What the fuck just happened?

I'm going to attempt to talk politics without being political. It's a futile premise, like talking about something racially without being racist. I realize that I'm very privileged, and have it very lucky. My takeaway from last Tuesday is that I don't have a fucking clue what the lives of most Americans are like. Maybe the lesson for me is that most people are just too concerned about the price of stuff, and it's just time to throw the current bums out so that we can have the last bum back in. Or something.

The day after the election I was reading Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus, which is about computer politics, generally speaking. Under the chapter about totalitarianism there's a section called the conservative suicide. He writes: "conservative parties in numerous democracies have been hijacked by unconservative leaders such as Donald Trump and have been transformed into radical revolutionary parties." Basically, America is ripe for a turning, and, the the Right went ahead and did it instead of waiting for the Left to get around to it. I guess we had our chance in 2016. Bernie Would Have Won, by Krystal Ball, makes the case. If only we'd kept the Bernie Bros on our side.

But that morning I read a paragraph that kind of summed up what had happened on Tuesday's election. When our information networks get dense, it gets hard for the average intelligence to keep up with what's actually going on, to figure out the truth of reality. Everyone's got their filters and bubbles. Harari goes into detail about this, but his point is that simple stories are easier to understand and that's what winds up sticking in most people's brains. When people are looking for answers but the explanation is really complicated or complex, it's easier to believe the simple story, even if it's not true. And when a strongman comes along and tells you that your problems are all because of an other, it's easier to go along with that. It's not me, it's them.

The fact that this election was not anywhere near as close as it was predicted shows that the mainstream media is completely out of touch with what's actually going on in America. As is the Democratic party. The image that summed it up for me was found in a post called Liberals, Provably Out of Touch with America, Must Change their Media Diet

Guess where I am on that scale? I used to listen to local talk radio, 4 years prior when I was running for office. It helped to know what kind of batshit crazy stuff they were spouting, and I spent a good deal of time writing about it.

Lately though, the only thing I've done to expand my media diet is adding Triggernometry my podcast feeds a while back, and this 33 Reasons to vote Trump with Bill Ackerman was published two weeks ago, and the first one I'd actually listened to. I thought it was notable that three white men were sitting around discussing it for an hour, and I don't think abortion or bodily autonomy was brought up, save maybe in passing. It felt like a psyop.

Everything feels like a pysop these days, which is one of the main reasons I got off Facebook and Twitter in the first place. I even suggested to a stranger in Cracker Barrel that they get off it as well, because GenAI was going to make it impossible to get to the truth. This was months ago, I couldn't help myself. Two older black women were talking about 'pregnant men' loudly behind me and I couldn't ignore it. Looking back, it seems like an omen.

Sam Harris is probably one of the people I look to for sanity in this world, and he had a scathing takedown called The Reckoning post election. Well before the election, Sam Harris had been pushing Kamala Harris to pivot to center and distance herself from the wokeism that had taken over the political atmosphere. The prime example here being the whole sex-change surgery for illegal immigrants in prison. To hear him say it, the Democrats lost touch with reality due to far-left activists who made it seem like it was more important to use the correct pronouns rather than fix the fucking economy. Trans people are people, Harris says, and should be treated as such, however, the amount of time spent on the issues like trans women in sports should not have taken up the amount of air that it did. The stories of young people being pushed into hormone replacement and irreversible elective surgeries at the behest of a loud, vocal minority was the narrative.

Beside Harris, the rest of my political diet is Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and Real Time with Bill Maher. I don't watch the Daily Show these days, save a few occasions when Stewart hosted. The narrative there is threat to democracy, an ongoing litany of injustices in the world with Oliver, and a skewering of both sides on the part of Maher, who is rabidly anti-Trump.

Well, here we are.

