When Race for the Galaxy first came out I was instantly addicted. It has a theme of galactic-level advanced civilization, as well as a design that is mostly straightforward, but just complex enough to provide a mutli-faceted experience, with lots of strategic choices and multiple paths to victory. It has secret role selection, a mechanic I like a lot, since it creates tension and the opportunity to second-guess and bluff. It also has a rich variety of cards, with each card being unique (mostly), but all of them interacting in a myriad of ways – a feature I always appreciate in a game.
Another thing I love about this game is that it incorporates sci-fi concepts that come from the venerable traditions of the genre, going back to earlier generations. It’s pretty obvious where its Rebel v. Imperium theme comes from. Then there’s also a mysterious vanished Alien race, which looks like a callback to Frederik Pohl’s Heechee Saga, and the Uplift idea, straight from Dave Brin. One card, Terraforming Engineers, reminds me of the planet designers from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
The game does have iconography that can be confusing at first, and one drawback it has is that it requires a learning curve to familiarize oneself with the card set. A player who knows the cards has a decided advantage over a complete novice. Luckily for me, there were plenty of other gamers in the late 2000s/early 2010s who also loved this game and developed the expertise to play it. It got a ton of plays back then. I was even logging plays on BGG at the time (which I don’t do any more), and this game has the most plays of any on my list, at 191 total. This game was also the subject of a couple of early session reports, including this fun one: RftG is baptized.
The game has been expanded a bit, and I love all of the expansions. The first expansion arc is a must have, and I prefer to play with all three of its sets, and all the complexity they add. And even though they are a bit more fiddly, so to speak, I also enjoy the Alien Artifacts and Xeno Invasion expansions. When I bought them, I also bought a new set of the base game to go with them, since the set I had already was mixed with the original expansions, and is well worn from being played so much.
The game has also been reimplemented, and I have tried a couple of its reimplementations. I liked the Puerto Rico-esque board game version, New Frontiers, a lot. Roll for the Galaxy I thought was well designed, though dice versions of board games are not really my thing, and I don’t much hanker to play it. I still haven’t tried Jump Drive, which is sort of a simplified version of it to my understanding.
Alas, all those old Race for the Galaxy gamers are not in my sphere any more. Everyone’s moved to different parts of the country (including me). It seems that no one at conventions wants to play, like it’s really fallen in popularity. And it’s a hard game to bring to new players, especially given that there are so many easier to learn options out there these days.
I still play, though, against the AIs, as there are several exellent digital implementations. I mostly play the Steam version. I must have a thousand plays by now, and there are so many combinations of cards that every game is unique, and it just never gets boring to me.
A lover’s calling is to love. To love unconditionally.
Not to judge; not to pass judgments.
Do you know why you do not need to judge your beloved, lover?
Because someone else already has that job.
Who, you might ask?
Why, every single other blessed human being your beloved knows and encounters in their daily life. Your beloved is constantly being judged by others. They do not need you to join in the chorus of nitpickings, criticisms, and condemnations.
As a lover, your duty is to love.
To love unconditionally.
❤
As in all things in life, there is a complimentary consideration. There are two sides to any coin.
As a lover, you have an intimacy with your beloved not shared by others. You are more closely involved with them than are those others who are constantly judging them. There is truth to the idea of knowing more about someone with whom you are intimate than they know about themself.
Sometimes a lover must help their beloved to see what they cannot see about themself, and to guide them away from harmful choices.
This is a delicate matter, as any lover knows. One does not wish to offend one’s beloved!
To stay silent while watching your beloved suffer from lack of self-awareness is an act of fear, however, not of love. So sometimes a lover must judge their beloved, for their own good.
But only gently, and always in the spirit of unconditional loving.
One of my New Year’s traditions is posting a list of the ages of the current living generations in the United States.
Arguably, on December 31st, everyone has had their birthday for the year. If generations are defined by birth year boundaries, then each generation fits neatly into an age bracket on that day (just ignore time zones, please). I use the birth years defined by Strauss-Howe generational theory, which gives us this age breakdown:
GI or Greatest Generation (b.1901-1924): 100+ years old
Silent Generation (b.1925-1942): 82-99 years old
Boomer Generation (b.1943-1960): 64-81 years old
Generation X (b.1961-1981): 43-63 years old
Millennial Generation (b.1982-2004): 20-42 years old
Homeland Generation (b.2005-20??): 0-19 years old
All living members of the GI (or Greatest) Generation are now centenarians, a fact underscored by the death on December 29 of former US President Jimmy Carter at age 100. His generation will still be with us for years to come, as we always have a few people alive who are supercentenarians (110+). As I write this, the oldest living American is 114 years old. So if just one 100 year old alive today makes it to that age, there will still be living members of the Greatest Generation in 2038.
