Winter in America

Dateline November 6, 2024

It’s been over a year since I last blogged. Last night, America elected its first dictator. This summer, the Supreme Court granted him the powers of a king. A moderate Republican friend says that “all this is just the sweep of history” and says it with the stoicism and 64,000 foot view that I do not share and don’t know that I’ll ever be able to attain. What follows is a series of prompts and responses on social media. My thoughts feel random and disorganized. This is an attempt to order them. I don’t have much hope.

David Hogg on X: If you are a young person who wants to run for office as a Democrat DM me. It’s time for some fresh blood. We have been failed by a corporate oligarchy masquerading as a party. It’s time to build a better Democratic Party that young people are excited to vote for.

Me to Hogg: The Democratic Party has become an ossified gerontocracy. Joe Biden was supposed to be a transitional president but once ensconced, he dug in. I fault him and the advisers who surrounded him for deluding themselves and depriving us of a robust primary. Why reward a party that has failed so spectacularly to halt the march of fascism?

John Pavlovitz@johnpavlovitz
I thought this would hurt more than 2016 but it doesn’t. That was a shock. This is just confirmation. We now know that 2016 wasn’t a fluke or an aberration, that this is what the majority wants: whiteness, patriarchy, nationalism, hatred, nihilism. Whether I want to spend the rest of my life in such a place is something my mind isn’t prepared to consider.

I review my social media sphere. I always realized that I was in a bubble and to a certain extent, understood how fragile and self-deluding it is. I scanned all the messages of how doomed Trump was and never really took them to heart. Like many folks, I am reevaluating social media engagement as it largely seems a waste of time, with one exception. I have a Messenger thread going back now nine years. We call ourselves “The Three Legged Stool” (my title). We are populated by a liberal Democrat (at the moment me), a Republican political operative and an Independent. My two colleagues called this election a long time ago. This is what I told them this morning:

I pushed back hard against what the two of you called the fecklessness of the Democratic Party. You were right and I was wrong. You both believed Kamala Harris was a weak candidate, who should have differentiated herself from her boss and didn’t. I deluded myself that you were wrong. You were right. And your (both) rage against Joe Biden was particularly on the mark. His gerontocratic blindness was a betrayal of his self-promised transitional presidency. By deluding himself, he plays an outsized hand in the breaking of his party, this country and its cherished institutions. Instead of going down as a wise old leader who righted the ship of state he will become a historical and cautionary tale about the corruption of power. In addition, I will never forgive Merrick Garland for being an ineffectual coward. By refusing to bring charges against Trump and every Republican who tried to overthrow the Government in 2021 he is utterly complicit in Trump being a free man, a felon who has become the president again.

Dan Rather: We can do hard things (again.) Get up. Shake it off. Don’t panic or isolate. Take care of the young ones who got their hopes up. Encourage their dreams. Lean into your trusted political and social networks and plan how to connect with other adjacent groups quickly and make plans. Organize more deeply than you think we can. Resistance starts now. We know how to do it. We’ve done it before. Visualize our getting through this in the most beautiful and intact way. Please please please just do not give up. We can love and protect each other through this. We have to.

Me to Dan Rather:

Dan, we need to turn our ire on the Democratic Party that has stood by and watched the GOP slowly break every one of our nation’s most cherished institutions. They were a known commodity. I direct my particular ire at Joe Biden who promised to be a transitional president, then when it became time for him to transition, dug his heels in and refused. As his cognitive decline became more obvious and his blindness at his own failures became more evident, the sycophants around him encouraged him to push on rather than reminding him of his promise.

Instead of a legacy of righting the ship of state, he ran it aground. He denied the party a robust primary where surely Kamala wouldn’t have lasted more than the first round. The rest of the ossified party gerontocracy moved too slowly, indecisively and fecklessly as it became clear that from Citizens United to US v Trump, to Jan 6 that democracy was in imminent peril. 2016 was another in a long series of wakeup calls that we ignored. We were fed a pablum of joy, decency, fairness and kindness. The Republicans cared for none of that and went to war against us. We held up the peace sign and prayed for sunnier days.

There are no lessons to be learned from this. It’s too late. As a country we cut our nose off to spite our face. Ouch. No ship responds well to being jerked hard left, then hard right. Our rudder is broken. Everybody is at fault and nobody is.

Democrats went along thinking that the Republican Party was the one that was broken and needed a reset. They won. It’s the feckless, ineffectual Democratic governance who were supposed to protect us and didn’t.

Kamala did the best she could. Perhaps she could have delineated herself more sharply from Biden, but she failed to even do that. As Trump gleefully dissects everything he did while in office, it’s Biden who bears the brunt of this catastrophe. History will not treat him kindly. I don’t trust any of my trusted political and social networks.

Me on Facebook: We’re witnessing the collapse of the two party system. Is it any surprise which party died first?

From Citizens United to US v Trump, to Jan 6., the Republicans have been systematically assaulting and breaking our most cherished institutions while Democratic leadership stood by. We thought for sure that theirs would be the party to collapse first when they hired trump to be their standard bearer.

When he started running totally amok, we looked to Democratic leadership to neutralize the threat and it’s not that they didn’t try; they didn’t try hard enough. They didn’t fight near as hard as the Republican leadership to keep him propped up. They started calling political disagreements culture wars. They started calling moderate white collar, educated liberals “elites,” “radicals, vermin, enemies within” and went to war against us. They took the most progressive and narrow issues that a small segment of Dems care about and pulled them into the mainstream. Again, Republicans went to war against Democrats and won. And now, because of the failure of leadership, trump, a slow-moving, trash-talking missile of death has been unleashed and our nation, if not the world is at his mercy.

Now the Republicans will crow that the 2020 15 million Democratic votes that put Biden over the top were faked (without evidence). 2016 was a wakeup call as to just how many people were already entertaining white nationalist, populist sentiments. Including the 15 million registered Democrats who sat on their hands on 11/5. So despite all evidence of failure, do we throw ourselves at the mercy of an impotent party leadership and pray they’ll do better in 4 years? Or is it time for a hard reset? I’m too shell-shocked to do anything right now, but I’m considering registering Independent for the first time in my near half century as a voter.

I know one thing. History will not treat Joe Biden kindly. For all his accomplishments that never got acknowledged, his two biggest blunders–the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and his reneging on his promise to be a transitional president, depriving us of a robust primary, selecting a well-intentioned but equally unpopular Democratic standard bearer, all this, instead of letting the electorate choose, will haunt him and the nation for the next 50 years.

I have equal scorn for Merrick Garland who, when given powerful reason and tools to prosecute criminal acts blatantly and publicly committed, instead slow-walked his non-prosecutions into irrelevance. trump shot our nation in the heart on Jan 6, 2021. We all watched and were powerless to act. Because once again, they let him get away with murder.

The feckless party that let this happen should not be rewarded.

Democrats have tried to run two accomplished women who’d have made, if not exceptional, at least competent presidents. They ran flawed, but dignified, honest campaigns. I cannot find much fault in them. Sorry ladies, we live in a society that clings to its guns, whiteness, bibles and most tellingly, its misogyny. Unlike advanced countries, we are not ready for a woman POTUS. With all my heart I wish it were different, but it isn’t.