Category: Politics

Image of the “100,000 square foot” Tate Center, its “95,000 square foot addition,” and the tiny stadium you can just barely make out sitting across the street, from the architecture firm Cooper Carry’s website

For a while I’ve been reading Stacey Abrams’s book Our Time Is Now, but I had to put it on hold. I was trying to read it before bed, and it would make me too angry to get to sleep. I knew that my home state of Georgia had had a contentious election for governor, and that the presumptive “winner” of the election, Brian Kemp, was known nation-wide for pulling some extraordinarily shady and undeniably unethical maneuvers to push the vote in his favor. Unethical as in the secretary of state refusing to recuse himself from overseeing an election in which he was a candidate.

What I hadn’t known was that “unethical” was the charitable interpretation. Kemp and the Georgia Republicans were guilty of blatant voter suppression. Abrams pulls no punches in the book, calling it like it is. And knowing that they would so casually and blatantly subvert democracy like that, and assume that it didn’t matter if anyone found out, is absolutely infuriating. Even more infuriating that they kept up their voter suppression for the 2018 election, forcing people in some districts to sacrifice an entire day trying to get into their understaffed and under-equipped polling station. One of the most egregious offenses was purging hundreds of thousands of registered voters, disproportionately in Democratic-leaning areas.

Most recently there’s been a bit of voter-suppression fuckery from my alma mater, the University of Georgia. The “UGAVotes” Twitter account announced that the Tate Student Center wouldn’t be made available for voting, giving the excuse that it was because of “concerns about social distancing.” Instead, students would be able to vote in downtown Athens, and they’d even be provided with a shuttle!

It didn’t take long for people to point out the obvious problems with that. Sending 37,000 students to the same polling places as the other 125,000 residents of Athens is likely to cause the same kinds of delays and long line-ups that plagued the majority-black-or-Democrat districts in 2018. It would also be no safer than the student center, because you’d be just causing a greater concentration of people in downtown Athens instead of a few blocks away.

Most obviously — and most infuriatingly — it’s absurdly hypocritical, since the University has decided that football games at the stadium, which is literally across the street from the student center, are safe. UGA’s Twitter responded with the smarmiest and most condescending thing I’ve seen in quite some time:

“Those comparing this matter to a football game should be able to recognize that football games will be played outdoors but we will still require social distancing by substantially reducing capacity to the stadium. We have eliminated tailgating as well due to a desire to keep the campus as safe as possible and limit visitors during the pandemic.”

Twitter is horrible and is responsible for so many bad things, but it did make me happy to see so many people calling them out for such a blatantly self-serving and hypocritical statement. After people nationwide responded to their bullshit by pointing out that if the stadium — which again, is just across the street — is so safe, they could just use it as a polling place, the University eventually responded with an unctuous bit of finger-pointing, offering the Coliseum, if approved by the Secretary of State and the local election office. Because you know, if there is any group that’s proven itself to be a bastion of integrity and honesty, it’s Georgia’s Secretary of State and local election boards.

After having spent four years at UGA, I have to say I’m kind of at a loss as to why the GOP is so devoted to keeping the students from voting. While the students are generally better educated and more ethnically diverse — which is to say, not Republican — there’s also an obsessive, overwhelming devotion to the football program and alumni donations that fund it, and to the Greek System — which is to say, extremely Republican.

I should mention that I don’t know for sure whether the members of the UGA administration making these decisions are actually Republicans, but I would be stunned speechless to discover that they weren’t. Every executive at UGA that I was aware of was a weird hybrid of the dean from Animal House and one of Paula Deen’s sons. A kind of good-ol’-dean that I can easy imagine forming a human centipede of sycophants from Athens to Kemp’s office in Atlanta and all the way up to the seat of Trump’s favorite Fox News-watching recliner.

But it is good for an embittered chuckle to see the conundrums the GOP gets into when their evil schemes clash with each other. They need COVID-19 to be just dangerous enough that it prevents liberal arts majors just finding out about class inequality from being able to vote, but not so dangerous that it keeps them from stuffing students into dorm rooms and classrooms to get their tuition, or keeps them from stuffing a bunch of drunk people into their comically overpriced seats in a football stadium. It’d be almost funny — if it weren’t politicizing a deadly and highly contagious disease for the purposes of subverting American democracy. Maybe you had to be there.

Copying the most important link from this blog post to the top, to make sure it gets noticed: if you can, donate to causes like the World Central Kitchen, an organization that’s actually helping people instead of just complaining. If you can afford it, an especially cool way to donate is to bid on the artwork that Mike Mignola has been making to support the WCK.

Three times now, I’ve started writing a post about how two reporters from The Washington Post revealed proof of a cover-up over the White House’s catastrophically failed lack-of-response to COVID-19, how remarkable it is that it’s Bob Woodward who’s the one with inside information, and how it’s inexcusable that he chose not to reveal the information until it would spur sales of his book.

The whole thing just seems like a perfect illustration of the decline and increasing selfishness and apathy of American society over the course of my lifetime. Casting Bob Woodward promoting a book release in the role of Deep Throat just feels too poignant, in the same way that so much of 2020 has seemed to be plotted by an amateur author who doesn’t yet understand why it’s bad to be too “on the nose.”

But I keep deleting it, because I keep feeling like my time would be better spent elsewhere. I’m sure that I have gifts to provide to society that will be revealed at some point, but being able to give insightful commentary about the goings-on of rich people in Washington, DC is not one of them. I don’t really give a rat’s ass one way or the other about Bob Woodward. I was still in diapers when Watergate happened, and every detail I remember about it is from the MAD Magazine parody of All the President’s Men. Until last week, I thought that Woodward was the one Heartburn was about. (Turns out it was Carl Bernstein). I have a B- history student’s grasp of the 20th century, is what I’m saying, so it’s unlikely that the definitive record of this entire incident will be revealed on a blog by an intermittent game developer with an audience of about 15 people on an active day.

Besides, nobody’s talking about how much Bob Woodward has suffered here. If he weren’t such a patient and diligent reporter, there might now be 200,000 more surviving Americans who could’ve bought a copy of his book!