Each generation’s age bracket currently lines up well with a phase of life. Meaning, Millennials fill the age bracket corresponding to young adulthood (21-41 by Strauss-Howe reckoning), Gen Xers that corresponding to midlife (42-62), and so forth. This means we should be close to the end of the current social era, the Fourth Turning or Crisis Era. In the next era, the First Turning of the new saeculum, the generations will be aging into their new life phases (Millennials will become midlifers, Gen Xers will become elders, etc.).
This Crisis Era has been dragging on, probably because of the influence of the Silent generation, which is holding back change. They are just on the edge of leaving elderhood (63-83) but still in power; President Biden is a member of the Silent Generation, for example. You could think of it as the long shadow cast by the last generations that were alive in World War II, whose legacy defines the postwar order which is now coming to an end.
As the Silents age out of public life in the near future, we will lurch our way to the end of this era and into the next saeculum (the true New World Order), however chaotically and however painfully. The inexorable logic of time and generational change demands it.
Congratulations, living generations, you made it through 2024!
This is a self-portrait I drew with a pencil. It came about because our youngest son, Tiernan, is studying art at Kutztown University. They have a short winter session in which his classes are 100% online. He had an assignment to draw a self-portrait, and there was a short instructional video from his professor to go with it.
Aileen and I offered to do the assignment with him and we all watched the video together. We’re kind of getting a three-for-one deal on the class, assuming we stick with doing all the assignments, though Aileen and I won’t get course credit (this is called the free rider problem).
So anyway, the professor gave quite good instructions, I thought. He explained the proportions of the face – for example that the eyes are at about the halfway point, and that when drawing them you should first consider the size and shape of the orbits. You should start with the outline of the skull, then get all the parts of the face in according to the proportions, and then fill in the details. With professional grade pencil and eraser it’s easy to draw lines for reference and then get rid of them for the final product.
We set up a mirror and a drawing pad on an easel so we could all do our drawings. I think mine came out pretty good. I did have it a little easier because I didn’t have to draw my chin or even my mouth really, since I have so much face fuzz. The shape of the skull isn’t quite right; it’s actually too wide. But the details of my eye sockets, with their impressive puffiness and deep shadows, are fairly accurate.
I put a lot of attention into those eye sockets. Drawing this portrait felt like a study in the imperfections of my face, like I really got to know its unique and asymmetrical contours. Those eye bags come from incessantly staying up late and refusing to give up my habit of alcohol consumption. My life etched onto the surface of my face, growing ever less resilient with the passage of time.
Aileen says I would be prettier if I smiled, but that’s just my resting concentration face I guess. 🙂
One type of post I’ve made a lot on this blog is the “strategy review,” where I either review a theory of social and political change, or examine current events through the lens of such theories. Considering recent historical developments, I feel like it’s time for another one.
Over the years, I’ve gotten a lot of traction on this blog out of Philip Bobbitt‘s concept of the “market state” – a new constitutional order which he theorized was forming in the wake of America’s Cold War victory. In his framework, this was caused by changes in the security environment. With the ideological conflicts of the World Wars to Cold War era resolved, and free market capitalism ascendant, the state no longer derived legitimacy from controlling the economy and maximizing benefits to its citizens, in competition with other economic systems. Instead, it’s purpose was to keep its citizens safe and free markets functioning, to maximize economic opportunity.
This jibes with what other strategists, like Thomas P.M. Barnett and Peter Zeihan, have identified as the grand bargain the United States made with the world after WWII: we opened up our vast consumer market and invited other countries to embrace free trade, in return for which we stood as a bulwark against the Soviet bloc. Then we simply outlasted the Communists’ failure of an economic system. With Great Power conventional warfare a bygone in the nuclear age (the MAD doctrine), Pax Americana reigned over the Earth. Some even called it “the end of history.”
Things got messy after 9/11. It seemed history wasn’t interested in ending after all. The way Bobbitt understood it, in terms of his market state theory, is that in the new security environment, the threat wasn’t other nations making war on the West. Instead, it was transnational organizations taking advantage of the open networks of market state societies to infiltrate and cause harm – the 9/11 terror attacks being a spectacularly dramatic example. The point is, the market state had to adapt and develop countermeasures against these threats, with minimal reduction of economic opportunity for its subjects: that would be the test of its legitimacy.
The War on Terror and nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq could be thought of as the emerging market state’s efforts to assert just such legitimacy, led by the hegemonic “sole superpower” United States. We would just reformat failed states and turn them into free market democracies like us, with a few tricks (like Guantanamo Bay) to get around any legal concerns. It ultimately didn’t turn out so well, and we gave up after the Bush era, but arguably there were a lot of lessons learned about the shape of modern warfare that carry forward to this day (send in the drones!).
