Tag: election

Quotes & Commentary #85: Ginsberg

Quotes & Commentary #85: Ginsberg

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing… America when will you be angelic? … America why are your libraries full of tears?

Allen Ginsberg

It appears that I am once again writing this column in the wake of a Trump victory. Eight years ago, I chose the Joyce quote about history being a nightmare, as the only words adequate to explain my immense disappointment at the American people. I ended that post on a rather hysterical note, promising to embrace Stoicism to get through the coming trauma.

This time around, sadly, I am not so surprised. The feeling is more of emptiness than despair. I may not have given America all, but I feel a numbing emptiness. 

In my last post, I tried to briefly explain why I thought Trump ought not to be president. In this one, I am tempted to explain—or try to—why he won anyway. I probably shouldn’t. After every unsuccessful campaign there is a post-mortem, and the conclusions reached are usually rendered irrelevant by the next election. It’s clear that Biden and Harris made some significant mistakes, but, anyway, I’m hardly a democratic strategist.

Yet it does strike me that Trump’s victory signals that, as Kamala Harris said, we’re not going back. That is, we can never return to the status quo ante in the US, where the media was basically trusted, institutions were cherished, expertise respected, and political speech and ideology existed between narrow bounds of acceptability. Trump was not, as was ardently hoped, merely an aberration. Voters experienced a full Trump term and, somehow, returned him to power. They want what he’s selling.

There are a million things to say about the rise of the populist right, the alienation among young men, the changing media ecosystem, the lingering effects of the pandemic, etc., etc. For my part, I think inflation was the decisive factor. Even though the inflation suffered in the US was, by historical standards, rather moderate, it revealed the financial precarity of a huge swath of the public. Most people simply have no margin in their budgets, so even a modest rise in prices can be acutely stressful (I am speaking from experience here).

By my lights, Biden deserves only a very limited amount of the blame for inflation, since it was a worldwide phenomenon, not especially severe in the USA. Yet that so many people live on so little, and were only to have a decent standard of life due to cheap goods—many of them manufactured abroad—is a situation long condoned by the elites of both parties, including Biden. And in this election, Trump represented a rejection of these elites, while Harris (whose administration often downplayed the financial hardships) was their spokesperson.

I hesitate to predict whether Trump will, as many fear, permanently destroy American democracy. He will certainly damage it—he already has—but it may survive. I feel confident that he will continue to flout norms and will leave the country worse off than before. I fully expect the media circus of his previous administration to return, at least in part. Maybe the Democrats, as the opposition, will get their act together and find a message that resonates better. Or maybe Trump is such a poisonous presence that even the opposition will be debased in the new political culture.

What is clear, though, is that we’re not going back to the pre-Trump times. I would blame the electorate for being easily duped or irredeemably misogynistic. But, in Ginsberg’s words, “It occurs to me that I am America. I am talking to myself again.”

Quotes & Commentary #84: Thoreau

Quotes & Commentary #84: Thoreau

Cast your whole vote, not just a strip of paper, but your whole influence.

—Henry David Thoreau

I began this section on my blog in the lead up to the 2016 election, the first time that Trump was on the ballot. Like many Americans, I was depressed about the possibility of a Trump presidency, even though I doubted that it would really come to pass. I went to bed on election night (Spain is six hours ahead, so the result was not announced yet) comfortably sure of Clinton’s victory. When I opened my phone, the following morning, the news was so shocking that I could hardly even understand it.

I walked to the bus stop on my way to work, where I normally would run into my other American coworkers. They were there, red-eyed, fighting tears, and the reality then began to sink in that the next four years would be dominated by a man I found, and continue to find, repulsive.

Admittedly, the first three years of the Trump administration were more annoying than anything else. The tone of the news coverage was frantic, bordering on hysterical. These were the years of midnight tweets, of tell-all memoirs, of constant White House staff churn, and of so many scandals, big and small, that it is impossible now even to call them to mind.

But it must be admitted that, for these first three years, the country was basically okay. The economy chugged along, there were no new foreign wars, and it looked as though America could survive with a peevish child as the commander-in-chief.

Yet this veneer of adequacy was stripped away when the COVID pandemic hit. When decisive leadership was needed—somebody the country could look to for clarity, strength, and calm—Trump gave us what he always gave us: bluster, boasting, and bullshit. The spectacle of him suggesting on national television to use light or bleach to combat the virus seemed to be enough, however temporarily, to wake the country up to the fact that the presidency is a serious job.

When Biden won, it was an amazing sense of relief. Trump’s ban from twitter, however brief, did more to reestablish sane public discourse than all of the sober talks from talking heads. In the words of Gerald Ford, I thought that our long national nightmare was over. It wasn’t.

I spent the holidays back home, in New York, savoring the newfound ability to travel to the US after the pandemic travel restrictions were lifted. On January 6, I was puttering around my mom’s house, trying to tune out Trump’s election denialism, and the fake controversies he was drumming up. My mom, true to form, had the news on, though the proceedings in the Senate seemed too boring to pay much attention to.

This changed, of course. A mob, whipped up by Trump’s lies, stormed the Capitol in an attempt to reverse the outcome of the election. I watched, stunned. And as the attack dragged on, the absence of any words from Trump—of any solidarity with his fellow politicians, or concern for their safety, or disapproval of lawless violence—became deafeningly loud. A message eventually came from the White House, far too late to make a difference, in which he called the rioters “beautiful people.”

Trump has been wrongly counted out many times, and I admit that after January 6 I thought his career was over. By the time his plane carried him away from Washington D.C. (refusing to wait for Biden at the White House, as per tradition), I felt a wonderful lightness, as I witnessed a moment I had dreamed of for four long years. Goodbye, and good riddance, I thought.

Here we are, four years later, and Trump is once again on the ballot. And by the looks of things, he has a decent chance of winning. Biden has proven to be an unpopular president. And because of Biden’s stubbornness, Kamala Harris had to step up at almost the last moment to replace him, depriving voters of a chance to pick their candidate. And she has not been able to distance herself enough from the policies that have made her boss so disliked.

Even so, I would urge any of the few Americans still wavering to choose Harris. While I am not certain Harris will be a wonderful president, we already know what Trump is like. He is simply not fit to lead the country. Trying to overturn an election is disqualifying. He still insists he didn’t lose; he is unrepentant, and is gearing up to try to overturn this one if it doesn’t go his way. A second Trump presidency might not end American democracy as we know it, but it will damage it, more than he already has.

During the 2016 election season, I found myself incredibly disheartened that the country could fall so low. Nowadays, I’m not so judgmental. The political establishment has let the people down for so long, in so many ways. It is genuinely disheartening to have to continue to vote to preserve it. And yet, Trump is not the kind of man to solve long-standing problems. He is an impulsive narcissist, a compulsive liar, and manifestly unfit for a job requiring measured words, self-control, and logical decision making. For the third election in a row, I will cast my whole influence against Donald Trump.