I have been a political junkie for many years (story checks out: take a look at my UID), but I think I'm probably done with national electoral politics. I mean, I'm still going to vote, and give Democrats a few bucks when I can spare it. But as far as closely following national politics as a kind of hobby, as I have done for so many years? Yeah, no.
I was thinking about the brilliant post the author Jeremy Zilber wrote the other day on Facebook, in which he likened any attempt to describe this election to a bizarre dream ("Donald Trump was running for president, but he was WAY worse than the real Donald Trump, but the media took him seriously like he was a real candidate, and the polls showed it might actually be a close election because Clinton did something weird with her email or something, and then there was something about Trump being a predator but nobody seemed to care very much, and he kept saying he'd lock her up if he won or maybe start a revolution if he lost, and also he loved Putin for some reason..."). In a related vein, I feel like American politics now reminds me nothing so much as a once beloved TV show that has jumped the shark, and is just throwing crazy and wildly implausible shit at the wall, having lost any semblance of realism, consistency, or coherent narrative.
LOST was guilty of this, as was Battlestar Galactica and House of Cards. Now it's "House of Trump", and I think I'm out (after kind of absorbing what has happened and reading and commenting on a few postmortems). I'm going to stick to TV shows that make a little sense and have some respect for the intelligence of the viewer.
Markos says “stay and fight”, and that’s great. More power to him, and anyone who joins that cause. Like I said, I’ll throw a few shekels your way. But if completely Bizarro World shit like this can happen, and we can’t tell what’s happening from the polls, we’re just stumbling around in the dark. Eight years of Dubya sucked. Bigtime, as Cheney would say. But it was at least something I understood and could push back against in some sort of comprehensible way. Now, if the exit polls are to be believed, Trump got a nine point bump in the Hispanic vote compared to Romney. And women even voted for him after all, in pretty sizable numbers. How does that happen? Are we all on LSD? Unemployment is low, President Obama (the polar opposite of Trump) is popular, and Trump is not just a shitty Republican asshole we should be scared of, he is a complete buffoon (to the point of making the doltish Dubya look ready for Mt. Rushmore by comparison), an absurdity. Paul Krugman nearly nailed it in his reaction in the NYT tonight:
What we do know is that people like me, and probably like most readers of The New York Times, truly didn’t understand the country we live in. We thought that our fellow citizens would not, in the end, vote for a candidate so manifestly unqualified for high office, so temperamentally unsound, so scary yet ludicrous. We thought that the nation, while far from having transcended racial prejudice and misogyny, had become vastly more open and tolerant over time.
We thought that the great majority of Americans valued democratic norms and the rule of law. It turns out that we were wrong. There turn out to be a huge number of people — white people, living mainly in rural areas — who don’t share at all our idea of what America is about. For them, it is about blood and soil, about traditional patriarchy and racial hierarchy.
I only say “nearly” because as I noted upthread, there’s that inexplicable jump in Latino support from 2012. That just doesn’t make a lick of sense.
I mean, in some ways I can understand this kind of result as a devolution of what we saw back in 2004, a very dispiriting election that can’t hold a candle to this one. If we had not had 2008 and especially 2012 intervening, I could just channel my favorite pundit/comedian Bill Maher and say “Americans are dumbshits—whaddaya gonna do?” And even 2008 isn’t too hard to explain. Dubya’s numbers were abysmal, Obama was super charismatic, the Republican brand was generally dogshit, and there was Sarah Palin (a preview of Trump in some ways). What I can’t understand in retrospect is how we won 2012. This country that reelected Dubya, that just made this abysmal choice, that voted in Tea Partiers in 2010 and supercharged them in 2014...why didn’t they do what all the right wingers expected and send Obama packing? Is he just a likeable fluke, and we’re back to underdog status for the foreseeable future?
I’m just thinking out loud here, ranting...and it hurts. I don’t understand, and I don’t know if it will ever be possible to get answers to these questions. So my plan for now, at least, is to just check out. If I can’t understand it, if night is day and up is down, and people are being idiots...then I am just going to try my best to safeguard my psyche by disengaging. I can’t handle this shit. Good luck to those of you who can, and maybe you can even have some fun with it by watching the shit show about to unfold and mocking Trump as he inevitably hit the rocks. I’m just burnt, and that doesn’t work for me.