I’ve argued in other posts on this blog that what Bobbitt calls the “market state” is really just the zeitgeist of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – an inner-driven, individualistic, commerce-minded social era. It was the age of neoliberalism, brought on by the Reagan revolution: a regime of free market principles aggressively pursued by government, on a global scale. The term “neoliberalism” is a bit fuzzy, and generally is used in the pejorative these days. Ever since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, there’s been kind of a consensus that neoliberalism was a bad idea, that it wrecked the middle class, and that we need to turn away from it, and from globalization in general.
In other words, what could be called the “neoliberal market state” was a creature of a relatively prosperous and stable era, when it was conceivable to have faith in markets and be comfortable with low regulation and an open, globalizing society. It wasn’t the end of history so much as a reprieve, during which the United States basked in its Cold War victory and enjoyed peak global hegemony. But the mood has shifted now. The public clamors for a more closed and orderly society, and a retreat from global affairs, which every President since Obama has provided.
This takes me to the recent Presidential election and the curious return of Donald Trump. Didn’t the people know that Biden-Harris was rolling back neoliberalism already, and was the best bet for the middle class? That Trump’s plans to cut taxes on the rich and impose tariffs on imports would hurt ordinary consumers? That his adminitration will deregulate capitalism to the benefit of the very wealthy, one of the hallmarks of the neoliberal regime we are supposedly rejecting? So why did they vote for him?
The election result could just be attributed to the incumbent-punishing effects of seething populism: everything sucks, and heads must roll! Alternately, the market state viewpoint might offer another explanation: informational warfare.
What I mean is, in the new constitutional order of the market state, the citizen is primarily a consumer. That includes being a consumer of media; that is, of information. In our somewhat free-for-all media envrironment, dominated by social networking sites, consumer-citizens tend to get pulled into either of two media bubbles, each one replete with the messaging of one of the two political factions vying for control of the government. It’s like two different versions of reality fighting for control over the minds of the masses. I’ve described this before as the “red-blue wars.”
It seems that in the recent skirmish that was the 2024 election, the red zone faction prevailed on the information warfare front. I have read post-mortem posts (there were so many this year!) that state just as much. The red zone faction simply has a more robust media ecosystem, which gives it a significant advantage. And, as I’ve noted before, they might also have more “group feeling,” or solidarity of purpose – another advantage.
But here’s another way to think about information war: it could be waged from outside! Meaning that, with the open and global nature of the Internet, “bad actors” who are not subjects of your government can infliltrate your media networks and influence your elections. This is a true test of the market state’s ability to sustain itself – is it even possible to govern at all in a wide-open society?
You might recall that this was the big story after the 2016 election: it was a successful Russian cyberwarfare operation, as Timothy Snyder bluntly put it. It was the first step to installing a Russian-style oligarchy in the U.S., and it seems like the 2024 election might be the last. In this interpretation, it wasn’t that the blue zone lost to the red zone. Instead, the United States lost to a foreign adversary, and was defeated in a market state war. The Russians outlasted us in the end, and we became like them!
I used to joke, during Trump’s first term, that we were transitioning from the “market state” to the “mafia state.” It doesn’t seem so funny now. The U.S. Constitution, stressed by decades of partisan gridlock, is fragile and might not survive a second Trump Presidency. He has no respect for the rule of law, and is enabled by cronies in the other branches of government. So it looks like we might end up with an entrenched criminal oligarchy. The only hope I have is that Trump is unfocused and distractable. But, as Tom Waits puts it, if you live in hope, you’re dancing to a terrible tune.
Arguably, “change voters” who put Trump in office this cycle were hoping for some kind of shake up that would at least put us on the path to fixing our broken system. That’s the only credit I can give them. But what will replace the market state that ostensibly has been trying to emerge these past decades? Trump’s cabinet of media personalities and tech bros are like a perverse enshrinement of the Reagan revolution – conservative pundits and Ayn Rand aficianados large and in charge. Isn’t that embracing the neoliberal market state?
Well, no, since the new regime promises to pull back from free trade, globalization, and military interventionism – all hallmarks of the neoliberal order. And the oligarchs at the top of the economic pyramid, like Bezos and Musk, are not interested in free markets. They want monopoly power, and the new administration will surely not stand in their way. It really is looking like we are reverting to isolationism and the rule of robber barons – because, you know, things were so great during the Gilded Age in the 19th century.
Were voters not aware that this was the future they were choosing? I mean, isn’t MAGA supposed to be a populist movement? Why did it put oligarchs in power? That’s where the idea of rightwing propagandists scoring an information warfare victory applies. Democracy is the tyranny of the uninformed.
