Still processing

It's been a tough week, if I may state the obvious. After a couple of days of basic wallowing I've tried to distract myself with other things—TV, household stuff, the cats, books—which has been helpful. But I've still kept up with all (or most) or the political stuff I'd become accustomed to following, just at a bit more of a detached remove, if you will.

Even at a remove, though, it's pissing me off.

Pundits and analysts and observers and just plain folks everywhere seem to be tripping over themselves trying to find the reasons Kamala Harris lost the election. Theories abound: She didn't distance herself enough from Joe Biden (why would she? Biden's been a fantastic president no matter how people are perceiving him right now and to say otherwise would be dishonest); she erred in being too focused on "joy" and "positivity" (ludicrous; the enthusiasm for her was profound and she had the best ground game of any campaign in decades); she picked the wrong guy for VP (would Shapiro have delivered Pennsylvania? Would not having Walz have hurt her elsewhere? No way to know); she didn't reach out to voters by nontraditional means (bullshit, she was on apolitical podcasts and local television and "The View" and on and on); she alienated voters by being too focused on "wokeism" and "identity politics" (absurd—when reporters tried to goad her into talking about identity politics she called it a "distraction" and insisted they move on).

Garbage, all of them. Not very many people seem to grasp the obvious here.

I've received a little bit of pushback on my last post, where I described most of 45/47's voters as hateful. The argument being that only a minority of them are hateful, the rest voted because of the economy or because they're woefully ignorant. 

First off, if you voted for the fascist because you thought it would be better economically, then you are also woefully ignorant, so I dispute that those are different cohorts. Secondly, yes, there are plenty of voters that are phenomenally uninformed, misinformed, and/or stupid—I just don't buy that most of them are not also hateful.

She lost because a majority of Americans—a hefty majority, at that—either didn't vote or voted for the convicted felon wannabe autocrat for one or both of these reasons:

1. They properly understand and approve of what he stands for and what he wants to do, which makes them hateful. They like his various bigotries and cruelty and thirst for retribution against people who are other than them in whatever fashion. Racists, mysoginists, champions of extreme wealth and poverty, people so fearful of LGBTQ folks that they can't stop to think about why they're afraid.
2. They are so gullible that they bought into the lies he constantly spews and lack the sense to give it any critical thought. You voted for him because of inflation? Then you didn't think it through, or even partway through, or think about it at all, because you actually voted for the guy that made inflation worse in the first place and against the VP of the administration that reined it in and brought it back to better-than-normal levels.

Certainly the corporate media went all in on the second group. Certainly the oligarchs-in-waiting exploited the second group to a truly impressive degree. And certainly much of that second group will be experiencing a kind of buyer's remorse within a year as things start going downhill, but I wonder if even then those people still wouldn't vote for someone with two X chromosomes.

Kamala Harris lost because most Americans won't support a woman at the top of the ticket, can't be bothered to engage with politics even a little bit, and/or hate trans folks and brown people so much that it outweighs anything else. Not because her campaign was flawed or because her policies were unpopular or she didn't sit for an interview with Joe Rogan. It boils down to sexism, willful ignorance, and hateful bigotries. The end.

What to do about it? Well, quit looking for reasons to blame Kamala Harris or Joe Biden or the DNC or whomever for the loss, for starters. Then focus on the people who to this point couldn't be bothered to pay attention.

It's going to be a challenge. The incoming president "loves the poorly educated," after all, because they're easier to manipulate, and his promise to destroy the Department of Education is in the service of further expanding the ranks of poorly educated Americans. How to counter that? Some disengaged people will always be disengaged, but some would be willing to learn. It's a matter of reaching them.

I tried this past spring. I put together a little booklet on presidential history that was intended to be accessible to anyone even a little bit interested; in the end it might have been a little more complicated than that, but still I felt it was something people would respond to. I reached out to a number of people and organizations that I thought would be interested in assisting me in distributing it and was surprised to get zero help. No one on Democratic forums or in campaign offices or on liberal podcasts or educators thought it worth their time, and I didn't exactly have thousands of dollars available to print out and distribute it door to door in seven swing states myself.

When I was a kid we had a more centralized media landscape. Newspapers were prevalent and largely trustworthy, there was civics education, we had Schoolhouse Rock. Schoolhouse Rock was great, it was on TV every Saturday morning in between the various cartoon shows. Truly a brilliant tool. It couldn't be done today because there is no platform like the network TV Saturday morning cartoons used to be. You could make it, you could get it available to people, but they'd have to search it out purposefully, which the people who need it won't do. We're all in our own insulated bubbles.

We have to figure out how to burst them.