During, and for several days after the election, I read the comments on ☑️ The Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes (🇺🇸) There's literally hundreds there now, and it serves as a historical record of the moment. As with most MeFi threads, there's a lot of thoughtful discussion there, as well as tons of links. 10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won is probably worth sharing for those who are still in shock and don't know what to do. "Do not-self censor, do not obey in advance" is the one I'm latching onto here. Building alternatives is where I'm going to focus my efforts. It's time to get involved at the local level, PTA, school board, city council, figure out what's going on and start building up those connections with local civic groups who are actually getting things done. Mutual aid and all that shit. Solidarity.

I'm gonna make more of an effort to talk to my neighbors, especially the ones with the Trump signs in their yard. And god help me, yes, also the guy down the street that's had the Trump 2024 flag up for the last four years. And I'm not saying I need to consume the same media diet that they do, but I need to know more about the stories that they're being told. I'm not saying I need to believe them either, but there are only so many times a man can hear something said before he himself starts believing it.

Culture Wars: The Endgame: Nihilism’s Grip on American Democracy is worth reading just for the term ressentiment, which "is a disposition that builds on a narrative of injury—a story of woundedness that can be real or imagined, even just anticipated." To the author, we're a country of nihilism without nihilists: "A nihilistic culture is defined by the drive to destroy, by the will to power. And that definition now describes the American nation." "Active nihilism (or the will to power)," is now the reality of contemporary American life.

Part of me believes that we're coming up on the crisis phase of the Forth Turning. Now that the WWI generation are gone, there's no one holding us back from trying fascism/communism again, and we're gonna slip right down the line to a sort of soft-fascism a lá Orban. This is the crisis, or maybe it's the rise of AI, or maybe it's environmental collapse. Perhaps all three are connected. Maybe we're just due for another big global conflict. It's been a while since we had whole-scale destruction of wealth, or a debt jubilee. COVID didn't do it, and to hear Elon Musk tell it, 2025 is going to be lit. Buckle up folks, it's gonna be a bumpy ride. The seculum is gonna run its course. Weak men bring hard times and all that jazz.

This is as pessimistic as I want to get. I've picked up the phrase pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, attributed to Italian communist and philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who wrote 30 notebooks while imprisoned by Mussolini for 11 years before he died. Now is not the time for despair. It's time to start getting shit done. Be the change and all that.

Last night I drove my wife to a FB meetup that was organized by the same people that were doing Indivisible meetings last time around. The average age was well north of fifty, and I don't know whether any solid action items came out of that, but I already wrote that whole scene off years ago. Apologies to all those elders out there fighting the good fight, but if we learned anything this cycle, it's that it's time to dump the boomer baggage and get on board connecting with and bringing up the next generation of leaders. Seems there are very few people my age with the resources or the wherewithal to get involved in political battles these days, and I'm not sure that there's much hope of bringing up many new ones at this point. This is what makes JD Vance so dangerous, he's a generational figure.

Vance is apparently a protégé of not only Peter Thiel, but also Curtis Yarvin, AKA Mencius Moldbug, a blogger who's argued since 2014 that American democracy is a failed experiment which needs to be replaced with a techno-monarchy. No shit. I'd read some of Moldbug's blog back in the day and didn't even know about the Vance connection until about a month ago.

But it's the economy, stupid. No telling that the average American has no idea the difference between inflation and deflation, people just want their bacon.

So Thiel and Elon got their wish, America's gone MAGA again. Harari's book seems utterly prescient now, and as a historian I think he's got a pretty good grasp on how our information networks led us to this point. It's not just the printing press all over again, this time we've got agents who can create their own knowledge and take action autonomously. AI is going to change the game. But, as Harari says in his book, "the network is often wrong", and his question is whether our tech continues to fracture us or whether it will draw us together.

There, to put an end to this post, is my last bit of advice for now. Draw together. Not only your friends and compatriots, but also those friends that you've stopped talking to over the last four years, he crazy uncle or in-law that posted the thing on FB that you disagreed with. Take steps to actively listen to people who disagree with you. Get out of the house and talk to your neighbors. And keep in mind that the problem might not be all of them, it might be you.