In The Zeitgeist

Obligatory election post-mortem post.

Like every blue zone household in America this past week, ours is reeling from the MAGA takeover in last Tuesday’s election. I am having a hard time coping as I find myself doomscrolling and contemplating the horrors to come. I’m not sure what stage of grief I’m in – possibly still denial. Maybe moving on to anger.

I don’t know if I can write my way out of this, but I’m posting this anyway, if only to get my thoughts down.

I’ve written a lot about the red v. blue wars on this blog, and clearly identified myself as a blue zone partisan. I’m not interested in living under a white supremacist Christian theocracy. I’m not entirely sure everyone who voted Republican this week realizes that’s what they voted for, but so it is in our klunky electoral system that offers so few options.

In a post I made in 2022, I invoked Ibn Khaldun‘s idea of “group feeling” (solidarity within a faction) to describe the ongoing partisan divide. Back then, I felt (hoped) that MAGA’s group feeling was waning.

Which faction is currently favored in the conflict? A few years back I would have speculated that the red zone faction, rallying around former President Trump, had a stronger group feeling. They really seemed to have a greater solidarity of purpose than the blue zone faction, split between its progressives and moderates. But after the failed coup attempt in early 2021, my sense is that the strength of their faction just wasn’t quite enough to achieve superiority, and now they are on the defensive. However, I would note, as Khaldun might put it, that the red zone has been more clever at manipulating the laws of royal authority to favor their faction.

As 2024 crept on and Trump ascended again, I joined the chorus of voices warning about Project 2025 and the dangers of giving the MAGA faction power. Their group feeling was clearly back, and they had a shot at returning to power.

The Supreme Court decision granting the former President immunity from criminal prosecution was just such a manipulation of the laws, as was the way they maneuvered their judges into position in the court in the first place. This does not bode well for the blue faction. Luckily, awareness of this seems to have galvanized Democrats, and Project 2025 is now all over the media. But awareness and fear are not enough; they must translate into action at the ballot box. We must not allow ourselves to be cowed by negativity from profit-seeking media outlets.

And still that hope was alive in the back of my mind – surely the majority would not be for mass deportations, the end of the Affordable Care Act, a federal ban on abortion, and the whole awful white Christian nationalist agenda. Surely the Democrats could muster enough group feeling to eke out another 2020 victory, and avoid a 2016 disaster.

What a kick in the face to be proven wrong.

The pundits are telling me the Democratic leadership screwed up the campaign in a myriad of ways, and eroded their base. They’re not responsive to the working class, which wants populism, not more of the same old corporate liberalism. The Democrats lost their chance when they rejected Bernie Sanders.

I really hoped that enough people would see the dangers of MAGA as a greater problem than the Democrats’s waffling inability to reform themselves. I guess I was in a bubble. Gee, thanks for bursting it, America.

The worst past is knowing that Trump grew his popular vote, and that he gained in all demographics. Was it really because of ignorance and misinformation campaigns on social media? Or have that many people given up on respect for the dignity of others and for the rule of law, following Trump’s example? That’s an awful thought to contemplate.

There is some consolation in knowing that over 70 million of us voted for Harris. She is the third most popular candidate in Presidential election history. Her popular vote total surpasses both Clinton’s from 2016 and Obama’s from 2008 (which was a record until 2020). She wasn’t unpopular. She just wasn’t popular enough.

So now we get right wing populism, run by billionaires and theocrats, a new brand of fascism. And the corporate media, which values money over truth, is ready to bend the knee.

The sexists, racists, homophobes and transphobes are already out there terrifying women and minorities. Aren’t women and minorities working class too, or do the pundits mean something else by “working class”? Makes you wonder.

Onward through the gates of history, which now look like the gates of Hell.