A break from AI & academia to talk politics
When I got up this morning and before I started writing in my journal, I looked back to the entries I wrote just before and after the 2016 election. FWIW, I write in a journal— I will not verb that into “journaling”— every morning and I have been doing so very consistently for about the last 15 years. Eight years ago, my journal entries in October/November 2016 were more brief than they’ve been lately, and I didn’t write much about the election between Hillary and Trump before election day. I think that’s because like everyone else, I thought Hillary had it in the bag. The shock of the day on November 9, 2016 (the day after the election) comes off the page, and I kept writing about the surrealness of the results for quite some time after that.
And now it’s time to mourn a bit and then to join the resistance once again.
This morning, after Trump has won decisively, I am surprised but I’m not shocked. Harris seemed to be finishing strong and Trump seemed to be imploding, but I still knew Trump might win. Though it’s disturbing that the vote was this decisive.
There are lots of reasons why Trump won— immigration, Biden should have never run for a second term, the US is still not ready for a woman president, etc. I think it’s mostly about money though. As I heard Geoff Bennett early last night on the PBS Newshour (I’m paraphrasing here), perhaps it is a luxury for people to be concerned about the ideal of Democracy when they can’t afford groceries. After all, a surprisingly large percentage of Americans would struggle paying a $500 emergency expense. As I was driving around this morning, I heard (yes, on public radio because I am that kind of educated liberal elite) someone pointing out that in times of high inflation, incumbents lose— Ford, Carter, and now Biden/Harris. And let’s not forget that Clinton beat Bush I because “it’s the economy, stupid.”
So people poorer than me who couldn’t pay off a surprise $500 car repair bill (let alone something like a devastating medical bill) are so mad and desperate they’re willing to pick someone we know will be an agent of chaos both because that’s how he governed when he was president four years ago and that’s what he’s told us he would do in the campaign. They’ve been taken into the cult that is Trump. But rich people— I mean very very rich people, but also upper-middle class people like me who have plenty of money and safety nets to pay surprise bills, who have good jobs, who have retirement plans that have swollen thanks to a robust stock market, the kind of people who don’t pay attention to how much a loaf of bread costs— also voted for Trump because, duh, the economy, stupid. Money money money.
Let us also not forget the appeal of the strong man.
Back in spring 2019, my wife and son and I went on a guided tour/vacation to China. One of the many MANY striking things about that trip for me was seeing an authoritarian regime up close and personal on a day-to-day basis. There were cameras and checkpoints and heavily armed soldiers everywhere, especially in Beijing. My face was scanned by security guards dozens of times. Access to the western version of the Internet was blocked, and we had to use VPN software to get around it with mixed results. Most of the programming available on television (at least in the hotels where we stayed) were state broadcasts with a bit of clearly censored news from CNN and BBC. It wasn’t as bad as I imagine it was on Soviet-era Eastern Europe or it is now in North Korea, but it was pretty bad.
But here’s the thing: as far as I could tell, most Chinese people were okay with this arrangement. As long as the great leader and the state enabled the poorest citizens to have food and shelter and for the elites to shop for western goods (I saw stores for every luxury good product that you can think of, along with almost every American fast food chain), everyone was happy— or at least satisfied. Political polls in authoritarian regimes are always sketchy, but the government in places like China and Russia are popular.
What’s clear from this election is a lot of Americans seem eager to give this fascism thing a try. Because while I strongly disagree with the results, it was a fair and square vote where more people opted for the wannabe strong man. This obviously makes me worry about mindset of the majority of voters in this country right now.
I think we all know that the next four years are going be a chaotic shitshow filled with scandals and protests and insane policy proposals and all the rest. Trump might be more able to do more damage, sure, but we also know a lot more about how to try to resist and fight back. I don’t know if this will be the beginning of the end of democracy as we know it, but I know it ain’t going to be good and the minority of us who didn’t vote for this are going to have to find ways to resist and fight.
But to speak selfishly here for a moment, at least I live in a very blue dot community. Just over 70% of voters in my county (Washtenaw) voted for Harris, so a very blue community in a left-leaning region (67% of Wayne county/Detroit and just over half of Oakland county voters picked Harris) and in a still purple state. We didn’t move here for politics— we moved here to work at EMU— but we’re liable to stay for politics.
And now it’s time to mourn a bit and then to join the resistance once again.