Alternately, maybe MAGAs did intentionally vote for this bleak new order. Snyder has invented a term for this type of regime: sadopopulism. This is a kind of government that inflicts harm, but then deflects blame to stay in power. Certainly on brand for Trump. MAGA voters might be willing to suffer, so long as other people that they blame for their woes (immigrants, queers) suffer even more.
An even bleaker prospect: MAGA is an alliance between criminal oligarchy and a vicious backlash from social conservatives against the multiculturalism of the post-1960s era. It wants to replace the market state with a new version of the nation state that yokes powerful business interests to White Christian nationalism. If the nation state was legitimate because it looked out for the people’s welfare, then the Trumpian White Christian nation state is legitimate (in some people’s minds) because it looks out specifically for white Christians – maintaining their privilege over the rest of society.
At what point do we just go ahead and call it fascism?
If a MAGA takeover is resisted, it might only be because our judicial system allows that, in the “emerging market state” in the United States, consumer-citizens are empowered to define at the state level what their particular constitutional rights are. So states that are in the blue zone could reject White Christian nationalism, and institutionalize rights according to blue zone values – obvious examples being abortion access or sanctuary for immigrants.
This would amount to a fractionalizing of the U.S. along red zone-blue zone lines, which sounds quite plausible in today’s political environment. The problem with this, which Bobbitt himself has reflected on, is that it goes against the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal rights for all citizens under federal law. This may well be the direction in which our state is evolving. For many citizens of the United States, that would be a human rights disaster. There are already women dying in red states from lack of reproductive healthcare, and God help us if deportation camps become a reality.
Another problem with fractionalizing along red zone-blue zone lines is that it denies the United States a national identity. Can we then truly be a nation? Each side in our partisan conflict has a different vision of how our national identity should be defined. The red zone’s vision is exclusive and looks backwards in time, while the blue zone’s vision is inclusive and confront’s the realities of today’s world. Obviously, I favor the latter vision. But until the conflict is resolved, one way or another, the definition of our national identity – and with it our understanding of what makes government legitimate – will be unclear. Until then, we can only keep dancing to that terrible tune.
Well, there you have it. Another long post that probably overthinks the politics of our time by trying to force fit it into theoretical frameworks. I mean, is “information warfare” really a feature unique to the new “market state” of the 21st century? Wasn’t propaganda a big part of the political struggles and wars of the 20th century as well? Haven’t other societies faced political conflict with an ideological dimension, where persuasion and the spread of ideas was a factor – for example, the Religious Wars of the 16th century, or the Enlightenment Era Revolutions of the late 18th century?
Theories are useful for making sense of events and for structuring narratives, but might also impose limitations on our thinking. And while the past can inform us of what is possible, it cannot be a perfect guide to the future. Ultimately, the shape of things to come is determined by our unique choices, based on our needs and perspectives, in our specific location in history. Whatever version of “the state” is coming into being, and whatever name we give it, it will be one that makes sense to today’s living generations.
All I know for sure is that everyone is getting a copy of this book in their stocking this Christmas:
As I write this, authorities have just arrested a person of interest in the case of the “Healthcare assassin,” who murdered a CEO on his way to an investor meeting. This guy, if it is him, has been treated by the public like a folk hero. I’m sure you’ve seen the memes. People really hate the healthcare system in the United States.
…the second wave of newly aging-in Trump voters entered adulthood… hoping only to grind out a living through scams. But this is fundamentally an anti-social and anti-humanist mode of economic activity that contributes nothing to society and offers nothing but alienation to its victims. The result is people willing to vote for someone they know will cause immense harm to others, hoping it will help them personally.
As I put it, voters tapped into their inner Joker and embraced the breakdown of the society. This latest incident certainly supports that idea: if we can’t reform healthcare by legal means, well…shall we say the Purge is underway?
I will point out that insensitivity about the death of the rich has already been on display, during an earlier story that took place before the election. I’m referring to the submersible that imploded while taking some wealthy clients on a tour. There wasn’t much sympathy for them, either, and they were just some folks out on a lark, not supervillain-esque corporate executives on their way to plot how to ensure that the maximum proportion of a firm’s revenues went to its shareholders and not its customers.
A mural in Seattle, made after the Ocengate Titan implosion
Celebaring someone’s death is pretty harsh. Is Trump’s reelection making us all worse as a society, or is it that we’ve become less civil, making Trump’s rise possible? Arguably, Trump’s election win simply exposed us for the uncivil society that we’ve already become. I’m sure the two phenomena feed back on each other, in a vicious cycle. This is how social moods are reinforced; by collective reactions to events.