That’s the problem, the thing that keeps making me pulling me back into pointless, un-constructive anger at people who don’t care and will remain completely unaffected. Obviously, waiting to reveal information isn’t as bad as willfully deceiving people about it for political gain (even the Post describes what Trump did as “downplaying” the virus, as if he were just incompetent, instead of what he actually did, which was actively engage in a disinformation campaign about it). But when the end result is the same and the motivation is the same, does it make a tangible difference?

The Trolley Problem

Woodward’s defense for waiting to reveal the information — and calling it a “defense” is inaccurate, since he talks as if he has nothing to justify — was that he wanted to give the full story, and his deadline was the election:

Again, Woodward said he believes his highest purpose isn’t to write daily stories but to give his readers the big picture — one that may have a greater effect, especially with a consequential election looming.

Woodward’s effort, he said, was to deliver in book form “the best obtainable version of the truth,” not to rush individual revelations into publication.

And always with a particular deadline in mind, so that people could read, absorb and make their judgments well before Nov. 3. “The demarcation is the election.”

from Margaret Sullivan’s article in The Washington Post

The most charitable interpretation of this is that he sees himself as something like the Watchers of the Marvel universe — spending an eternity overseeing the day-to-day activities of ordinary humans, forbidden to ever intervene. But there’s no shortage of tell-all books about the corruption and incompetence of the Trump administration. Hell, Woodward has already written one. This book is coming out at around the same time as the criminal Michael Cohen’s, who’s more blatantly doing a press circuit — and starting his own podcast, because of course — to promote it. What’s the difference, apart from the obvious assumption that Woodward’s book will be better researched and infinitely better written?

Continue reading “The Audacity of Accountability”

Serendipitous photo of my three choices for Democratic Presidential candidate in reverse chronological order, via Rolling Stone

I watched most of the Democratic National Convention this week — they really should consider continuing the new “infinitely more watchable” format even after the pandemic — and I found myself just crying and crying. It shows how hard the last four years have been when all it takes is a bunch of people earnestly talking about hope, decency, and empathy to provoke such an emotional response.

For a while now, even before the United States collectively shit the bed and elected one of the worst people alive to be President, I’ve been feeling increasing frustration with and outright despair over the political atmosphere in America. It wasn’t just that awful people were pulling all of us down into the mire of their own awfulness, it was feeling increasingly uneasy seeing the opinions and the tactics of people who were ostensibly supposed to be on “my side.” Watching the convention last week, and seeing the reactions to it online, made the last piece fall into place. I realized that I’ve spent decades being manipulated.

Not manipulated into believing in liberal or progressive causes; I do that because I’m a decent human being. I mean manipulated into being hyper-wary of being manipulated. It goes back decades. For all I know, it started as a well-intentioned attempt to teach media literacy to a bunch of naive 80s kids. But over the years, it’s grown more and more pervasive, transforming from a healthy skepticism to a defeatist cynicism.

While I was watching the speakers deliver a message of hope and equality, I was focused on looking for “tells.” Kamala Harris’s familiar and practiced suite of Generic Politician Gestures, as she was the first woman of African and Indian descent to accept the vice presidential nomination from a major party. Paying close attention to who was and wasn’t present and who was given the most speaking time, during the Cory Booker-led roundtable of Presidential candidates now united in support of Biden. Considering the strategy behind using a teenager with a speech impediment as a shield, as an impossibly brave young man went on national television to share a story about how Joe Biden helped him, knowing that Biden’s opponents are shamelessly soulless, bullying, cowardly shits who wouldn’t hesitate to disparage a child if they thought they could get a few poll points out of it. And I thought about using loss to push emotional buttons, as Biden described his own grief to show empathy with Americans who’ve suffered loss, and I found myself sobbing at his perfect description of grief as a deep black hole that opens up in your chest.

Any time something makes me cry, I’ve been indoctrinated to ask: is this real? Am I being manipulated? Is this something maudlin or insincere? Should I be embarrassed? Am I being set up?

On its own, I don’t think that’s all that unusual. But over the decades, it seems to have metastasized into the kind of paranoia that seems to be the one thing left in the United States that’s truly bipartisan. More and more of what we’re hearing from self-described progressives is echoing what we’re hearing from the members of the current kakistocracy and their enablers. Mistrust of institutions. Dismissal of the “main stream media.” Convinced of corruption that wasn’t just widespread but completely saturated every American organization. Trustworthy public figures aren’t just rare, but completely imaginary.

Much of this was obviously due to the increasing volume of troll accounts, motivated either by political gain or just a lazy nihilism. We’ve seen how the Tea Party-infused GOP and Trump administration feed on nihilism and despair, profiting from the belief that nothing is real and nothing matters. But especially this year, as more Americans are finally admitting that they can’t go on denying all of the systemic racism, institutionalized misogyny, and white supremacy, it’s become increasingly difficult to distinguish the nihilistic trolls from the more vocal and militant people on “the left.” No one is to be trusted. All our institutions are irreparably corrupt. There’s no hope for reform; everything must be torn down. We’re surrounded not by people who occasionally stumble while trying to do the right thing; everyone is a latent racist or misogynist or fascist desperately trying not to reveal their true nature.

All this time, I’ve been feeling stressed that it’s getting harder to tell the difference between the trolls and sincerely militant liberal progressives and socialists. I’ve felt like it required more and more work on my part to determine whether something was being said in good faith or not. Finally, I remembered the only useful thing from my philosophy classes: something has to make a difference to be a difference. If I can’t distinguish between trolling bullshit and sincere bullshit, then it’s just plain bullshit. No matter how earnest the person may be about dismantling the systems of oppression.

To be clear, I’m guilty of it to some degree. When Warren, my favored candidate, dropped out of the race, I threw a tantrum online. I complained that we’d squandered so much potential for change by turning the Democratic candidacy into a choice between two old white men. It didn’t take long for me to realize, however, that the person who was the most entitled to be bitter about Warren having to withdraw from the race — Elizabeth Warren — wasn’t joining me online in complaining. Instead, she was throwing her support behind the party, against Trump, drawing attention to progressive causes, and championing the campaigns of other Democratic candidates up and down the ticket.

