I Know That Living With You, Baby, Was Sometimes Hard

Not sure if I'm ready to give it another try.

I almost didn’t write today, figuring that I’ve said everything I need to say about the election, yet feeling unable to think about anything else. I figured everybody’s already tired of hearing me bitch and moan, so maybe it’s best to just shut up for a few days. But I have the darndest time keeping my peace so here I am.

The closest analogy I can come up with is that I feel like I just got dumped by my country. It’s been a while since somebody dumped me, but I remember the feeling. It’s the sense that the person you really cared about doesn’t feel the same about you. You tell your friends how heartbroken you are and they indulge you for a few days, but after a while they just want you to shut up about how you really thought she was the one. It hasn’t quite been seven hours and fifteen days yet, but I guess I’m in the “Nothing Compares 2 U” stage of grief.

One of my favorite singers ever. I saw her on the street once a few years after she hit it big. She was either getting into or getting out of a car. Her hair was short but growing in and I feel like she was wearing a black leather jacket. There were some guys around her, which I interpreted to be security, but might not have been. Anyway, I miss her.

Even so, I think it’s about time to start moving on. I don’t know what that looks like for me exactly, but I know it means neither giving up nor getting too involved. As I said in this piece last week, I’m not going to be a Resistance guy. I’m not going to march. Instead, I’m going to step back and watch the nation do what the nation will do. If I’m in the minority, there’s a reason for that. The majority has earned the right to have their way. Let them eat.

I’ll continue to chronicle their actions, and I will offer my own reactions to them. I’m not taking a vow of silence over this bullshit, but I’m trying to continue my work from a place of detachment, if that’s possible. Which, of course, it’s unlikely to be.

I’ve never really thought about what I do here as “my work,” but I guess that’s what it is now. For me, it’s the work of good citizenry and (hopefully) good writing. The work is planting fenceposts to guard the territory of my own principles and priorities. Chief among those principles are supporting those who need support: the so-called “poor, tired, and huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

That freedom isn’t confined to immigrants, of course. It’s everybody who needs a helping hand to lift them up. It’s protecting those who need a little extra protection. It includes those suffering from lack of opportunity, resources, and hope. A government’s primary role is to protect its citizens. Not just from external threats, but from internal ones. Enemies foreign and domestic, as the saying goes. Therefore, one of the government’s most important roles is to define who they believe their enemies to be.

The new administration has made their enemy’s list explicit: immigrants, trans people, unions, teachers, various politicians of both parties, media outlets, the American civil service, and NATO, among others. It’s a list that bears no resemblance to my own, which would place “authoritarianism” at its top. Just below that, I might put “illiberal democracy,” which I believe is the more likely destination to which we are now being steered.

What does an American illiberal democracy look like? I don’t have a clear idea, but I worry that elections will become more difficult for the Democrats to win, courts will be packed with ideologues, schools will become re-education centers promoting Christianity and a cramped version of American history that erases or strongly mitigates the story of our country in favor of a whitewashed (pun intended) version that erases the horrors of our early years. I worry about minorities being targeted by law enforcement with impunity.

I also worry about a potential new wrinkle in American life: biting your tongue. It’s a vague worry at the moment but I am mildly concerned that public and even not-so-public figures will find themselves in the crosshairs of the justice system for things they say which run counter to the preferred regime narrative. Trump has already sued CBS for ten billion dollars because he didn’t like the Kamala Harris 60 Minutes interview. Now he’s promised that the entire Justice Department will be remade as an extension of the President’s whims and moods.

Trump supporters will argue that the Biden administration has already targeted their political opposition for this very thing. Let me just make my position clear: they have not. There’s no evidence of this. In fact, I would argue that the justice system has taken it extremely easy on Messrs. Giuliani, Bannon, Stone, Navarro, and Trump. They have been shown deference and leniency that would not be available to most defendants. So, please, spare me the sanctimony.

As for the good that the new administration promises to do, forgive me if my expectations are low. The causes of our economic troubles are deep and entrenched. I heard nothing from the Trump/Vance campaign that talked about the cumulative effects of globalization, technological innovation, union busting, corporate corruption, and de-regulation. I heard nothing from them about how they plan to innovate the American economy other than through the magic bullet of tariffs. What I haven’t heard is any economist express they believe Trump’s tariff plan to be a good one. On the other hand, those same economists said America was headed for a deep recession under Biden. I would remind everybody bitching about the economy that that recession never arrived. Thanks, Joe.

How will we judge the success of the new administration? I guess we have to look at their priorities and then measure their progress on those priorities at the end of the term.

He has promised to mass deport anywhere from 11-20 million people. At what cost will he achieve those goals, financially and morally? How high of a price are Americans willing to pay to remove these undesirables from our borders? I guess we’ll find out.

He promised to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours. At first he said he wouldn’t wait until he took office to end that war, but I suspect that might have been a little unrealistic even for this miracle worker. Will it end on Day One of his presidency or do we give him a week? And, again, at what cost will the war end? Americans may be willing to let him have Ukraine, but does Putin’s expansionist plans end there? What lessons have we learned over the last century or so about appeasement?

He promised to solve the war in Gaza. During his last term, he assured us Jared Kushner would fix things in the Middle East. Did that happen? We know Kushner walked away with a couple Saudi billies in his pocket for an investment fund, which was good for Jared Kushner. But I don’t feel like we’ve achieved that lasting peace we were promised. Just as with Russia, at what cost will the war in Gaza end? Trump has already said he wants to give Netanyahu a free hand to “finish the job.” Well, what does finishing the job look like? I suspect it doesn’t look great for the Palestinians.

While I don’t think he stated it as such, I think another campaign promise is to “end wokeism,” or as our shadow president-elect, Elon Musk, calls it, “the woke mind virus.” As I stated here, I actually believe this is the actual reason Trump won, a sense that the culture has drifted so far from its moorings that “the left” cares more about trans athletes than they do about white working-class Americans. I argued that was nonsense, that the outrage is entirely manufactured by the rightwing, forcing the left to respond to ginned-up culture war salvo after ginned-up culture war salvo. We fall for it because we really do want life to be better for those huddled masses, not at the expense of anybody else, but to the benefit of all. At least that’s what I tell myself.

Because those are my principles and priorities.

So yeah, I almost didn’t write today. There’s a Veteran’s Day Parade marching two blocks over. I can hear the marching bands. I don’t feel much like joining them today. My gratitude to Veteran’s remains intact, but heading to the parade will remind me too much of the one that dumped me last week. I’m just not ready to hang out with my ex yet.