Generations theory has its own take on why this is an age of callous attitudes and lack of sensitivity: it has to do with the archetypes of the generations that fill the adult age brackets. The “sensitive artist”-type generation that is left is the Silent generation, but they are very old now, and on their way out of public life. President Biden is from that generation, and his departure when his Presidency ends will likely mark the end of his generation’s influence.
The next generation to fit that archetype is the current child generation, the Homelanders. Not until they have come of age in significant numbers will we see the return of an attitude of empathy and humaneness. By then, we will have entered another social era.
This is our Christmas tree for 2024. Pretty cool, huh?
Aileen wanted to do something different this year, and we contemplated making a tree out of books, or making one of out wine bottles. The latter idea was appealing because we have all these wine bottles with LED lights in them that we put together some years ago.
When we looked up making a tree of books, we realized that we would need hundreds of books to make it work. We had some books in stacks that we didn’t have shelving for, but not nearly that many, and didn’t want to unshelve our whole book collection. Then Aileen got the idea of stacking a couple of round tables and putting the globe on top, and then maybe putting books on the tables for a tree effect, which might require fewer books.
But she found it hard to get the books to look right, since she had to fit them in between the legs of the tables. She started experimenting with putting other things on the table, like those fancy boxes you can see there, and discovered that expanding the options gave her more versatility. A Christmas tree shape emerged out of the miscellany of objects she selected, at which point she really got into the process.
I’m a bit of a lumbering bear, so I didn’t dare try to help with the placement and careful balancing of the variety of objects. I did help by changing the batteries on the LEDs in the bottles, so that they would all be nice and bright on the occasions that we turn them on (we can’t just leave them on because they drain fast).
I love the way it turned out. I love the eclectic mix of objects, and how they mostly have muted colors and look “antique-y.” As a whole it’s like a sculpture with a “cluttercore” aesthetic, which suits our house (we have a lot of stuff). I love that Godzilla is in it, and the Fourth Turning book, and that there are pictures of our loved ones from the young generation.
Aileen calls it our holiday magic tree sculpture and says that everything in it means something.
We’re back home in eastern Pennsylvania after what I termed our “Red Thanksgiving” road trip, so named because it took us through solid Republican-voting “red zone” country. Specifically, we drove through the western part of our state, plus Ohio, Indiana, and even a tiny bit of West Virginia.
One of our stops was at Fallingwater, the iconic house on a waterfall designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Aileen had already been there, but not me. As I had always wanted to see it, we took advantage of the opportunity afforded by the trip. It’s a lovely bit of architecture, but not exactly a cozy place to live.
The house is in a remote location (that was the point of it – it’s a mountain retreat) so we ended up in the “Laurel highlands” of southwestern Pennsylvania. This is the highest elevation region of the state, as was evident from the snow on the ground. It is clearly part of Appalachia – sparsely settled, rustic, with a bleak and run-down feeling.
In fact, bleak and run-down describes all of the territory we drove through. Granted, it could have been the season, as the foliage has turned its wintry brown color, the days are short, and it was overcast most of the way. Interestingly, if you follow Colin Woodward’s model of eleven regional American cultures, most of the territory through which we traveled falls into the region he calls “Greater Applachia,” so it’s not surprising that it all looked so similar.
This is territory that was settled in the 18th century by people from “the Borderlands of the British Empire,” “proud” and “independent,” as Woodward puts it. And it is definitely Trump country now, with Trump-Vance signs all about and nary a Harris-Walz sign to be seen. That was probably the most Red State part of our trip – being inundated by pro-Trump messaging in a bleak landscape of decay and poverty.
The most Red State moment of all might have been briefly listening to a jingoistic radio station in Indianapolis that was first promoting American-made products, and then had Trump himself hawking watches. I wanted to barf (at the Trump ad). They might have radio stations like that here in the Philly area, but I wouldn’t know where to find them.
The most Blue State moment of the trip was probably when we detoured into Columbus, Ohio to see Wicked. We did it on a whim, finding the venue and purchasing the tickets online while we were on the road. Power of the Internet. The venue was an indie theater in the same building as a pub and restaurant, so we were able to get pizza and beer to go with our movie.
The place was jammed, there were so many people there to see the film. They had to start it late so everyone could get settled in. We got to enjoy Wicked in a large and diverse crowd of geeky fans. And what a fantastic film it was! It’s story hit hard, too, considering what is going on in the U.S. now (I won’t spoil it for you).
We visited Springfield, Ohio, too. We toured another Frank Lloyd Wright house, the Westcott House, which is much homier than Fallingwater. We also went to a Haitian restaurant (take that, orange guy!), where we enjoyed a delicious meal of fried chicken, plantains, and pasta, served with amazing black coffee. We were treated like VIPs by a sweet, gracious, middle-aged woman, who I think was the only one in the restaurant who spoke English. She told us they had been open for eight months.