I’ve seen a lot of people announcing that Joe Biden isn’t their first choice for President, as if that makes them special. He wasn’t my first choice either. I’d given up on the Democratic Party and political engagement in general until I heard a speech from Pete Buttigieg. He described the end of the Reagan era, for better or worse, and that was the first thing in years that sparked hope in me that things could get better. I was 9 years old when Reagan was elected, so it’s been the standard for almost my entire life. I have no other frame of reference, but I do vividly remember how Reagan-era politics was contrasted with previous administrations, from a media still trying to process what was happening. It was all about media manipulation, optics, and spin taking precedence over authenticity, government as a service, and progress. Hearing a candidate saying “it doesn’t have to be this way, change is possible,” was inspiring.

Finding out later on that he’d have been the first openly gay President was proof that change was possible. Just a decade earlier, the leading Democratic candidate for President had said that he was against marriage equality “because of [his] religion,” and resorted to the GOP’s obstinate and cowardly excuse that it was a matter of states’ rights. Gay rights had been a hot potato that no one in the Democratic Party was willing to hold onto, and by 2020, a gay front-runner for the Presidency was hounded by criticism that he was too conservative.

Call me a single-issue voter, but that’s the realization that finally snapped me out of my cynicism, and got me fired up for a Biden/Harris administration. While the Democratic Party was just perpetuating more of the same while claiming to have the moral high ground, Biden forced the administration to finally “evolve” and make a stand. Biden officiated the marriage of two White House staffers, while party insiders and pundits were still lamenting how he was prone to “gaffes” like standing up for basic human dignity that the rest of the party wasn’t ready to embrace.

As far as I can tell, Biden wasn’t his own first choice, either — it took him forever to throw himself into the running. I don’t have to wonder about any hidden motivation, because I can’t imagine what he has to gain by being President. Few of the candidates this election have sounded sincere — except for Cory Booker, of course, who always speaks with 150% conviction — not because they’re lying, but because they’re always having to deliver a set of talking points repeatedly over the course of more than a year to thousands of different people. But throughout Biden’s acceptance speech, I didn’t have a moment’s doubt that he was being sincere. I believe he’s in it to help people.

I believe Kamala Harris is in it to help people, as well, even though she absolutely talks like a politician and a lawyer. Tone and optics should be irrelevant in the post-Reagan era. Trust is more important. She’d already earned mine by virtue of seeing the course of her career; if all she wanted were power or money, there are much, much easier ways she could’ve gone about getting it.

So in other words, I’m rejecting the bullshit idea that as a liberal progressive, I’m “begrudgingly” voting for Biden and Harris. I’m rejecting the idea that the Democratic Party doesn’t represent all the people that it claims to. I’m especially rejecting the idea that American government is a pendulum that only works for one half of the country at a time. We’ve seen multiple times what happens when you have a bastard occupying the White House who only cares about placating a base instead of working for all Americans. Anyone who suggests that a moderate is irreparably compromised simply doesn’t understand, or doesn’t care, how democracy is supposed to function. It’s not about getting enough votes to win an election, it’s about electing the person who’s going to do their best to represent the needs of everyone.

The overwhelming message I got from the Democratic National Convention was one of inclusion and unity. I reject the conclusion of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said that the convention wasn’t “targeting” her because it didn’t include the prerequisite number of Muslims, or a Latino who’d run for President. I reject the complaints of atheists, who’ve insisted that mentions of religion and faith somehow exclude the nonreligious. If we want to make people realize that social justice isn’t a zero-sum game, in which improving the lives of long-marginalized people means making life worse for the people who’ve historically benefitted from inequality, then we have to commit to that. We have to reject even the notion of “marginalized” and acknowledge that everybody truly means everybody. If that’s a “moderate” message, then I guess I’m an unashamed moderate.

That’s the message I got from the convention. A party that’s finally committing itself to genuine inclusion, and making a government that serves everyone even when it’s not trying to get their votes. Are they going to fall short on that pledge? Undoubtedly! But I don’t live up to all the pledges I make for myself, even with the best of intentions. Why would I expect perfection from an inherently compromised and messy process involving thousands of people? Electing decent and honest people who believe in government as a service is the first step. Decency and honesty aren’t just a low bar set by a hopelessly corrupt and incompetent administration; they’re an essential first step to a government that works for everyone. Damn anyone who tries to dismiss hope and optimism as gullibility and complicity. Damn anyone who can’t see past winning a single election, when the election is just the first step of a never-ending process to make things better.

We all know that voting Trump out of office is the barest minimum a decent human being can do. But if we’ve learned nothing from the Obama Administration, it should be that having an honest person with integrity in the office is just the start. It’s what keeps us stable enough for actual progress, so we can disagree about important things without having to argue against immorality as if it were a valid political stand. It’s what lets us be confident that the people we disagree with are arguing in good faith. Personally, I’m looking forward to trusting people again.

I recommend supporting Stacey Abrams’s Fair Fight organization, which is working to ensure “free, fair, and secure elections.”

I also recommend listening to the Majority 54 podcast hosted by Jason Kander, which is devoted to this topic and ways we can effectively engage with politics like responsible cooperative adults.

For as long as I knew her to be vocal about politics, my mother was a steadfast, Rachel Maddow-watching Democrat. Even as the rest of the state shifted from blue to red — or, if you include Atlanta, purple — she remained convinced that the Republicans were on the wrong side of most issues. And she was definitely not a fan, to put it mildly, of the fetid sack of garbage currently calling himself president of the United States. (My words, not hers).

But she was also adamant about one thing, which was that she refused to let someone that awful get in the way of what was important.

And that’s the idea I’ve been trying to keep forefront in my mind. As we see “politics” get more and more divisive; pundits continue to spew increasingly indecent nonsense; common-sense issues of basic human decency continue to be treated as if they were somehow controversial; online discourse filled with nonsensical noise and blatant lies; and political “leaders” continue to show themselves to be belligerent, shameless, and classless; it’s difficult not to feel like the country has been overrun with millions of degenerate people, every one of them complicit in selfishness and evil.

