Post-Election Rant

I am, by nature, an optimist.

By that I do not mean that I emulate Pollyanna. (Do kids still read that in this day and age?) Nor do I agree with Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide that things are all happening for the best in “the best of all possible worlds.”

While I am well aware of the many negative things in this world, I have tended throughout my life to assume that we will muddle along and things will work out more or less all right. There will be suffering and great evils and progress will be uneven, but we will stumble forward.

The election has shaken my optimism to its core. I don’t seem much path for muddling forward after that.

Dave Karpf, a professor of political communication and a very interesting thinker, had some good observations on the day after the election. His thoughts aren’t particularly comforting – “I did not think American Democracy was in any way perfect, but I did believe we were at least better than this” – but they’re in keeping with my own and also not big on trying to fix blame on political decisions.

His focus is the future and his answers are bleak, but he does think the country will eventually come back. He observes, “This will get very bad for a great many people, and many of the effects will be locked in for decades.”

I don’t have decades. I look at the same things he’s writing about and think “this is the rest of my life.”

We didn’t have that time to spare (I’m paraphrasing Karpf here, but I had the same thought), especially when it comes to climate change.

Even under a Harris administration, I was worried the United States would not do enough to address climate change, but under the grifter there will be no federal resources available and the fossil fuel industry will go on a binge.

The price of renewables may make them competitive and help, but that’s only going to cover a small part of the problem. And some tech bro types are going to go wild with completely unregulated and unsupervised geoengineering.

I shudder to think how wrong a lot of that will go.

The most positive take I can put on this is the world Kim Stanley Robinson evokes in The Ministry for the Future, which does include an ineffective United States. There’s a lot of suffering in that book and I’m not sure I share his faith in the positive things that happen.

Octavia Butler’s Earthseed books are also on point, with a United States government that looks eerily like the one we’re facing.

Given how many tech bros use dystopian science fiction as an agenda rather than a warning, it starts to feel like this is on purpose. Though I don’t think those who misread William Gibson pay much attention to Butler.

I’m looking at climate change, but of course we’re facing many other evils: misogyny, racism, wealth and income inequality, and the likelihood of more pandemics and other serious health challenges with no public health system or other resources.

I am inclined to think the human race will survive the current stupidities – I’ve got some optimism left – but we could do it with much less pain for all concerned. The suffering is going to be immense, both now and later.

One thing I’m sure of, given that I don’t have decades to help rebuild this country after it is ravished by the fascist grifter and his tech bro accomplices, is that I’m not going to spend my time on elections anymore.

Oh, I’ll vote. I’ll write my members of Congress occasionally. I might do a little bit at the local level, where I can maybe help avoid the dangers we face from developer and Silicon Valley money trying to do to the East Bay what they already did to San Francisco.

But certainly on the national level and maybe all the way down, the best we’re going to be able to do with government is put up some resistance. And resistance, while necessary, doesn’t get us what we really need.

The climate disasters are going to pile on us and the government won’t be there to help. Wealth inequality is going to skyrocket, and it was already terrible.

We’re going to need to help each other, to build community, and to see where we can stop the worst outrages. We’re going to need to think deeply and make art.

I’ve spent my whole life doing bits here and there to help the United States live up to its potential. I believed in the country envisioned by the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution, in the country we built from the New Deal to the Great Society.

The right wing has been tearing that country down for fifty years now and it looks like they’ve finally got it where they want it. We’re going to get the Roaring 20s and the Gilded Age, with no brakes.

Christopher Brown had an excellent discussion of the kind of people we’re dealing with in his Field Notes from last week (pre-election):

The idea of blindly following a real estate developer as your Pied Piper is quintessentially American, when you think about it. It’s kind of what George Washington was, and absolutely the origin story of the State of Texas. And when you read about Moses and Stephen F. Austin, and how the son came to think about his work—taking “sincere and boundless joy at the destruction of the wilderness [and] every crashing tree”—you get a better idea of why it is that the only remnants of the expansive biodiverse prairies they found here are a few stray plants popping up in the ditches where the water drains off the dystopian hellscape we’ve made.

I’m done. I no longer care what happens to the United States. We’re back to the greedy bastards who came here to steal the land from the people who already lived on it and build wealth on the backs of other people they stole from Africa.

Some of those people are my ancestors, but they are not my people.

I will continue to care about the planet as a whole. I’ll care about my friends and relatives throughout the country. I’ll do what I can in the places where I live and try to help a few folks in other places.

But I don’t think the United States is worth saving as a country. In the end, the worst parts of our history have trumped our virtues.