Springfield isn’t exactly a bustling city, but it plainly had at least a little more diversity and culture than the surrounding country. Our experiences there and in nearby Columbus made it clear that they were the more “blue zone” parts of Ohio. Franklin County, where Columbus is located, did indeed go for Harris in the election, though the state of course did not. It just goes to highlight how the red-blue divide is a rural-urban divide.
The visit with family in Indianapolis was wonderful. Thanksgiving – that most distinctive American ritual – is about coming home, about return and reunion. We had a traditional turkey dinner, played board games, and caught up with relations we hadn’t seen in a while.
On Friday we long-hauled it back to eastern PA, and our life in the purple zone. It was snowing pretty hard in the mountains, but Aileen bravely got us through (I can’t see good at night, so we split the trip with me driving the first half, during daylight).
All in all, a fun and satisfying trip. The only thing I could have wished for to make the trip better was if it hadn’t been quite so cold, as we didn’t get as much walking in as I might have liked.
This week Aileen and I are going take a long road trip to visit her sister in Indianapolis. We are calling it “Red Thanksgiving” as we will be driving through Red States. Even Pennsylvania counts these days. Sigh.
It’s the first road trip out West that we’ve done in awhile, since the days when we used to go to Chicago every summer for G-Fest. We plan to stop off at Fallingwater (since I’ve never been) and then to another Frank Lloyd Wright house in Sprinfield, Ohio. That way we can check on everyone’s pets, too. /s
I love a good road trip and I’m looking forward to it. Also to an alternate Thanksgiving, as it’s our first celebrating with Aileen’s sister and her family. We Americans make a big deal out of this holiday, as it is one of the customs that defines who we are as a nation. Don’t worry about the history, it’s mostly myth. Just enjoy the gathering with friends and family and the harvest-time feasting.
There’s a chance we’ll get caught in a winter storm at the end of the trip, so wish us luck! And have a Happy Thanksgiving!
It’s been two weeks since the election, and we now wait with dread for the MAGA regime to take over and reformat, or at least attempt to reformat, American society. I’ve already written one post – I called it an election post-mortem, but it was really more of a reaction to the gut punch, immediate thoughts post. Like many of us, I’ve been consuming tons of post-election content as we all process this historic event. Here are some deeper thoughts, bringing in a little social theory.
Now that the votes are mostly counted, it is plain that Trump will beat his 2020 popular vote, by 3 or 4%. Harris will fall far short of Biden’s 2020 vote, which is the essential story of her loss. It’s a shame, given that she will likely have the third highest total of votes in Presidential election history, after only Biden in 2020 and her opponent in this election. As I put it earlier, she wasn’t unpopular – she just wasn’t quite popular enough, for a post-2020 candidate.
Assuming that there was no fraud (let’s not go down that conspiracy hole), the problem for Harris was clearly turnout, which then intersected with the brutal equation of the swing states and the electoral college. Where did those millions of Biden 2020 votes go, that might have tipped the balance?
One answer I’m reading goes back to that famous quote from 1992, “it’s the economy, stupid.” The narrative goes something like this: neoliberalism and globalization have hollowed out the middle class, and those corporate Democrats just don’t offer any solutions, instead pushing a bunch of woke nonsense.
This narrative doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Listen to historian Heather Cox Richardson explaining it. She states that Biden was actually stepping away from neoliberalism, and that Trump will take us back. The economy was working more in favor for the working class under Biden than it has in 40 years. Under Trump, it’s back to the old ways. The rich will keep getting richer and working class Americans will get the shaft.
Harris, in her bid to be elected, offered economic policies, with specifics, clearly addressed at helping working people – she calls them the middle class. Some examples, listed on her campaign web site, are a $6,000 Child Tax Credit, and up to $25,000 assistance for down payments for first-time home buyers.
On top of that, Democracts, including Harris, ran decidedly un-woke campaigns this cycle. I’ll let Jon Stewart take it away.
The fact is, President Biden handled the economy well, considering that his administration started in the midst of a global pandemic. As this MSNBC article puts it:
In what will be a generous gift to his successor, President Joe Biden beat inflation, brought down gas prices, created millions of jobs, spurred strong growth, boosted retirement savings and revived American manufacturing — just in time for Donald Trump to take credit for all of it.
But MAGA partisans on social media and the pundits in Jon Stewart’s video alike are echoing this “Democrats are too woke and are ignoring real-world problems” idea. Why are they falling for it? The answer in one word could be: misinformation. As the MSNBC article puts it: “Democrats need to realize that they have less a policy problem than a propaganda problem” – in other words, their messaging just doesn’t resonate.