But I try to always ask myself: who’s profiting from my feeling isolated and angry? When I see people who’ve been treated far worse than I have still able to spread a message of unity and hope, what right do I have to feel despair? And ultimately: why would I allow people for whom I have absolutely no respect get in the way of my relationships with the people that I do respect?

It’s a quandary that a lot of people have been wrestling with over the last three years: the man who’s acting as president just straight-up sucks. It’s no secret. There’s no denying it. So how could so many people vote for him?

I mean, let’s just agree to stop humoring the idea that there’s still any question of whether he’s racist, misogynist trash. We knew he was in the 1980s. We knew it in 2015. It’s not as if there were any mystery before the election, so acting as if his behavior in office has been surprising is insultingly disingenuous. And now, any accusation of “he’s gone too far this time!” is nothing but performative nonsense, since he’d already done a dozen inexcusable things that should’ve made him unelectable long before he even became the nominee. It’s hard to believe that anyone is still wasting our time denying that he’s racist, considering he started his political “career” by accusing the first black President of not being born in the US. Nobody should act like we didn’t know he was trash, especially since he was caught on a live mic during a presidential campaign, bragging about sexual assault.

Still, people have spent the past three years trying furiously to normalize it. We’ve all heard various attempts to offer a rational explanation for something that should never have happened. For a while after the election, the media tried to convince us of the “economic anxiety” story — we were sold an image of strong, hard-working Americans in coal mining towns and farm towns throughout the heartland, who’d all spent years being ignored by Clinton-era elitist Democrats. The only problem was that these stories just didn’t hold up to the facts. The actual demographics of Republican voters didn’t have much in common in terms of economics, but a lot in common in terms of race. But it’s not tactful to just admit that millions of people voted for a racist piece of shit to be president of the United States, so we’ve been expected to pretend that it’s all reasonable and normal.

In the 10,000 years since January 2017, it’s been a never-ending cycle of the White House doing the stupidest, most corrupt, most irresponsible thing; pundits and Russian troll farms making increasingly batshit claims to defend it; news channels pushing click-baiting video clips with their pundit delivering some devastating take-down of someone who should never have been given a national audience in the first place; late night shows building a new industry of comedy-outrage, asking “can you believe what he did this time?!” as if any of us are still capable of surprise at this point; and the rest of us left wondering what happened to all the sane grown-ups in the country. And in my case, wanting to get some kind of justification from his enablers to explain why they chose to put us through all this.

But they just shake their heads and lament that “we’re more divided than ever,” even though they’re the ones who voted for someone who led racist pep rallies chanting about building a wall.

This week, after seeing the colossal, inexcusable failure of this despotic clown car of an “administration” in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and then the police brutality protests — protests not just in all 50 states but around the world — I think I’ve finally got a theory: this whole time, I’ve had it backwards. They don’t enable him; he enables them.

In case that seems shallow for a life-changing epiphany, hear me out. I feel like a lot of the assumptions I’ve been making over the past four years have been exactly backwards.

What prompted my “wait a minute… we’re in The Bad Place!” moment was seeing that in the middle of this complete vacuum of leadership during multiple crises, he’d ordered peaceful protestors to be tear gassed so he could stand in front of a church and wave a Bible around in front of a bunch of cameras. I was livid. Almost without thinking, I found myself back on Facebook, posting a link to it with my thoughts. I wanted to ask “can you believe this?!” I wanted to find someone who’d voted for him, and I wanted to rub their nose in this. After all, this had to be the turning point! How could anyone possibly see this and endorse it? How can anyone support this blasphemous perversion of everything Christ taught and still call themselves a Christian?

Keep in mind that this was after I’d already pledged about a dozen times over the years to stop giving him any attention. Stop fanning the flames and instead, help starve them of oxygen. Instead of indulging in more performative outrage, concentrate on doing something that will actually make a difference. I don’t know if the blatant pandering worked on his “base,” since even though I keep hearing about his “base,” I haven’t actually seen them in person. I have no idea how many of them there actually are. The only thing I know for sure is that it worked on one person: the guy who got so angry that he went on Facebook to complain about it.

I could’ve acknowledged that we’re at what feels like an unprecedented turning point in America, in which we finally recognize our responsibility to each other and begin making actual changes to dismantle centuries-old systems of white supremacy and unjust law enforcement. Instead, I chose to complain about the one person in the country least capable of and least willing to actually make a difference. As he threatened to send the military to attack American citizens, then ran to his bunker to hide, it was clear to everyone that there’s a leadership vacuum at the federal level. But really, it’s not simply a vacuum, but a black hole. It destroys everything it can, absorbing everyone’s hate and outrage and despair.

Now, people have been warning us constantly about the “distractions” of this administration. But it’s always taken a form like “While all of you were distracted by some outrageously offensive thing, what was really happening was some sinister new policy.” There are a few problems with that:

1. It’s pompous and condescending. It’s almost as infantilizing as when liberals suggest that Trump voters were “tricked” into voting for a con artist. No, most of them were adults who knew what they were doing, and they should take responsibility for it.
2. It ignores the fact that we can be upset about multiple things at once. A real President is more about policy but sets the tone for public discourse. So when this asshole goes around spreading conspiracy theories, making up stupid and/or racist nicknames for his opponents, and lying on the public record, that’s actually harmful and shouldn’t be dismissed as pure spectacle.
3. It assumes an agenda that is far too competent to come out of this administration. Sometimes people talk as if Trump is secretly a mastermind for absorbing the attention of the media, but I’ve seen zero evidence that he has any actual skill or talent at anything at all.

Attributing any conscious motivation to Trump’s outrage-absorbing properties is a bit like, well, attributing a motivation to a virus. I’ve seen the suggestion that since Trump is too incompetent to be an actual leader, he’s more of a puppet figurehead for some Cheney-esque shadow government. Except puppet Presidents are supposed to be charming and not so blatantly awful; even George W Bush understood how to be civil. And puppet Presidents aren’t supposed to throw so many people under the bus before they’ve had the opportunity to profit from their corruption — poor James Mattis had to be complicit in the evil of this administration for three whole years, and now he’s got nothing to show for it except multiple book deals. If Trump were a construct of the right wing, he seems less like a puppet and more like ED-209.

