Bbyland takes on the election

Image courtesy of Al Jazeera

It is very difficult to trace a problem to its root. I keep thinking that, as I watch the discourse and the results come in. Politics, ultimately, is about looking for someone to blame.

For months I have wondered what would happen, and now I know. Now I get to wonder about what will happen next. And all the while, I have felt myself screaming on the inside: “Look at the world! Look at what’s happening right now! Surely there’s more we can do!” When blaming others gets too depressing is when I start blaming myself. “I should be doing more, we should all be doing more! Everything I use is plastic, everything I eat is grown by slaves!”

So when the results come in and I see what I already sort of knew, which is that people will run the world on blame and fear, I can’t be too surprised. I have this feeling when I have nightmares. I’ll have a dream that someone is chasing me, or hurting me, stabbing me with a thousand tiny blades, and instead of feeling fear I feel frustration. Why isn’t anyone helping me? Why do we have to cause suffering? The answer is that it’s easier to keep letting the nightmare happen, and hold onto our petty comforts, than it is to really inspect how we’re living and what it contributes to.

Everyone has their own reality. As I watched the results come in at a local bar, a man was yelling at a woman: “this is what happens when we choose the progressive route! We took a gamble on a radical, and now we’ve lost.” The internet is blowing up with blame, just like it was before the election but now instead of blaming Republicans we’re blaming ourselves. Bernie says the Democratic party has abandoned working people, which is true, and Kamala says that when we fight we win, which seems like it might not be true given all the evidence. Centrists are blaming leftists, leftists are blaming centrism, but Trump blames migrants and that seemed to work the best in terms of electability.

I’m wondering if there’s anything we could have done to avoid this—if this is a great failure of action, or instead a revelation of 75 million people’s priorities. There’s a sense that politics is a strategy game, that if you play it right and explain your agenda people will vote in their best interests. The logic of democracy is that the masses know what they need. The Republican platform, as it stands, has always struck me as motivated by a childish inability to see long-term consequences of short-term pleasures; I was in second grade during the 2004 election, and remember my classmate telling me that lower taxes are better because it would make buying a Gameboy less expensive. I received a receipt at my waitressing job about a month ago upon which the customer had scrawled: “TRUMP 2024: NO TAX ON TIPS.” It’s easier to blame poverty on taxes, which register as the revocation of money earned, than it is to work out the intricacies of social safety nets and community uplift and international trade and interest rates. I don’t know how any of it works, either. I just know that I’m not responsible for road repairs but still have access to roads.

It is easy to see this election as the result of a rightward resistance to a pop culture turn toward diversity and inclusion. The sea change in cultural discourse within my own lifetime—the legalization of gay marriage, the popularization of identitarian political analysis, the emphasis on accepting and integrating difference, Steven Universe—can be easy to metabolize as long-standing, eternal ideologies rather than an enormous rupture from previous modes of thinking that are still reflected in media, porn, interpersonal relationships. This cultural chasm then becomes a convenient scapegoat for systemic problems that have little or nothing to do with a Black Disney princess or Instagram’s pronoun feature. People on the right and the left are both blaming “wokeness”—both saying that the embrace of or resistance to racial and gender diversity is the locus of our political crisis. Both are blaming, blaming.

The mantra of Trumpism, “Make America Great Again,” relies on an Edenic image of past America built on white, heterosexual “family values.” His economic policies are obscure but promise the return of industrial-era labor and consumer practices—more factory jobs, cheaper eggs. Meanwhile, the Democratic party consistently refuses to offer any platform that diverges meaningfully from what is already happening. Biden campaigned on a “return to normalcy;” Kamala campaigned on what read as “return to normalcy 2: 2 return 2 normalcy.” The perpetual call to a recent past (implicitly, as far as I’m concerned, an Obama-era past of shutter shades, half-hearted public healthcare, and bombs in the Middle East) inspires a subsect of the American public who believes in climate change and racial equity but wishes that all they had to do to fix it was post on Facebook and wear Tom’s shoes.

Neither party is a monolith—both Kamala and Trump sequestered votes from people who more or less believed in their candidate’s platform. It’s unclear how many people actually knew what it was they were voting for; a graphic has been circulating of the number of Google searches for “did Biden drop out” on election day, a friend told me the other day that he heard that 40% of Americans are functionally illiterate (the real number is closer to 20%, as far as I can tell). Stupidity, ignorance, cruelty; elitism, alienation, delusion.

I’m wondering, then, if it’s cultural conflict that caused this, or instead if it’s a refusal to face reality. Conservatism, in the most basic sense of the word, means resistance to change—to conserve what already is. When change is then thrust upon us, as it always inevitably will be—temperatures rising, global conflict, refugees—conservatism holds that it is the change itself that is the problem, and not the behaviors that have led to them. By definition, both parties ran on some form of conservative ideology; both parties insisted on harkening back to a “time before.” When the world feels like it’s falling apart, it’s easier to lean on nostalgia than it is to actualize a clear, coherent solution to the situation you’re in right now; the sacrifices required to prevent climate change, to stop the spread of disease, to halt global conflict aren’t appealing to the voter base. I’m not a public policy guy, but the impression that I get is that the long-term solutions are going to require a substantial reorientation of our social and economic systems. Trump offered a specific, nostalgic vision of radical retrogression, while Kamala offered maintenance of sociocultural liberal hegemony.

Blame is just another method of maintenance. Of course, we need to determine what causes harm in order to prevent it; but the obsession with electoral strategy, with hunting down the culprits, of determining “who we are as a nation,” is just another way of shouting and discoursing and changing nothing. And change is always coming. I mean this on a personal level and a collective one. It’s compelling to believe that we can hold the world in our palm and spin it back and forth, that we know how stories will go because we’ve heard stories before. But the world does not wait for our stories—it doesn’t care about our nostalgia for the 1950’s or the 2010’s, and it doesn’t care about our predictive algorithms or our exit polls. We have urgent problems to solve, and solving them will require facing the circumstances and beliefs of our time. We can’t pretend the world isn’t heating up anymore, because it’s us that it’s heating. We can’t pretend that our taxes being used on drones don’t kill children, that the police don’t kill our citizens, because we see it on screens and on the street every day. There’s no going back. How will you move forward?