My future grandson sent this to me last night, written by his friend.
“I had to put this down earlier. Maybe it resonates. If you’re bored… Ramblings of a mad man…
There will be much to say over the coming days and weeks about what just happened. While we lick our wounds and process this through the lens of historical American elections, it will be tempting to yet again introspectively search our souls for how people could be so misled, what we did wrong, and try to sort out how to come back from this. There will be plenty of blame and self-loathing to go around. “Biden set us up for failure,” “Harris was the wrong candidate and we didn’t get a primary” etc. There will yet again be olympic level gymnastic apologetics for the misinformed and manipulated electorate who were riled up by populist rhetoric, misinformation and social media. There will yet again be accusations of widespread racism, sexism, and that America “just wasn’t ready” for a black woman to be president. And there will yet again be post-mortem calls to listen more empathetically to the misinformed complaints about the economy, inflation, and misguided conclusions about the spurious correlation between current presidential leadership and widespread economic frustrations.
I find myself rapidly accepting that while all of those contributing factors may be part of the story, it misses the mark of the deeper truth that this outcome has revealed—American democracy is finally cooked. And you know what? Fuck em.
I think this is the culmination of a values shift that we should have known was coming when 2020 turned out to be so close. Not a shift in policy or moral values necessarily, but a wholesale shift in the way we relate to governance and power in America. When I say we’re cooked, I mean our democracy has failed under its own weight. The chaos prevailed. We had one candidate saying “there is more that unites us than divides us,” and the other calling for persecution and violence against “the enemy from within” and we chose the latter. At the end of the day what I believe was just clearly communicated is that most people in America don’t want a democracy, and they’d happily rationalize squandering their democratic agency in pursuit of a strong man dictator against all caution.
In 2018 I found myself in Beijing on the same day Kim Jong Un was visiting, by total happenstance. The Chinese secret police (thinking I was a reporter) pulled me aside at Tiananmen Square and questioned me. After they realized I wasn’t a “threat” they started asking me my opinions about Kim Jong Un. I bit my tongue and expressed false neutrality but returned the question, “What do YOU think about him?” The guy told me that he liked leaders like him because you don’t really have to think about too much, things are just “taken care of.” I believe that’s what Americans just unapologetically declared they want.
One of the most prominent constitutional scholars alive, Erwin Chemerinsky, predicted blue state secession if Trump were to return to power, and I agree that movement is likely on the horizon. So perhaps we redraw the maps, take our toys, and build the progressive future we want without having to drag the red welfare states out of the mud in our pursuit of progress and the expansion of democracy. Maybe it’s time to let ‘em rot. We've historically flirted with this rhetorically and theoretically, but always thought better of sacrificing the would-be subjugated and disenfranchised within those states. It wasn't worth it. But at some point, ideological conflict becomes irreconcilable and it becomes necessary to game out and weigh the unintended consequences of secession against the desired end-state. I am struggling to decide whether we have reached the tipping point where we leave the red states to their own devices, or give in and accept our new Christo-Fascist overlords, but I know which way I'm leaning.”