As far as I can tell, no one actually likes Trump, and it’s mutual. Nobody supports his ideology because there really isn’t one other than trying to destroy as much of the progress of the Obama administration as possible. I suspect that the chaos is the whole point. Selfish and evil people can keep taking advantage of the system to do whatever they want to do, and as long as Trump is absorbing all of the attention and the outrage, they don’t have to worry about trying to keep it secret.

That’s what’s happening on a grand scale, and I think it’s happening on a personal scale as well: Somebody’s frustrated that people keep yelling at her for saying the wrong thing? Trump gives her a pass to complain about “political correctness.” Somebody’s frustrated that they pay taxes and never see visible results, and then they hear about bureaucratic waste? Trump gives them an excuse to assume that all taxes are wasteful, and so it’s not selfish to want to pay less. Somebody’s frustrated that politicians never seem to get anything done? Trump gives him an excuse to say the whole system is corrupt, so it’s not lazy to just throw up your hands, call yourself a “realist,” and say that nobody else genuinely wants to fix the system, either.

So when I start to wonder, “how could so many millions of people support Trump?” I have to remind myself “they don’t.” From what I’ve seen — and I’ll admit I could just have an extremely skewed and sheltered impression, but I doubt it’s that far off — very few real people are actually cheering on or even defending this guy. I don’t see millions of Americans rallying around a trusted leader; I see a bunch of people using a loud, attention-grabbing asshole as their own Portrait of Dorian Gray. He absorbs their flaws, so they don’t have to confront them. He’s not just the president for white supremacists and self-interested multi-millionaires; he’s also the president for the type of people who said just between you and me, don’t you think the Obamas seem a little preachy and full of themselves?

Maybe that’s an even more cynical take on the state of America, but it actually gives me a bit of optimism. For one thing, because it’s the first explanation that makes any sense to me. I tend to assume the best of people, but even so I think I can recognize the difference (eventually) between sincerely good people and rotten people who are just putting up appearances. And it’s never made sense to see people — who I know are good people — choose to support putting children in cages, or mocking disabled people, or disparaging women, or undermining the free press, or any of the other 10,000 inexcusable things this jackass and the rest of the national Republican party have done. I’m not going to be so condescending to say that they were “duped,” but I do believe that they mistakenly thought they were choosing the lesser of two evils and never believed that it could get that bad.

In other words: I can’t even imagine being a responsible adult in 2016 and choosing to vote for Trump. But what I can imagine is a couple decades without seeing much change in local politics despite Democrats or Republicans being in charge, or all the promises of “Hope” at the beginning of the Obama campaign turn into years of impasse and obstruction, and being convinced that federal politics just don’t matter all that much. And if the counter-argument is my liberal relative posting photos on Facebook comparing Trump to Hitler, I’m probably not going to be swayed by that. (Even if this is one of the rare cases where Godwin’s Law isn’t actually that much of an exaggeration).

The other reason it gives me hope is because I can see parallels in my own behavior. I’m so often tempted to use “Trump supporter” as a litmus test because it’s just simpler, faster, and easier than the alternative, which is waiting for them to actually cut through all the qualifiers and excuses and “I don’t defend Trump, but…”s and “I’m not racist, but…”s and actually explain their views. There are so many people who are just making noise, arguing nonsense as if it were a rational position, refusing to argue in good faith, and just wearing us down until we’re too exhausted to care anymore. We may think that it’s easy to spot troll posts or propaganda — and it often is — but it doesn’t need to be convincing on its own. It just needs to be loud and pervasive enough to wear us all down and make it difficult to distinguish signal from noise. So I want to have a shorthand to use, so I’m not caught wasting my time trying to engage with someone who just wants to waste my time.

If I can say “you might not be racist, but you’re complicit in racism,” and use that as grounds to cut somebody off, it’s a real time- and energy-saver. And to be clear: that is absolutely, 100%, a valid stance for some people to take. We’ve seen repeatedly how systemic racism is about more than just the overt white supremacists, but is perpetuated by people who prioritize their own needs and their own comfort over social justice. But we’ve also seen how social media — and especially attempts at activism via social media — will repeatedly show us the violent, unrepentant white supremacist, and the clueless or careless person caught saying something inappropriate in public, and present them to us as equivalent. Some people are just trash, and there’s no point wasting our time on them. But most people are pretty complex and generally try to do the right thing but inevitably screw it up sometimes. For whatever reason, social media hates that kind of ambiguity, and needs to have a shocking exposé that proves somebody was a latent asshole this entire time, we just knew it. Everybody’s got to draw their own lines, and I don’t know what the answer is. But I’m positive that false equivalencies and “cancel culture” isn’t it.

I should be clear that I’m not in any way trying to undermine or belittle the damage the Trump administration has caused to the country. To be clear: this has been, objectively, a disaster. And I genuinely believe that Trump being re-elected would mean an end to American democracy as I understand it — that’s not exaggeration. Even if you don’t include the lives unnecessarily lost to a disease they initially dismissed as “no worse than the flu” although they had ample proof otherwise; even if you don’t include the environmental protections that have been arbitrarily and vindictively rolled back; even if you don’t include all the civil liberties and basic human rights violations committed against immigrants; even if you don’t include the blatant attempts to undermine the free press and replace it with state-run media; Trump’s actions would be inexcusable. If only for the degree to which they’ve lowered our public discourse, destroyed our trust in each other, and degraded our belief in America. You don’t have to be one of those pretentious historians who describes American democracy as an “experiment” to recognize that this is a violation of the ideals we’re supposed to stand for.

I should also be 100% clear that I’m in no way suggesting that we excuse, forgive, or ignore casual racism or continue to treat it as inevitable. Anyone who was disgusted by the murder of George Floyd, or Ahmaud Arbery, or Trayvon Martin, should be forced to acknowledge that these aren’t just one-off events, but the inevitable result of centuries of white people treating black people as “less than” or even “other,” and slowly building systems into our society to reinforce that. I’ve no doubt that at least 90% of the people responding with “All Lives Matter” aren’t saying it in good faith, but instead are using it as a time-wasting deflection. Still, I’m sure that there are people who do genuinely believe that we’re close to living in a “post-racial” society, because they’re not forced to confront it every day. That should be something we can fix. We should all be forced to acknowledge that we’re not one community yet — we can be, but we will never be until we make a real effort to overhaul the thousands of ways our community works to make sure that non-whites are at a disadvantage.

