine we must attack and, at minimum, remake if we do not want to continue down this road. Economic inequality has risen for most of my lifetime, creating a tiny group of super-rich winners that warp our politics and leave most people grasping for the mirage of the American dream that they will never reach. The labor movement, the most promising and powerful tool to turn this all around, has fallen into paltry weakness, and must, must be rebuilt to strength. To lose the class war that underlies politics is to doom ourselves to a darker and more unequal future. Join a union if you want to live.
All this is still true, sure. There is the path. It’s just that the path just got a lot steeper. The path has just been planted with a fresh crop of landmines. The path will now be full of dogs that will bite you and then try to sell you Ivermectin for your wounds. The activists who are politically engaged and who understand how difficult it is to fight capitalism even in friendlier environments are depressed today, because they, more than anyone, grasp how much harder all of this is about to get.
There will be time for hope. But not today. Today is the time to do our very best to look this right in the face. Most of America, knowing who Trump is, picked him. We find ourselves in the absurd circumstance of facing a slew of awful policy outcomes because our country’s most sensitive narcissist is addicted to the simulacrum of love that power provides him. Only a nation brittle from long failures to embrace genuine democracy could ever find itself in this position. It is convenient to the operation of America for its population to be distracted and hateful and ignorant of root causes, and that environment is a fertile one for Trump’s personality. This stupid idiot man will throw so much on the bonfire. All so he could get up last night and say, with unmatched gravitas, “We’ve achieved the most incredible political thing.”
Words for the ages. Our new leader.
Hope will return. But right now there is only a sickening contemplation of what just happened. You’re going to get it good and hard, America. Hang on tight.
Hamilton Nolan is a labor writer for In These Times. He has spent the past decade writing about labor and politics for Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian, and elsewhere. More of his work is on Substack.