Democrats have earnestly tried to steer away from identity politics and focus on the material needs of voters, but unfortunately for them, MAGA Republicans have been able to make the “too woke” label stick. As this excellent substack essay points out, Trump is the one who ran on identity politics, and for him it worked. His promise to his base is a future that is white and Christian, just like in the good old days. Nothing could be more identitarian.
Let’s face it, the partisan conflict was always about the right-wing backlash to the emancipation of women and minorities, and to the rise of multiculturalism, that came in the wake of the Consciousness Revolution of the 1960s. As another substacker starkly puts it, this race was about race. Whites will lose their majority status in the United States in the next couple of decades, and for many millions of them, that is too much to take. Hence their slogan, “take America back,” which they will now proceed to do, with a vengeance.
But then why did Trump gain support compared to 2020 from almost every demographic group, including non-whites? Even including undocumented immigrants, who presumably know he wants to have them deported. Could it be that misinformation thing – all that money poured into ads to undermine the Harris campaign’s messaging and the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration, with the help of Trump’s billionaire mascot (or is it co-President?), who owns one of the Internet’s largest social media platforms? But then what about all the money poured into the Harris campaign – she both outraised and outspent her opponent – was it not applied effectively?
Was it just a case of tactical errors in the info wars? I’ve argued on this blog before that in this partisan age, when most voters know where their loyalty lies, political messaging is largely about rallying the troops, so to speak. The specifics don’t much matter. Except they might, when it comes to those crucial swing voters, who are the ones who actually decided the last three elections. Trump’s crude identity attacks and simplistic points (he literally just called Biden and Harris “the worst” and “failures” and left it at that) might amount to a blunter but better instrument of information delivery. People have thick heads, after all.
Let’s allow, however, that average folks, while maybe not intellectual giants, are not complete morons, and understand what their interests are. As this election post-mortem article puts it, “politics are material and people actually do know their conditions.” Yes, the Biden-Harris administration made great strides in improving the U.S. economy. By the standards that are conventionally used to measure the economy – inflation rate, employment rate, economic growth – we’re on the right path.
But people are still feeling the pain of high prices. It was the rate of price increase that was tamed, not prices themselves, which are still higher than four years ago. And young people – the demographic whose loss may well have been the hardest for the supposedly Gen Z-appealing Harris – face a future where jobs do not pay enough to achieve major life milestones such as buying a home or raising a family. In the face of this hard reality, rosy economic statistics are not much of a palliative.
That last article from The Guardian makes another point, one I have not seen anywhere else, but it rings true to me:
I propose a different explanation than inflation qua inflation: the Covid welfare state and its collapse. The massive, almost overnight expansion of the social safety net and its rapid, almost overnight rollback are materially one of the biggest policy changes in American history. For a brief period, and for the first time in history, Americans had a robust safety net: strong protections for workers and tenants, extremely generous unemployment benefits, rent control and direct cash transfers from the American government.
Despite the trauma and death of Covid and the isolation of lockdowns, from late 2020 to early 2021, Americans briefly experienced the freedom of social democracy. They had enough liquid money to plan long term and make spending decisions for their own pleasure rather than just to survive. They had the labor protections to look for the jobs they wanted rather than feel stuck in the jobs they had. At the end of Trump’s term, the American standard of living and the amount of economic security and freedom Americans had was higher than when it started, and, with the loss of this expanded welfare state, it was worse when Biden left office, despite his real policy wins for workers and unions. This is why voters view Trump as a better shepherd of the economy.
It’s like the American people got a taste of life in a Scandinavian-type socialist society, then had the rug pulled out from under them, and for that they punished the incumbent. We almost got there, people! We were on our way to fully automated luxury communism! But then Biden did the bidding of his corporate masters, and back to normal it was. Only someone forgot to tell him that for most Americans, “normal” sucks.
For most Americans, normal sucks so bad that they were willing to vote in, or allow to be voted in, a convicted felon and known degenerate who is probably also a national security threat. Like some kind of Hail Mary play to shake things up and maybe, somehow, end up better off on the other side.
The Guardian article has an even more depressing take:
Perhaps most emblematic of this is at the heart of Trump’s campaign: his embrace of extremely online tech billionaires, crypto currency and online influencers. If the archetype of Trump’s win in 2016 was the left-behind post-industrial Rust belt manufacturing worker – or, perhaps more accurately, the car dealership or McDonald’s franchise owner in a left-behind post-industrial Rust belt town – this year it is the crypto scammer, the dropshipper, the app-based day trader, the online engagement farmer.
That embrace was Trump’s message, and at the core of his gains, especially with young men. Without civil society and without strong unions, people believe the only path to success is getting one over on someone else. And who is better at that than Trump?