So my goal isn’t really to excuse, explain, or forgive Trump supporters at all. Because that’s really not my job. If people were actually gung-ho about voting for this fool, there’s not much we can do about that now. Let other people decide for themselves how they feel about 2016, and let’s devote our energy to moving forward and figuring out what we can do now to actually fix things.

I don’t know what the answer is — but I can link to smarter people than me who are trying to make things better. And the first step is to reject any notion of despair, laziness, or division. Don’t act like good people are outnumbered in the US. Trump was already lying about how much support he had on inauguration day. We have been shown over and over that both US political parties and foreign “agitators” have been creating loads of fake online accounts to make it seem like offensive, nonsensical ideas have more support than they actually do. We’ve seen that he was impeached, and is only still in office because of 50 self-interested senators, few of whom would even make a statement defending him. We’ve seen that there is no genuine loyalty among Trump and the people he enables, and they turn on each other and abandon each other the moment it’s politically convenient. We’ve seen Trump get increasingly hysterical, spreading increasingly outlandish bullshit via platforms owned by white billionaires who profit from the controversy — these are not the actions of a party that’s “winning” and has genuine grassroots support.

The thing to remember is that Trump not only lost the popular vote in the 2016 election, he lost by a lot. Greater than the populations of Wyoming and Vermont combined. By almost as much as the entire population of the United States when the electoral college was introduced. And not only did he lose, he came in third. Second place went to Hilary Clinton. First place was a tie between apathy and complacency.

We’ve already seen that Americans — especially white Americans — put too much emphasis on “we’ve elected a black President!” as proof that we’d moved into a new post-racial age. Now we’re seeing some Americans insist that it was all a lie, and that we’re no better now than we were before the Civil Rights Act. Obviously, neither of these are true. Even after three and a half years of an incompetent racist president, things are better now than they were 50 years ago. Better than even 20 years ago. It’s inexcusable how slowly we’re advancing, but we are advancing. Just like voting for Obama didn’t fix everything — ask all the gay couples who had to wait for his opinions on marriage equality to “evolve” — voting out Trump isn’t going to fix everything, either. It’s an essential first step for us to survive at all, but it’s still just the barest minimum a responsible human being can do.

Biden was my second-to-last choice for President, but he doesn’t have to be President just for me, but for about 330 million other people too. Of the 10,000 things that make the Trump “administration” illegitimate, one of the most damning is one of the least directly harmful: he doesn’t have any sense of obligation to serve anyone who doesn’t keep him in power. Even Republicans should recognize that that’s not how America is supposed to work. A system where Democrats get their own private President for 8 years and then Republicans get theirs for 8 years is not sustainable and is definitely not progress. It’s been disheartening to see so many people who are ostensibly progressive talk as if any dissent were betrayal. As if reducing the needs of 330 million people down to a choice between two candidates were ever going to be anything other than a compromise.

It’s understandable that in an increasingly noisy environment, where malicious actors are spouting extremist nonsense that no decent human could actually agree with, that we’re all wary of sacrificing our integrity. Few of us want to be unwittingly helping perpetuate a system that periodically promises progress and then does nothing. But I feel like healthy skepticism often gets corrupted and turns into apathy — where someone actually believes that the whole system is corrupt, and the people trying to do good are just as bad as the people openly abusing and exploiting the system — or it turns into its own kind of absolutist self-righteousness — where someone actually believes that dissent and compromise are the enemies of progress, instead of the tools of progress. When I heard that Pete Buttigieg was running for President, I expected that a well-educated gay Christian from the midwest would meet with a lot of resistance. What I didn’t expect was that the most virulent attacks on him would come from people claiming to be Bernie Sanders supporters.

There’s a meme going around that says, paraphrased, that we can have political disagreements about things like tax rates, zoning, appropriations for schools; but not about questions like “are gay people human beings?” and “are Nazis bad?” and “are black people bad?” It seems straightforward enough, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve spread it or similar in the past. But if you think about it for a minute, it’s not really saying that much — all you’ve done is pledged to reframe the way you treat other people around the most extremist, and likely most deliberately divisive, way to describe important issues. I’m a strong believer that the easier it is to say something, the less valuable it is to say it. So if you find yourself arguing for a statement that should be trivially true, you should consider whether that’s actually the argument that’s being made. It doesn’t do much good to yell “racism is bad!” to someone who doesn’t believe they’re being racist.

With so much noise and so many people acting in bad faith, it’s especially worthwhile for us to take a minute before we respond to anything we see. Are we responding to a real person, or are we being fooled by a troll and just adding more noise to the conversation? Are we responding to actually share some information or shut down something genuinely harmful, or are we just trying to get in a sick burn of a takedown? And most importantly: is the person actually saying what I’m accusing them of saying, or have we just both reduced each other’s viewpoints to the most absurdist and extremist shorthand? Are we actually making progress, or are we just playing into a long-running attempt to keep us focused on all the things that divide us, instead of all the things that bring us together?

There’s a reason I started this post the way I did. Back at the beginning of the year, I realized that we’re in the world for way too short a time to be wasting any of that time on the things and people that don’t matter. And I realize I keep letting my perception of what matters get skewed by spending too much time in an environment filled with performative, divisive noise. At a minimum, I need to pledge — hopefully for the last time, until it’s time to help drum up the vote in October — to stop giving any attention to Trump. We need to be listening to competent people with actual answers, and a genuine desire to help us get through this pandemic and work towards real social justice, and any time spent being angry at an idiot is just a waste of time. And after that, I need to remember that disagreements aren’t just unavoidable, but necessary for a democracy to function. Instead of concentrating on our differences for the sake of preserving my imagined “integrity,” I need to concentrate more on the things that we all have in common. There are a lot of people who want to tear everything down and keep everything for themselves, but there are a lot more of us who genuinely want to make things better, and simply disagree on how to do it.

If I were editing together a sizzle reel for the highlights of Western Democracy, I don’t think I’d be including much from the 21st century. Seeing the US elect a black President was a highlight — especially for the side benefit of seeing bigots in sputtering, baffled rage like the kids in the rich camp at the end of an 80s teen movie. But apart from that, there’s been enough crushing disappointment in my fellow citizens that I’ve often started to wonder whether democracy was a good idea in the first place.

For one example: there was that wave of Web 2.0 evangelists promising to democratize the internet. It was sold to us as a world without gatekeepers, in which everyone has a voice. What it became instead was a world where millionaires handed out super-powerful microphones to any asshole who’d increase “engagement” enough to bump up the artificial value of their publishing platform’s IPO.

Another: all the bans against marriage equality across the US and the rest of the world, in which a bunch of bigots spent decades arguing that it was fair and just to put the rights of a minority up for a popular vote. (Don’t forget: the aforementioned first black President, who’s now frequently championed as if he were some kind of hero of LGBT rights, asserted that he was opposed to marriage equality because of his religion, but believed it should be left to the states to decide. Even though as a constitutional scholar and the child of interracial parents, he should’ve known better).

Next: the citizens of the UK decided to make the Magna Carta seem like a bad idea, by taking the silly, lighthearted, and trivially irreverent idea of Boaty McBoatface and applying it to racist, global-economy-threatening, backwards isolationism.

And then it culminated in November 2016. All of us who’d been raised learning about both the importance of checks and balances in government and the necessity of being a good and honest person in society got to watch tens of millions of people vote for one of the worst people to be President of the United States. Not just worst people for the role of President. Worst people in the United States. And then instead of saying “oh my God what have I done?!” they proudly held up their lovingly selected pile of dogshit and said “Ha ha, suck it, liberals!”

In the time since the election, the initial shock has subsided, and the rest of us have gone from asking ourselves “How could this happen?” to “Where are we supposed to go from here?” Our government and all the other interconnected systems that make our society work are based on the fundamental assumption that functioning adults will show the barest minimum level of civic responsibility. If adults can be so consumed with selfishness and apathy that they’d take their one responsibility as citizens and say “well, screw it, why not vote for the corrupt, incompetent clown?” then what’s the point of any of it?

That’s the mindset I’ve been in for a couple of years now. But recently I’ve grown to appreciate the value of democracy again, and I’ve got Mark Zuckerberg to thank for that.

Last month, a “leaked” recording of an open meeting at Facebook revealed Zuckerberg speaking out against Elizabeth Warren’s pledge to break up anti-competitive tech giants. In it, he delivered his own pledge to “go to the mat” fighting against it. Zuckerberg has had at least a couple of private meetings with Trump since then.

It’s tough to describe the kind of despair I felt after hearing that. I was already feeling the kind of depressive anxiety that comes from being an American with an internet connection in 2019, but this added a new level of hopelessness. For the first time in my lifetime, we have the potential to have a genuinely progressive Democrat in the office of President. It could mean a rejection not just of Reagan-era policy, but of the pervasive white male superiority that’s desperately and cravenly clawing to maintain its hold over the country. And it could all be ruined by some weird asshole billionaire just for the sake of maintaining his own source of immense, unnecessary wealth.

Except for this: the same democracy that lets some racist vote for a sleazy grifter for President of the United States is what makes Mark Zuckerberg’s vote worth exactly the same as mine.

Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Jack Dorsey, and Peter Thiel combined all have the same voting power as the passengers of a fully-loaded Prius plug-in hybrid with a “Coexist” bumper sticker. Every single asshole in the Trump administration combined with every Republican senator hypocritically supporting them, is no more or less powerful in a popular vote than even the number of black supporters at a Pete Buttigieg rally.

Since November of 2016, we’ve been deluged with thinkpieces imploring us to get inside the mind of the Trump voter, to acknowledge and renounce our coastal elitist bubbles and connect with the heartland that forms Trump’s base, and even to upend our lives and move to “red states” to “turn them blue” again. There’s been so much of this talk, you might even be fooled into thinking that Trump won the election.

He didn’t, of course. He lost the popular vote. By a lot. Even with the proven Republican gerrymandering and proven Republican attempts at voter suppression and proven Russian interference in the election. He lost by almost 3 million votes, which means that Trump lost the popular vote by almost as much as the entire population of the United States when the electoral college was instituted.

I mention the electoral college because the Republicans only “won” because they manipulated an inherently un-democratic system to appoint their candidate President. Ironically, it was a system included as a concession to states panicked about a too-strong federal government that would ignore the representative branches, ignore states rights, and govern by fiat. In other words: Trump is in office because the GOP manipulated a system that was intended specifically to keep people like Trump from ever being in office.

Over the past few years, I’ve seen a lot of chuckleheads insisting that focusing on the popular vote, or complaining about the electoral college, are all just the bitter grousing of impotent liberals. But that’s one of the biggest lies of all. It suggests that the political theater that the media focuses on is the most important part, and that it’s all a game of strategic machinations and counter-machinations where the end goal is to “win,” not to govern fairly and justly.

And more simply: it suggests that Trump has the mandate of the people, which is just objectively false. Even if you ignore the popular vote. Even if you accept the ludicrous idea that the 85% of the US population living in urban areas is somehow less American than those in rural areas. Even if you accept Trump’s hilariously bullshit and deliberately misleading “Impeach this” map. Even if you accept the more accurate “Land doesn’t vote, people do.” visualization that still shows areas as uniformly either red or blue.

But it’s important to remember that Clinton didn’t “win,” either. As embarrassing as it is for Trump that he still lost the popular vote even with so many people keeping their thumb on the scales for his benefit, it should be embarrassing to Clinton that she didn’t win by the largest landslide in American history. Trump was repeatedly caught on video and audio saying racist and misogynist things, and was recorded at a rally openly mocking a disabled person. If over 60 million people can see and hear all of that and still not want to vote for you, you don’t have the mandate, either.