While the core of the resurgent-left generation of Sanders was downwardly mobile college-educated professionals, selling their labor for wages without the prospect of buying a house or retiring on a pension, the second wave of newly aging-in Trump voters entered adulthood without even those prospects, hoping only to grind out a living through scams. But this is fundamentally an anti-social and anti-humanist mode of economic activity that contributes nothing to society and offers nothing but alienation to its victims. The result is people willing to vote for someone they know will cause immense harm to others, hoping it will help them personally.
In other words, America has thrown up its collective hands and declared, “fuck it, let’s all be criminal degenerates now.” If a toxic mashup of white supremacy and billionaire kleptocracy is the best we can get, then let’s tap into our inner Joker, embrace the breakdown of society, and get on with the Purge.
That’s a dark view of the American electorate, and the sense that it might be true contributes to the dread that Harris voters like me feel. It’s the real kick in the face to the almost 50% of voters – almost! – who rejected Trump. We thought our society could be both civil and multicultural. But enough other Americans decided, I guess, that those two ideas are incompatible.
I will now turn to generations and turnings theory. I note that the brief experience of the Covid welfare state came about because of an emergency. In the Crisis Era or Fourth Turning, the perception of emergency creates urgency and acceptance of the need for drastic measures, shifting power from the market to the state. This reshapes society, and lays the foundation for a new understanding of civic community.
If the public indeed got a taste of that during Covid and liked it, that just shows how receptive the living generations are to radical change, as well as to authoritative leadership taking control. It could simply be that Republicans prevailed in the election because they are promising both of these things – radical change and authoritative leadership.
The Democrats offered sensible policies that have a track record of actually working – but to a majority of voters, that wasn’t satisfactory. They wanted sweeping reform of the system. I’ll let Jon Stewart make the point for me again. He might be the commentator out there who gets it the most.
If our government is indeed, as Stewart puts it, “an overly regulated system that is no longer responsive or delivering for the needs of the people,” then no wonder the party that shows that it is willing to break the rules is the one that got the most votes. The MAGA Republicans are more attuned to the social mood, and more aligned to where we are in the generational cycle – whether by craft or by instinct, who knows.
This is also connected to how the non-college educated working class has been migrating to the Republican party, in what has been called America’s 7th party system. A political party realignment pretty much always happens in a Fourth Turning. In the last cycle, it was the rise of the New Deal coalition, which gave the U.S. its modern social welfare state, such as it is.
The new MAGA coalition, if that’s what is forming, wants to dismantle the New Deal and make the Reagan revolution – that is, neoliberalism – a permanent fixture of American life. They want to add a heavy dose of social conservatism, rolling back civil rights that have been hard-won over this generational cycle. And also tariffs, Trump’s way of giving the middle finger to globalization.
None of this will close the wealth gap between the working class and the wealthy elites. So why is the working class supporting it? It’s hard not to conclude that lower educated, less informed voters are simply more susceptible to the rightwing’s superior media ecosystem. Or just go ahead and call it idiocracy.
It remains to be seen if MAGA will fully consolidate their power. Their victory is no mandate; the margins are too thin, and there was support for progressive causes despite Trump winning the popular vote. But unlike in 2017, Republicans in 2025 will control all three branches of the United States government. There might not be any “guardrails” or “checks and balances” to contain the MAGA policy agenda. The Constitution is about to get a major stress test (save us, John Thune!) which it might not survive in its current form.
In 2016, Trump’s election galvanized the Democratic opposition, which launched a “resistance” movement, so that partisan conflict was always in the background during Trump’s first administration. Today, the mood among Democratic partisans is one of retreat to nurse their wounds. We’re all over on Bluesky, sharing tips on how to manage life under tyranny. I don’t see much coming from the Democratic party’s leadership, if they even have any at this point. Is it possible they will cave, and give the Heritage Foundation the bloodless revolution it wants?
I suspect not, given how radical the MAGA agenda is. MAGA’s definition of the emergencies which require an empowered state (immigrants! gays! reproductive rights!) mean they are prescribing fixes that will not be popular, including mass deportations, and – potentially – banning abortion and gay marriage nationwide. It’s hard to imagine this will all proceed without friction.
Could we have avoided all of this if only Biden had kept the Covid welfare state going, as the Guardian article suggests? He could have pushed the idea of an ongoing pandemic emergency and used it to instigate more radical change, and taken us to a better resolution of the Crisis. Instead, we’re going to create our own emergency here.
There’s no way to know what could have happened, so it’s beside the point. We missed our chance. The future ahead can’t be known either; we see through a glass darkly. All we can be sure of is that somewhere in that undiscovered country lies the climax phase of this Crisis Era. God help us to get through it.
This is possibly the longest post I have ever written on this blog. I keep going back to it and rewriting it. It’s been a lot to process these past weeks. Thanks for bearing with me, dear reader, in these trying times.