The real winner of November 2016 was apathy. The idea that either the system was working as intended and was just inherently unfair, or that the system was irreparably broken and not worth even trying to fix. For eight years, there were a lot of people heavily invested in telling us that having a left-of-center black President was radical. For the past three years, there’ve been a lot of people heavily invested in telling us that the nation is irreparably divided in ways that it hasn’t been since the Civil War.

I’m skeptical.

Although I’m backing Elizabeth Warren for as long as possible, it was Pete Buttigieg who knocked me out of my sense of despair and convinced me that there was a way out of the current mess. His most insightful observation is that this is the end of the Reagan era of politics, and good riddance. It’s been in effect for most of my lifetime, so I’d started to think that it was just the way America worked, instead of a deliberately constructed system of media manipulated and reinforced complacency that indicts Obama and the Clintons almost as much as it does the Bushes and Reagan.

Buttigieg’s other most valuable insight is that people knew full well who they were voting for. A lot of people — including me — who were trying to make sense of the 2016 election spent at least a year afterward getting flustered at news stories and showing them angrily to suspected Trump supporters, asking “Do you see what you’re responsible for? Can you understand what you did?!” As if they’d somehow just missed the news. It’s a lot like trying to punish a dog by rubbing its nose in its mess, as if a dog, of all creatures, wasn’t already aware of what shit smells like.

The reality, I believe, is that individual people are as “purple” as voting districts are. Maybe I’ve just been extraordinarily lucky, but I’ve encountered very few people who were actually gung-ho pro-Trump. They were well aware of the thousands of things that make him unfit for the Presidency, but they believed — incorrectly — that either it didn’t matter or that there were other issues that were more important.

I can’t stress enough how wrong that was. No matter how much people might want to insist that we don’t know what’s in their hearts, that people contain multitudes, that politics requires compromise, etc. ad nauseam, the fact remains that there was an objectively wrong choice in November 2016, and they made it. They want to suggest that there’s a moral equivalent between my voting for Clinton despite having issues with some of her opinions on foreign policy, and their voting for Trump despite his bragging about sexual assault and holding rallies promising to build a wall to keep out brown people. Nice try, but no.

But at least it’s a start. To think that around half of the people in the country who cared enough to vote saw a campaign based on lies, bullying, fear, and bigotry, and said “yes, that’s what we’re all about,” suggests that the US is irreparably doomed. To think that people saw a campaign based on lies, bullying, fear, and bigotry, and gave an exasperated shrug, at least suggests we can get better.

Whatever the plan is, it doesn’t work unless it works for everyone. That means rejecting any idea that doesn’t make the process as democratic as possible. Obviously, that means a flat rejection of any President who brazenly admits he doesn’t work for people who didn’t vote for him (spoiler: he doesn’t work for the people who voted for him, either), and tries to act as if Californians and Puerto Ricans aren’t US citizens. It means a flat rejection of legislators who are more preoccupied with stuffing judicial appointments with as many people of their party as possible instead of actually legislating. It means rejecting anyone who tries to suppress or manipulate the vote. It means eliminating the electoral college. These are all the basics, and anyone who suggests it’s “partisan” to support democracy is selling you a bold-faced lie.

The more complicated part that people like me have to realize is that it means including everyone, including the irretrievably broken assholes. The bigots screaming racist shit at a Trump rally need to be part of it, so we can assert that they are in the minority. Divide and conquer is one of the oldest tricks in the book, but it’s depressing how often we still fall for it. Not just from the obvious sources like the Republicans who rely on it to stay in power, but anyone who profits from your “engagement.” But if we continue to believe the bullshit narrative that we’re a nation divided, with elites in the big cities having no idea how good honest folk in Trump Country live, then we’re essentially ceding half of the country over to self-interested grifters.

One of the insidious ideas that’s been floating in the American consciousness ever since Reagan and his followers farted it out is that being patriotic or pro-America is a “conservative” idea. I mean, I’m sure that people have been calling each other “un-American” for as long as the country’s existed, but at least in my lifetime, it was during the 80s that liberals stopped arguing against it. So all the grossest representatives of white America would wrap themselves in the US flag and wave sparklers around and insist that only they represented true American values, while liberals couldn’t figure out how exactly to promote globalism, diversity, peace, and equality as being somehow not mutually exclusive with patriotism.

It seems like we were so eager to show how chauvinistic and militaristic we weren’t, that we stopped defending the trademark, and we just let astoundingly hypocritical politicians and redneck assholes (and sometimes, both) take it over. “America, Fuck Yeah!” became a joke, along with schmaltzy displays of patriotism. It’s only by insisting that patriotism is somehow partisan that you end up with the disgusting spectacle of the President of the United States telling US Representatives to “go back where they came from.”

Instead of pointing and laughing at the hypocrites and rednecks, we should’ve been showing the right way to do it. Insisting on a version of America that works for everybody, and to listen to people when they tell us over and over that it isn’t working for them. Demanding that we all share what we’re entitled to, instead of being treated like special interests. If there is anything good to come out of this nightmare, it’s that maybe more people will be knocked out of their sense of complacency and finally be forced to admit that the system hasn’t been working for people who aren’t straight, white, and upper middle class.

On a more practical level: the podcast Majority 54 with Jason Kander is entirely devoted to the idea of restoring our democracy and rejecting the lazy idea that we’re a nation hopelessly divided. It’s a good slap back to reality for those of us who’ve spent too much time being influenced by Vox headlines and Twitter threads.

There’s also Represent.us, which is drawing attention to the problem and asserting that democracy is not a partisan concern, no matter how much the GOP would like to insist that it is. And via Fair Fight, Stacey Abrams is campaigning for free and fair elections.

It’s appropriate that the shithead currently acting as President has a history with the WWE, because this is in a lot of ways the kayfabe administration. Everyone spreading a lot of bullshit that they know is a lie, the only truth being that there’s a lot of money in getting people wrapped up in the spectacle and eager to scream at the heel. I still say voting us into this nonsense was inexcusable, but I have to believe that there’s a viable way out for all of us. It sure as hell doesn’t mean that we have to like or respect or even empathize with each other, but we do just have to share and do the barest minimum to act like responsible adults.